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On July 9, 1842, a small wedding took place at the bookstore of Elizabeth Peabody at 13 West Street in Boston. After a highly secretive three-year engagement, 38-yearold struggling novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne married 33-year-old Sophia Amelia Peabody, the younger sister of the bookstore owner. Officiated by the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, only five people attended the ceremony: Sophia’s mother and two sisters, along with her two best friends, Connie Park and Sarah Clarke, the minister’s sister. The groom’s mother and two sisters were not pleased with the whole “affair” (as they called it) and were not in attendance. However, Hawthorne would write to his family the next day: “The execution took place yesterday. We made a christian end, and came straight to Paradise, where we abide at this present writing. We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous, and might be 38
Discover CONCORD
| Summer 2022
BY RICHARD SMITH even happier; but, as a matter of taste, we choose to stop short at this point. Sophia is very well, and sends her love.” Immediately after the ceremony the newlyweds took a carriage ride out to Concord. It was there that they would begin their married life, in a 72-year-old house that Hawthorne would soon call The Old Manse. The vacant home, previously owned by the recently deceased Reverend Ezra Ripley, was offered to the Hawthornes through a kinsman of Dr. Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He showed the couple the house in the spring of 1842; at $100 a year, the place was affordable (even to a struggling writer) and the deal was done. The Hawthornes liked the idea of living in Concord, while Emerson liked the thought of having another writer, albeit a novelist, in Concord; “I like him well” he would write a friend. Indeed, because of Emerson, Concord had become the literary center of the
Universe for all sorts of poets, writers, and Transcendentalists. Henry Thoreau, an Emerson protégé, had lived in Concord his entire life, while the philosopher Bronson Alcott and his family moved to town in 1840. A mutual friend of both Emerson and Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller (herself a frequent visitor to Concord) thought that Nathaniel would fit quite well into Emerson’s clique. “You will find him more mellow than most fruits at your board,” she told Waldo, “and of distinct flavor, too”. “Distinct flavor” indeed. Hawthorne would never feel entirely at ease with the philosophers and poets who flocked to Concord. He liked them well enough, but he was no Transcendentalist, and he looked upon his metaphysically-inclined neighbors with detached humor and a slight disdain. “Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most of whom took
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Commemorating the 180th Anniversary of the Wedding of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne
