BOADICEA

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4560, 15 April 1942, Page 6

BOADICEA

AND THE PURITAN IDYLL OF NATHANIEL AND SOPHIA HAWTHORNE

(By

P.C.B.)

Great men have in a number of instances attributed their achievements to the aid of a devoted wife. The almost perfect love which united Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife was indubitably responsible for the high character of his literary fame.

Six years after marriage he could write to her: “ Oh, ‘ Phoebe,’ I want thee much. Thou art the only person in the world that ever was necessary to me. I am only myself when thou art within my reach. Thou art an unspeakably beloved woman.”

For her part, his wife made frequent eulogiums on her husband. “ I like,” she said in one of these, “ to shower luxuries because he has such a spiritual taste for beauty ... to do the highest, wisest, loveliest thing is not the least effort to him. . . I never knew such loftiness, so simply borne. Happy, happiest is the wife who can bear such and so sincere testimony to her husband after eight years’ intimate union.”

Hawthorne, being of a highly organised and sensitive temperament, was particularly susceptible to the influences which can be exercised by a wife, and doubtless the most fortunate event of his life was his union with Sophia Peabody. Tradition says that the Peabodys are descended from Queen Boadicea. The story is that, following that monarch’s death, her son fled to the Welsh mountains, where for hundreds of years his posterity bore the title of Pe-Boadie, meaning “ Men of the Peak ” —Pe for hill and Boadie for man. Of this clan came the redoubtable Owen Glendower, who, rising in the early part of the fifteenth century, greatly embarrassed the Lancastrian cause from without while the Lollards were endangering it from within. Tales by their mother of the exploits of her remote and adventurous kinsman—immortalised by Shakespeare—never failed to hold spellbound the Hawthorne children.' GREAT INHERITANCE Although no tradition exists tracing Hawthorne’s descent back to so illustrious a forbear, it is evident that he came of splendid stock. It is said that he inherited “ an unblemished name and the best brains in the world.” One of his ancestors enjoyed the distinction of disobeying a summons of Charles 11. It was to Salem in New England that the persecuted Puritans sailed, and when John Winthrop, their leader, joined them in 1630, among his 800 companions was one William Hathorne. In the same town Nathaniel was born on—of all days—4th July nearly 200 years later (1804). This Calvinistic descent is said to be one of the disadvantages under which he laboured—that his narrow social and moral prejudices hampered him. Nevertheless, his innate genius became manifest very early in his career, even when he was not identified by name with his writing. He has, moreover, used those surroundings to excellent purpose and universal acclaim, notably in that early great achievement “ The Scarlet Letter ” one of the best known of his works. Here he has told of those relentless New England Puritans and of how they compelled the girl who had slipped into sin to wear, branded on her dress, the letter “A” in red so that all might know her shame. Very beautifully then he tells of the gracious life lived under so cruel a handicap, so that the people came to think of the “A” as signifying “ Angel ” rather than the hateful epithet. It was through the publication, in 1837, of “ Twice Told Tales,” that Hawthorne first came to public notice. He had drifted into a literary careerAn insatiable reader, he postponed from year to year the formulation of definite vocational plans, in the meantime penning a njimber of sketches. Although he burned many of these, some of them found their way into the magazines. His mounting fame secured for him the editorship of The American Magazine, although it was not until the publication of “ The Scdrlet Letter ” several years later that his fame was established as a first-rank romancer. Before that he had met Sophia Peabody, who was to be his “ true guardian and re-creating angel.” It was a clear case of love at first sight, but their subsequent engagement was kept a close secret for three years on the representations of his sisters that the shock of the news would result in the death of his mother—a recluse. When it was ultimately publicised, far from such fatal consequences, it became to her a source of felicity. A DELAYED ROMANCE A far more tangible hindrance to their marriage was the twenty years’ invalidism.of Sophia. Seven years his junior, she had been the victim, as a baby, of difficult teething. To give relief, she had been so incontinently dosed with drugs that their baneful effect continued until her thirty-first year in the form of an uninterrupted headache. Conscious of the excessive

strain which a semi-invalid wife might be to him, she stipulated that their marriage must be contingent upon her recovery. “If God intends us to marry,” she said to him, “Ho will let me be cured; if not, it will be a sign that it is not best.” At the time the barrier appeared insuperable in view of the etiology of the case. The miraculous thing, however, was that love cured her, for when they were married in 1842 she was, for the first time since her infancy, in perfect health, and never relapsed into her former invalidism.

After the wedding they went to live in the scene of “ Moses from an Old Manse ” at Concord, where he enjoyed the friendship of Longfellow, Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, Henry Thoreau, and J. G- Whittier. For a time Hawthorne was Surveyorof Customs at his birthplace. Afterwards he went as American Consul to Liverpool. He visited Rome in 1859, and his health commenced to fail soon after his return to America. He had been married on 9th July, 1842, by

Rev. J. F. Clarke, and the same minister preached the funeral sermon over his body on 23rd May, 1864, not having seen him again at any time during those intervening twenty-two years. Among those who lined the path to the grave were Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Lowell, Pierce, and Emerson. He was survived for seven years by the loved and loving wife who would never read his letters without first washing her hands.