In 1850, Herman Melville was living in a farmhouse near Pittsfield, MA; Nathaniel Hawthorne was living six miles away in a little red house at Lenox; and their Berkshire neighbors included such important literary figures as Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell.

Hawthorne and Melville knew each other’s work but had never met. In 1846, for example, Hawthorne had written a favorable review of Melville’s Typee. And by August 1850, Melville had read and was about to publish a laudatory review of Hawthorne’s Mosses From an Old Manse. The events leading to their historic encounter on August 5, 1850, began germinating a few days earlier when publisher Edward Duyckinck and editorial writer Cornelius Mathews met David Dudley Field, a Stockbridge attorney, on a train and planned a late-summer excursion to Monument Mountain, near Stockbridge. Then on August 4, Hawthorne and Sophia dined with Hawthorne’s publisher, the now-familiar J.T. Fields (don’t confuse Dudley Field and J.T. Fields), and Fields’ wife. On this occasion, they also visited Oliver Wendell Holmes. By the end of the evening all of these people were now invited to the next day’s outing, which was to be followed with a dinner at David Dudley Field’s house.

On the fateful day as the group neared the mountain’s summit, a thunderstorm developed, whereupon, according to Evert Duyckinck’s account, “Dr. Holmes cut three branches for an umbrella and uncorked the champagne...we scattered over the cliffs, Herman Melville to seat himself, the boldest of all, astride a projecting bow sprit of rock ...Hawthorne looked mildly about for the great Carbuncle....” J. T. Fields also described Melville’s sitting on the overhanging rock. As for Hawthorne, he “was among the most enterprising of the merrymakers...pretend[ing] that certain destruction was inevitable to all of us.”

Later that evening, after dinner and more wine, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes began warmly praising British literature, claiming that American literature could never measure up to the English standard. With equal vigor, Melville, age thirty-one, and Hawthorne, age forty-six, stoutly disagreed with any such comparison. The men had each found a kindred spirit. In Melville’s words, their meeting was “the shock of recognition.”

Two days later, Melville, along with Mathews and Duyckinck, visited Hawthorne, who gave them two bottles of champagne and walked to the lake with them. Afterwards, Hawthorne wrote to his friend Horatio Bridge, “ I met Melville, the other day, and liked him so much that I have asked him to spend a few days with me before leaving these parts.” Melville accepted the invitation and visited from September 3-7, 1850.

For about a year and a half Hawthorne and Melville continued to live within a few miles of each other. And it is surely not a coincidence that this was the most productive period in each of their careers. Five novels—Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance, and Melville’s Moby-Dick and Pierre—were being published or written during this time period. By dedicating Moby-Dick to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville was acknowledging the older writer’s influence in his decision to transform his light-hearted whaling adventure into a profoundly challenging literary masterpiece.

Born in Portsmouth, NH, James Thomas Fields (1817-1881) went to Boston as a teenager and worked in a bookseller’s shop and later wrote for local newspapers. By the late 1830’s he was a junior partner with the publishing firm of Ticknor, Reed and Fields, which eventually became Ticknor & Fields. Known for his charm, literary intuition, and good business sense, Fields became close friends with most of the writers we studied this May Term. As you recall from our visit to the Houghton Library, it was J.T. Fields who slipped Longfellow’s poem on the death of Hawthorne into the manuscript of The House of the Seven Gables.

In 1880 Ticknor & Fields merged with the Boston printing company owned by Henry Oscar Houghton and George Mifflin, creating Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Something over a hundred years later, Houghton Mifflin bought McDougal Littell & Company and the D.C. Heath Company. (Incidentally, the Houghton Library at Harvard is named after its benefactor, Arthur A. Houghton, Jr., not the publisher Henry Oscar Houghton.)

One dark spot in the story of J.T. Fields is that after Hawthorne died in 1864, Sophia asked the firm of Ticknor & Fields about royalties from Hawthorne’s books, only to be told that there was a “negative” balance because books after The House of the Seven Gables had not sold well. Sophia did not press the matter but moved herself and her three children to England, where, at the time, she could live less expensively. Evidence clearly suggests that Sophia was cheated out of the royalties that were coming to her. And since Ticknor himself was also dead, the guilt clearly falls upon the shoulders of J.T. Fields.

As a final note here, you doubtlessly remember that Sophia and the first child, Una, died in England, both in the 1870’s. On June 26, 2006, their remains were finally re-interred next to Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

The name J.T. Fields came up on several occasions during our study-tour:
1) his publishing house was along the Freedom Trail in Boston; 2) he was the publisher of works by Hawthorne, Longfellow, Thoreau, Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Louisa May Alcott; and 3) it was he who helped introduce Hawthorne and Melville to each other, although his role is slight. The next three blogs will elaborate upon these points.

When we were in Boston, you may have noticed a small brick building at the corner of School and Washington streets, near Faneuil Hall and the Old State House. One of the oldest structures in Boston, this gambrel-roof building was constructed shortly after 1712. First it was used as an apothecary shop for Thomas Crease. Later, however, from 1833-1864, it came to fame as the office of Ticknor and Fields, the most important book publishers in America. The Scarlet Letter and Walden were published in this very establishment, as was The Atlantic Monthly magazine. Not only did Hawthorne and Emerson frequent this venerable building, but such British writers and Dickens and Thackeray also paid visits. Indeed, it is fair to say that no other single building in American has been associated with so many famous writers. Today the structure has been preserved and is the home of The Boston Globe Store, a retailer focusing upon travel books and maps.

Worth mentioning is that an earlier building occupying this site was the home of Anne Hutchinson, the famous religious leader who was banished from Massachusetts in 1638. Her house was later destroyed in the Fire of 1711.

In 1856, suffering from intellectual melancholy (okay, let’s call it clinical depression), Melville traveled abroad to the Holy Land, making a trip that was financed by his ever-supportive father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw. Stopping first in England, Melville visited his old friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was now serving as the consul at Liverpool. On November 20, 1856, Hawthorne writes in his journal:

He [Melville] stayed with us from Tuesday till Thursday; and, on the intervening day, we took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in a hollow among the sand hills (sheltering ourselves from the high, cool wind) and smoked a cigar. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other [underlining mine]. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.

Here, Hawthorne astutely assesses Melville’s dilemma. It is precisely the same assessment that Ishmael [or Melville] gives of himself in Moby-Dick

Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye. (Chapter 85)

Being neither a believer nor an infidel might at first glance seem to be an ideal philosophy. At second glance, however, one perceives that it involves always living with doubt and skepticism. Emily Dickinson could live with such; Melville found it to be tormenting.

While visiting the Houghton Library at Harvard, our group was presented with John Eliot’s Native-American translation of the Bible. Since John Eliot is now rarely mentioned in literature classes, a bit of background might be helpful.

Arriving from England in 1631, Eliot became the pastor at Roxbury, Massachusetts, and for the rest of his life made the conversion of the Indians his special assignment. The first bible printed in America was his Algonquian translation in 1663 (the one we saw). And to encourage others in his missionary efforts, in 1666 he published a book entitled Indian Grammar.

The story of John Eliot is also associated with the famous Bay Psalm Book. Remember that although most of the Puritan colonists who settled in Massachusetts Bay in 1630 were of the lower middle-class, many were educated. By 1636, a mere six years after their arrival, they had established Harvard, the first college in America. And by 1638, they had a printing press at Cambridge. According to John Winthrop, “The first thing printed was the freemen’s oath; the next was an almanac made for New England...; the next was the Psalms newly turned into meter”—the Bay Psalm Book.

In 1636, having concluded that the existing version of Psalms was an unfaithful translation of the Hebrew original, the Puritans appointed thirty “learned ministers” to translate the verses accurately into English meter. The editors were John Eliot, Richard Mather, and Thomas Welde. Published in 1640 under the title The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre, the work was not only the first complete book printed in American, but it became an international bestseller. As Darrel Abel observes in Colonial and Early National Writing, a more popular version came out in 1651: it went through twenty-seven editions in America, twenty editions in England, and six editions in Scotland. The first part of the 23rd Psalm reads as follows:

The Lord to me a shepherd is,
want therefore shall not I.
Hee in the folds of tender grass
doth cause me down to lie.

This afternoon Belita and I joined a small van of sightseers for an overview of Nantucket Island with Edward Dougan (Mr. Ed) of Nantucket Red Tours. A former meter maid, lecturer at the Whaling Museum, and day laborer, Mr. Ed was thoroughly familiar with the island, its history, and its culture. Having married into the island in the 1950’s—wedding a sixth-generation Nantucketer—he regaled us with stories of the early Quaker inhabitants and even drove us by the Quaker cemetery.

Mr. Ed effectively taught us that the so-called “widow’s walk” on the peaks of houses was basically a banister to keep an inhabitant from falling off if he were atop the dwelling with his bucket of sand, trying to put out a chimney fire. Additionally, he lectured about the rose-covered cottages (built with trellises on the roofs to hold the vines), the “warts”—small additions to the various cottages—and the island’s windmills and lighthouses. But none of this was what Mr. Ed really wanted to discuss.

His chief concern was real estate, the tourist industry, and the HDC—otherwise known as the Historic District Commission, a local governing body which has iron-clad control over all house designs, landscaping, and construction on the island. Even mailboxes must meet their approval. All of this insures uniformity for residents and tourists and presumably helps maintain real-estate values. And oh what values! A mere plot of ground goes for $700,000. And dwellings themselves sell for upwards of a million dollars. Delightedly, Ed pointed out the properties of Jack Welch, John Kerry, and other notables. Even though the cedar-shake houses all looked the same to us in the van, they were unique to Mr. Ed.

As for the tourists, they provide the main source of livelihood for the island’s 11,000 permanent residents. During July and August, the number of inhabitants swells to 60,000. This is when the island’s houses are actually occupied. Ninety percent of these behemoths are unoccupied for ten months of each year. Most of the time they are simply grand, empty structures, monuments to affluence and symbols of portfolio fodder. Ozymandias lives !

After an hour and a half, Mr. Ed dropped us off in front of the old Pacific Bank Building in downtown Nantucket. It was on the roof of this building in 1847 that Maria Mitchell, America’s first female astronomer and the first astronomy professor at Vassar College, discovered a comet, but Mr. Ed, with his real-estate chatter, failed to mention this fact.

Maria Mitchell was most definitely on the mind of Dr. Vladimir Strelnitsky, however. At 8:15 p.m. we met him at Maria Mitchell’s birthplace home, directly across the road from our lodgings. Having come to America in the 1970’s, Strelnitsky worked first at Harvard and then at the Smithsonian Institute, teaching, as he explained, students from kindergarten age through graduate school. What a natural teacher he is ! Enthusiastic, patient, entertaining, and stunningly knowledgeable, he in five minutes made us all wish that we had majored in astronomy. After explaining precisely how a telescope works and how one should study the stars, he led us on a half-mile trek through the dark to the Loines Observatory, actually two observatories, Vladimir’s pride and joy. Following a sandy trail up to the domed structures, we walked in single file, looking surely like nocturnal aliens returning to our hilltop pods. A mere week earlier, Vladimir realized a ten-year dream of installing a new telescope into one of the observatories. Inside each structure, we sat on benches as Dr. Strelnitsky confidently explained how the equipment worked and showed us how the domes themselves would open, close, and rotate.

After the presentation, Vladimir carefully locked up the observatories and returned us—again in single file—over the sandy trail back to our lodgings. Radiant from having shared his life’s work, he gave us his email address, invited us to write him, and urged us to apply for a summer internship with the Maria Mitchell Astronomy Center. Not once did he mention real estate or investment values.

Henry David Thoreau is at home in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, surrounded by the people most important to him—his brother John, his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and Bronson Alcott, and such dear acquaintances as Emerson’s aunt, Mary Moody. But he would not feel at home in Concord.

Concord is an extremely affluent town, a white, upscale suburb of Boston. It’s charming, yes, in a quaint, Pleasantville sort of way. But with the average home costing $1,500,000 or more, there would be no place for a homemade cabin with slightly over a hundred square feet. Only a squeaky clean replica is needed, thank you.

One way to understand current Concord would be to focus upon what one does not see: pickup trucks, obese citizens, used car lots, consignment stores, and franchised fast-food establishments. Much of this, of course, may be applauded, but it runs counter to Thoreau’s famous dictum that a man should measure his wealth by what he can do without. These citizens do not do without their Audi automobiles, their Saabs, their domestic help, or their trendy shops. They more or less like having Walden Pond--because it brings in a million tourists each year to spend money. They would be happier, though, if the tourists would spend more but stay less. And many would like to nibble away at the Walden acreage and convert it into soccer fields and expensive real estate for condominiums. Location, location, location!

With so much gentrification, Thoreau’s birthplace home on Virginia Road is an eyesore. Fortunately, a few folks want to preserve the dilapidated structure. Others claim that the town hardly needs another historic home. In this rich little burg, the preservations are having a hard time scraping the bucks together to save the very reminders of what was once a sanctuary for plain living and independent thought. If the privileged are not careful, they may kill their noisy golden goose. Grim justice!

Walden Pond—the pond itself—offers an excellent example of a literary site that is accessible to the public and yet is beautifully preserved. Instead of being surrounded by museum ropes, the pond is available for visitors who wish to swim, fish, or use small boats (no motors). True, there is a prescribed walking/ jogging path around the two-mile perimeter, lightly reinforced by a short fence. But everyone seems to cooperate and stay within the boundaries so that erosion does not set in. To my delight, there are no gift shops or beverage booths on the premises, only a litter-free public treasure.

In Kentucky, the pond would surely be called a lake. It covers 200 acres, making it precisely the size of Western Kentucky University’s campus. And being a glacial lake, it is wonderfully clear and deep, just as Thoreau describes in the ninth chapter of his famous book, and definitely not like a muddy stock pond. With ease and delight, one may see schools of fish swimming along the edge.

Preservation has not been without its controversy, however. Several years ago a developer seriously sought to build an office complex along Walden’s shores. And today a local middle school is trying to obtain six of the 600 acres in Walden Woods in order to construct a soccer field. Around town are “Yes” signs and “No” signs, proclaiming the political sentiments of Concord citizens. Nevermind that there are nine other soccer fields in the community! Many super-ax-whackers still want to whack away at Walden. For now, though, Walden is well. With love, so may it prevail!

In our visit to Orchard House, the Alcott home in Concord, Massachusetts, the guide failed to mention that for a time Louisa May and her older sister, Anna, attended the Concord Grammar School of John and Henry Thoreau. The connections among all of the New England writers seem to be inexhaustible.

Thoreau’s experience as a teacher began in 1835 when he took a leave of absence from Harvard and taught school in Canton, Massachusetts. Then after graduating in 1837, he briefly taught at Concord Academy. However, because he refused to administer corporal punishment, he was officially dismissed by the school board. His brother John, who was well liked in the community, came to his rescue in 1838, and the two opened a grammar school—with John handling pubic relations and Henry teaching the advanced courses.

Meanwhile, in 1840, the Alcott family moved to Concord. It was during the 1840-1841 period that Louisa May and Anna studied under Thoreau, whose school fostered the same openness and liberal tradition that the girls had seen in Bronson Alcott’s Boston Temple School. Significantly, as W.T. Anderson has pointed out, “Louisa proudly credited Henry Thoreau, not her father, with her awakening to nature’s influence.”

For a time, the Thoreaus’ school prospered, offering such innovations as nature walks and field trips to area businesses. Unfortunately, John contracted tetanus and died in 1841, ending Henry’s formal career as a teacher.

As you recall, on July 9, 1842, five days after his thirty-eighth birthday, Nathaniel Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody and moved to the Old Manse in Concord. A few weeks afterwards, Hawthorne and his bride met Henry David Thoreau (whose name Hawthorne spelled Thorow-- again establishing how the name should be pronounced). On September 1, 1842, Hawthorne wrote in his journal:

Mr. Thorow dined with us yesterday [August 31, 1842]. He is a singular character—a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty. He was educated, I believe, at Cambridge, and formerly kept school in this town; but for two or three years back, he has repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men—an Indian life, I mean, as respects the absence of any systematic effort for a livelihood. He has been for sometime an inmate of Mr. Emerson’s family....Mr. Thorow is a keen and delicate observer of nature---a genuine observer, which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness. He is familiar with beast, fish, fowl, and reptile, and has strange stories to tell of adventures, and friendly passages with these lower brethren of mortality. Herb and flower, likewise, wherever they grow, whether in garden, or wild wood, are his familiar friends. He is also on intimate terms with the clouds, and can tell the portents of storms. It is a characteristic trait, that he has a great regard for the memory of the Indian tribes, whose wild life would have suited him so well; and strange to say, he seldom walks over a ploughed field without picking up an arrow-point, a spear-head, or other relic of the red men—as if their spirits willed him to be the inheritor of their simple wealth.

After dinner (at which we cut the first water-melon and musk melon that our garden has ripened) Mr. Thorow and I walked up the bank of the river; and, at a certain point, he shouted for his boat....Mr. Thorow managed the boat so perfectly, either with two paddles or with one, that it seemed instinct with his own will, and to require no physical effort to guide it....Nevertheless, being in want of money, the poor fellow was desirous of selling the boat, of which he is so fit a pilot, and which was built by his own hands; so I agreed to give him his price (only seven dollars) and accordingly became possessor of the Musketaquid [the Indian name of Concord River—meaning “the river of meadows”]. I wish I could acquire the aquatic skill of its original owner at as a reasonable a rate.

What Hawthorne didn’t know at the time was that he had bought the very fifteen-foot skiff that Henry and his beloved brother, John, had made by themselves. It was also the very same boat in which they had made a river journey in 1839—starting on August 31. Note the dates here: the Thoreau brothers began their journey on August 31, 1839; Henry decided to sell the boat on August 31, 1842, the third-year anniversary of their historic trip together.

And what Hawthorne also didn’t know on August 31, 1842, was that John had died of lockjaw on January 11 of that same year. In fact, he died in the arms of Henry. As John McPhee has said, “John was his brother’s best friend, perhaps his only close one.”

So why did Thoreau sell the boat for $7.00? Hawthorne seemed to think that he simply needed the money. I would argue that money had absolutely nothing to do with it. Keeping the boat was a too painful reminder of the loss of his brother, a loss which Henry was still dealing with when he went to Walden Pond in 1845 for the express purpose of writing a memorial to John, a book he would entitle A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.