June Badeni on readings by 13-year-old Alice Thompson, as recorded in her notebook: 'She has been reading more of Scott and Dickens, is plunging through the novels of George Eliot... has sampled Bulwer Lytton, Thackeray, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Thompson Print: Book
'Charlie Chaplin was a classic autodidact, always struggling to make up for a dismally inadequate education, groping haphazardly for what he called "intellectual manna"... Chaplin could be found in his dressing room studying a Latin-English dictionary, Robert Ingersoll's secularist propaganda, Emerson's "Self- Reliance" ("I felt I had been handed a golden birthright"), Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Hazlitt, all five volumes of Plutarch's Lives, Plato, Locke, Kant, Freud's "Psychoneurosis", Lafcadio "Hearn's Life and Literature", and Henri Bergson - his essay on laughter, of course... Chaplin also spent forty years reading (if not finishing) the three volumes of "The World as Will and Idea" by Schopenhauer, whose musings on suicide are echoed in Monsieur Verdoux'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Spencer Chaplin Print: Book
'Along with her old school books [Maud Montgomery] read whatever she could find both for pleasure and to learn from their authors how to improve her own writing: religious tracts, newspapers, the Godey's Lady's Book, Charles Dickens's "Pickwick Papers", Sir Walter Scott's novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The House of the Seven Gables", Washington Irving's "The Sketch Book", and Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lucy Maud Montgomery Print: Book
Leon Edel, introducing Henry James's letters from 1869-70: " [James] traveled in 1869, reading Goethe, Stendhal, the President de Brosses and Hawthorne."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry James Print: Book
'Began "The Scarlet Letter".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot and G.H. Lewes Print: Book
'The house was behind the post office and below the town library, and in a few years not even the joys of guddling, girning and angling matched the boy's pleasure in Emerson, Hawthorne, Ambrose Pierce, Sidney Lanier and Mark Twain. Day after day... he carried a large washing basket up the stairs to fill it with books, choosing from upwards of twelve thousand volumes, then downstairs to sit for hours in corners absorbed in mental worlds beyond the narrow limits of Langholm.'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Christopher Grieve Print: Book
'I wasted a great deal of time in wrong reading from eleven to fourteen, always hoping for the enjoyment which rarely came, but going on with surprising persistence. A sense of overpowering gloom is connected in my mind with Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris", which I read in English, and an impression of a livid brightness with "The Scarlet Letter"; but that is all. Of Carlyle's "French Revolution" all that remains is a sentence like a radiant hillside caught through a rift in a black cloud: the passage where he describes the high-shouldered ladies dancing with the gentlemen of the French Court on a bright summer evening, while outside the yellow cornfields stretched from end to end of France'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir Print: Book
'Do [italics] you [end italics] know what Hawthorne's tale is about? [italics] I [end italics] do; and I think it will perplex the English public pretty considerably.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book
'['After Hawthorne's romance had come out she expresses to her friends her supposition that they will have read, as every one in England had, the "Cleopatra chapter", and assures them that she is proud of being able to say to people that she had been acquainted from the first with the statue commemmorated']'
Letter reproduced in this edition from a printed source which gives this precis.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book
'By the way, we all admire _very greatly_ your beautiful little poem in the Boston Book. I
dare say you
don't care for the opinion of we three "weaker vessels" [i.e. De Quincey's three daughters],
though Papa,
like the dutiful parent he is, and though a "vain man", admits that our judgment in such
matters is
equal if not sometimes better than his. However in this case we one and all came separately
to the
conclusion that there was exquisite poetic grace and beauty in the lines. Who is the Poet you
sent the
mosses too [sic]? for we don't know one who has spoken of Venice that has been living since
you could
have written this. My sister Florence says that with one or two exceptions in the case of
Longfellow
and that most beautiful of writers Hawthorne, yours is nearly the only good thing in the book.
I have
not had time to look it over yet.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Florence De Quincey Print: Book
'Your mention of Hawthorne puts me in mind to tell you what rabid [underlined] admirers we
are of his [...] There is no prose write of the present day I have half the interest in I have in
him, his style, in my mind is so beautifully refined and there is such exquisite pathos and
quaint humour, and such an awfully [underlined] deep knowledge of human nature, not that
hard unloving detestable, and, as it is purely one sided (or wrong [underlined] sided) false
reading of it that one finds in Thackeray. He reminds me in many things of Charles Lamb, and
of heaps of our rare old English humourists, with their deep pathetic nature--and one faculty
he possesses beyond any writer I remember (not dramatic, for then I would certainly
remember Shakespeare, and others on further though perhaps) viz. that of exciting you to the
highest pitch without on any [underlined] occasion that I am aware of making you feel by his
catastrophe ashamed of having been excited. What I mean is, if you have ever read it, such a
case as occurs in the "Mysteries of Udolpho" where your disgust is beyond all expression on
finding that all your fright about the ghostly creature that has haunted you throughout the
volumes has been caused by a pitiful wax image! [...] And no Author I know does [underlined]
try to work upon them [i.e. the passions] more, apparently with no [underlined] effort to
himself. I cannot satisfy myself as to whether I like his sort of Essays contained in the twice
told tales best, or his more finished works such as Blithedale romance. Every touch he adds to
any character gives a higher interest to it, so that I should like the longer ones best, but there
is a concentration of excellence in the shorter things and passages that strike, in force like
daggers, in their beauty and truth, so that I generally end in liking that best which I have read
last [...] There are beautiful passages in Longfellow, above all, as far as my knowledge goes
in the Golden Legend, some of which in a single reading impressed themselves on my
memory.'
Unknown
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret De Quincey
'Your mention of Hawthorne puts me in mind to tell you what rabid [underlined] admirers we
are of his [...] There is no prose write of the present day I have half the interest in I have in
him, his style, in my mind is so beautifully refined and there is such exquisite pathos and
quaint humour, and such an awfully [underlined] deep knowledge of human nature, not that
hard unloving detestable, and, as it is purely one sided (or wrong [underlined] sided) false
reading of it that one finds in Thackeray. He reminds me in many things of Charles Lamb, and
of heaps of our rare old English humourists, with their deep pathetic nature--and one faculty
he possesses beyond any writer I remember (not dramatic, for then I would certainly
remember Shakespeare, and others on further though perhaps) viz. that of exciting you to the
highest pitch without on any [underlined] occasion that I am aware of making you feel by his
catastrophe ashamed of having been excited. What I mean is, if you have ever read it, such a
case as occurs in the "Mysteries of Udolpho" where your disgust is beyond all expression on
finding that all your fright about the ghostly creature that has haunted you throughout the
volumes has been caused by a pitiful wax image! [...] And no Author I know does [underlined]
try to work upon them [i.e. the passions] more, apparently with no [underlined] effort to
himself. I cannot satisfy myself as to whether I like his sort of Essays contained in the twice
told tales best, or his more finished works such as Blithedale romance. Every touch he adds to
any character gives a higher interest to it, so that I should like the longer ones best, but there
is a concentration of excellence in the shorter things and passages that strike, in force like
daggers, in their beauty and truth, so that I generally end in liking that best which I have read
last [...] There are beautiful passages in Longfellow, above all, as far as my knowledge goes
in the Golden Legend, some of which in a single reading impressed themselves on my
memory.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret De Quincey Print: Book
'The more I read of Mr. Hawthorne's writings the more intense does my admiration become. I
read over the other day a part of his "House of the Seven Gables" and I don't remember any
delineation of character under Shakespeare's that is to me so exquisitely fascinating as his of
Phoebe, and it is the one I think, among all his characters which mark him most of all as a
man of very great genius, for in the hands of any but such a man, instead of being as she is
"A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still and bright
With something of an Angel light."
she would have been a common place stupid creature who only was good because she had not
will to be bad [...] The contrast too of the restless minded metaphysical Holgrave always
searching into the cause of things, and his tremendous delight in watching the development of
character are admirable [underlined]. This latter feature is I am sure a marking characteristic
of Mr. Hawthorne's and I just wish to warn him that though I have in thought [underlined]
quite an agonizing sympathy with him in it, yet when carried to such a pitch as he does in
practice that he won't give a hand to a pair of poor lovers that have fallen into the gutter on a
rainy night because his part is only to be a spectator. I have no patience with him, and beg to
say if I catch him at anything like that I will commit an assault upon him as sure as fate. I
should tell you, as more important than any thing that I can say on the subject, that for the
first time Papa read "The House of the Seven Gables" a few days ago [...] he said that if
anyone wished to give a very favorable notion to a non-German reader of Jean Paul Richter's
style of thought and sentiment they could not do it more successfully than by pointing out
many passages in it [i.e. the Hawthorne], and when I tell you that Papa admires him more
than any Author of his class by far, and has often regretted our not being German scholars
simply on his account you will have an idea....'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret De Quincey Print: Book
'The more I read of Mr. Hawthorne's writings the more intense does my admiration become. I
read over the other day a part of his "House of the Seven Gables" and I don't remember any
delineation of character under Shakespeare's that is to me so exquisitely fascinating as his of
Phoebe, and it is the one I think, among all his characters which mark him most of all as a
man of very great genius, for in the hands of any but such a man, instead of being as she is
"A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still and bright
With something of an Angel light."
she would have been a common place stupid creature who only was good because she had not
will to be bad [...] The contrast too of the restless minded metaphysical Holgrave always
searching into the cause of things, and his tremendous delight in watching the development of
character are admirable [underlined]. This latter feature is I am sure a marking characteristic
of Mr. Hawthorne's and I just wish to warn him that though I have in thought [underlined]
quite an agonizing sympathy with him in it, yet when carried to such a pitch as he does in
practice that he won't give a hand to a pair of poor lovers that have fallen into the gutter on a
rainy night because his part is only to be a spectator. I have no patience with him, and beg to
say if I catch him at anything like that I will commit an assault upon him as sure as fate. I
should tell you, as more important than any thing that I can say on the subject, that for the
first time Papa read "The House of the Seven Gables" a few days ago [...] he said that if
anyone wished to give a very favorable notion to a non-German reader of Jean Paul Richter's
style of thought and sentiment they could not do it more successfully than by pointing out
many passages in it [i.e. the Hawthorne], and when I tell you that Papa admires him more
than any Author of his class by far, and has often regretted our not being German scholars
simply on his account you will have an idea....'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas De Quincey Print: Book
(1) 'I wonder does the "Wayfarer" series publish my latest discovery - the most glorious novel
(almost) that I have ever read.... It is Nathaniel Hawthorne's "House with the Seven Gables". I
love the idea of a house with a curse! And although there is nothing supernatural in the story
itself there is a brooding sense of mystery and fate over the whole thing: Have you read it?
See if it is in the "Wayfarers" as I want to get an edition of my own as soon as possible.' (2) 'I
shouldn't have said "mystery", there is really no mystery in the proper sense of the word, but
a sort of feeling of fate & inevitable horror as in "Wuthering Heights". I really think I have
never enjoyed a novel more. There is one lovely scene where the villain - Judge Pyncheon -
has suddenly died in his chair.... it describes the corpse sitting there as the day wears on.... I
intend to read all Hawthorne after this.' (3) 'This week I have been reading "The House of the
Seven Gables" which I have often heard praised but never met before. Have you? It is well
worth the reading.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Clive Staples Lewis Print: Book
