Four Doors of Pinckney Street: Nathaniel Hawthorne
In Boston, the past and the present carry on in parallel. The steps we take as we hurry for the T or head to a coffeeshop to meet friends trace those who came before us, maybe even in sync. One such literary place, where numerous authors have made their homes over the year, is Beacon Hill, and in this series we’ll take you on a tour of Four Doors of Pinckney Street.
#54 Pinckney Street: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Most dear love,
I have been caught by a personage who has been in search of me for two or three days, and shall be compelled to devote this unfortunate evening to him, instead of to my Dove. Dost thou regret it? —so does thy poor husband, who loves thee infinitely, and needs thee continually. Art thou well to-day, very dearest?
Thus begins one of the many letters Nathaniel Hawthorne addressed from 54 Pinckney Street. It was from Beacon Hill that the majority of his correspondences – a courtship in letters – went out to his secret fiancée Sophia Peabody, one of the renowned Peabody sisters. He also worked at the Custom House while a resident of Pinckney Street, inspecting the ships that came into Boston Harbor. It was a brief stay, but one that occurred during a pivot in the writer’s life.
Hawthorne was born in Salem in 1804, and was raised there and in southern Maine by a single mother after his father died at sea in 1808. With two sisters as well, Hawthorne grew up surrounded by women (some attribute this influence to his ability later to write such a strong female protagonist in Hester Prynne), and began writing stories at a young age. He attended Bowdoin College, where he befriended future president Franklin Pierce, and it was shortly after graduation that he wrote his first novel Fanshawe. By the 1830s he was publishing short stories in magazines – “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Minister’s Black Veil” – and served as a magazine editor.
His connection to the Peabody sisters happened around 1835, just after the educator and intellect Elizabeth Peabody left the school she began with Bronson Alcott over a difference in teaching philosophy (see our last article for more details). Hawthorne was looking to write a children’s book, and she connected him to Horace Mann, the secretary of the board of education, but the two struck up a friendship. Or a little bit more than a friendship, as it seemed Peabody had an interest in Hawthorne, despite his interests elsewhere.
But the future was sealed one day in the Spring of 1838 when Sophia Peabody entered the parlor of the Peabody home in Salem, disrupting a conversation between Nathaniel and her sister Elizabeth. “He rose and looked at her—he did not realize how intently,” Elizabeth Peabody wrote about the moment. Sophia was somewhat the opposite of her bold older sister, but somehow her shyness and privacy matched up with Nathaniel’s quiet spirit. Herself a painter and illustrator, Sophia sketched drawings to go with Nathaniel’s short stories, most notably “The Gentle Boy.”
Despite Nathaniel and Sophia’s indulgent courtship, Elizabeth Peabody continued to champion the young writer, and knew that if marriage with her sister was his intention, he’d need a day job. So she leveraged her connections to get him a position at the Boston Custom House. On New Year’s Day 1839 Nathaniel and Sophia were engaged in secret, and that January he moved to Boston to start as an inspector at the Custom House.
While Hawthorne tends to be associated most with the Salem Custom House – the semi-veiled autobiographical intro to The Scarlet Letter tells of daily work at the Salem Custom House – the time he spent at the Boston Custom House seems equally as stressful and draining (he worked at the former Custom House location that would have been a block away from the current Custom House, with its iconic tower). During his time there he wrote little, and he recorded his days with varied emotion:
“I have been stationed all day at the end of Long Wharf, and I rather think that I had the most eligible situation of anybody in Boston. … I have been measuring coal all day on board of a black little British schooner, in a dismal dock at the north-end of the city. Across the water, however, not more than half a mile off, appeared the Bunker Hill Monument. … I pray that in one year more I may find some way of escaping from this unblest Custom-House; for it is a very grievous thraldom. … I do think that it is the doom laid upon me of murdering so many of the brightest hours of the day at the Custom-House, that makes such havoc with my wits” (The Atlantic).
It seemed the only bright spot was his correspondence with, and anticipated union to, Sophia, who continued to reside in Salem.
In the Fall of 1839, George Hillard, a lawyer and partner of Charles Sumner, invited Hawthorne to room at his residence at 54 Pinckney Street. There, he was free to invite Sophia to visit. Still, their relationship continued on through letters, and “two lamps with copper-colored shades threw a soft light on the page when he wrote to Sophia in the evening, long letters, alternately ardent and jolly, tender and arch, always earnest, always receptive” (Wineapple 137). Sophia herself had decorated his room.
Hawthorne only remained at Pinckney Street for a year and a half before moving on to join the Transcendentalist society Brook Farm, after resigning from the Custom House in January 1841 after a government change. But the utopian experiment wasn’t for him, and he left before the year was out. Still, he continued to write to Sophia, and on July 9, 1842 they were married at Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop at 13 West Street in Boston. The couple moved to the Old Manse in Concord (Thoreau planted a garden for them as a wedding present), where to this day you can still see Sophia’s poetry etched into the glass window.
Works Consulted
Bacon, Edwin M. Literary Pilgrimages in New England. New York: Silver, Burdett & Co., 1902.
Bixby, William K. Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1841-1863. Chicago: Society of the Dofobs, 1907.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Hawthorne in the Boston Custom-House.” The Atlantic. January 1868.
“Nathaniel Hawthorne Residence.” Boston Literary District. www.bostonlitdistrict.org.
Marshall, Megan. The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
Valenti, Patricia Dunlavy. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 1. Columbia, MI: University of Missouri, 2004.
Wineapple, Brenda. Hawthorne: A Life. New York: Random House, 2003.
