'The Wrong Side of the Tapestry': Hawthorne's English Travel Writing

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ABSTRACT Hawthorne's period in England as American Consul at Liverpool brought him into contact with British and American eccentrics and enabled him to ramble the old towns and significant places he had known through reading, and the churchyards to which he seemed inexorably drawn. His views of the English and of English places were in some respects conventional but demonstrate his powerfully emblematic imagination and profound concern for mortality and an unease related to his feelings about sexuality, dirt, and foreignness which is seen not only in Our Old Home, but also in his English Notebooks and The Marble Faun. Some episodes are particularly disturbing: his expression of anti-Semitism (about the Lord Mayor's Dinner), and his encounters with poverty, in particular with a sickly and perhaps syphilitic child in an almshouse. ********** It was never intended to be looked at from any point of view in that straight line; so that it is like looking at the wrong side of a piece of tapestry. (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home) The end of Our Old Home finds Hawthorne betrayed into making an address at the Lord Mayor's banquet, nervously determined he will 'save both countries, or perish in the attempt'. (1) As the book closes he remains, 'still erect in so heroic an attitude', the speech yet unmade (p. 354). This final ironic gesture, towards a tense silence, points to an issue other than the contemporary political 'chasm of discord between England and America' (p. 344) that confronted the then American Consul at Liverpool (Hawthorne served between 1853 and 1857) (2)--what is it that Hawthorne, as travel writer, really could say of his investigations into the 'Old Home' of England and Europe? That rhetorical silence reverberates in other ways too: an admission that his mind was 'absolutely empty of appropriate ideas' (p. 344), a premonition of his inability to turn the observations of his English notebooks into coherent fictions; (3) perhaps for us as later readers a precursor of his imminent death, and in any case a figure for the almost compulsive registration in his readings of England of death itself, the final 'old home'. For the role of lively cultural mediator, interpreting America to the English, and reporting back on their supposed ancestors to his readers across the Atlantic, Hawthorne was almost spectacularly unsuitable. Nor did he think himself much fitted for the role: his first published essay from these travels, 'Some of the Haunts of Burns', appeared in the Atlantic in October 1860 with the byline by 'A Tourist Without Imagination or Enthusiasm' (Our Old Home, p. xv). His observations produced more outrage than amusement when he described an English dowager promenading under full sail in Leamington, and his loyalty to the much despised ex-President Franklin Pierce almost sank the book on its publication. His cultural observations were surprisingly superficial, but his deeper insights and interests often seem more universal than local, as for example when he noted that a landscape seen from a railway must inevitably be seen amiss because 'it was never intended to be looked at from any point of view in that straight line; so that it is like looking at the wrong side of a piece of tapestry' (p. 140). But, again, the whole of Hawthorne's invocation of the 'Old Home', so mis-taken and conventional, and almost perversely under the spell of his own obsessive concerns, is like looking at the wrong side of a tapestry, which becomes an invitation to the pulling of a loose thread or two, to see what may be revealed. Hawthorne's position on transatlantic relations is based on the notion that England had determined American identity much as a parent shapes a child, and it is this thread that, with marked indifference to the many and various other paternities of the mid-century United States, he attempts to follow. 'After all these bloody wars and vindictive animosities', he insists, 'we still have an unspeakable yearning towards England': When our forefathers left the old home, they pulled up many of their roots, but trailed along with them others, which were never snapt asunder by the tug of such a lengthening distance, nor have been torn out of the original soil by the violence of subsequent struggles, nor severed by the edge of the sword. …