Passages from the American Notebooks, Volume 1 — A Reader’s Guide

A Walk as Inventory

Hawthorne’s early entries often read like a catalogue of the visible world. On June 15, 1835, he records “small pieces of painted wood, bark, and other driftage” among heaps of seaweed, and notes how waves have rolled brick fragments “till they resembled a natural mineral.” The attention to texture and transformation is characteristic: he sees the human-made becoming geological. Later, at the almshouse, the pigs become a moral emblem, yet he also observes that “the Shakers keep their pigs very clean, and with great advantage,” a practical aside that undercuts the sermon. These walks are not mere rambles; they are exercises in seeing precisely, and the notebook becomes a storehouse of such perceptions.

Encounters on the Road

Travel entries shift the notebook’s focus from solitary observation to social exchange. On July 27, 1835, Hawthorne takes the stage to Worcester and meets an old gentleman, Mr. Phillips, who “inquired very freely as to my character, tastes, habits, and circumstances.” Hawthorne reflects that “it is strange how little impertinence depends on what is actually said, but rather on the manner and motives of saying it.” Later, an essence-vendor climbs aboard, carrying anise-seed, cloves, and opodeldoc. The peddler “spoke very frankly about his trade, which he seemed to like better than farming.” These vignettes capture a writer gathering voices and temperaments, noting how people reveal themselves in casual talk.

The Self as Another

Amid the external record, Hawthorne occasionally turns the lens inward. In one undated fragment he writes: “A perception, for a moment, of one’s eventual and moral self, as if it were another person,—the observant faculty being separated, and looking intently at the qualities of the character. There is a surprise when this happens,—this getting out of one’s self,—and then the observer sees how queer a fellow he is.” This is not confession but a cool, almost scientific detachment. The notebook becomes a place where the observing self can split and examine its own habits, a practice that anticipates the psychological complexity of his later fiction.

The Texture of Daily Life

Hawthorne’s notebooks are filled with small, telling details of nineteenth-century New England: a little boy returning from the city “with a basket of empty custard-cups,” a judge in “a black coat, and thin, light pantaloons,” the landlord of a temperance house giving out cards. He notes the calculations of grocers on tour to Niagara, “subtracting as few days as possible from the shop.” These observations are not arranged into narrative; they accumulate, each one a seed. The reader learns to move through the entries as Hawthorne did—alert to the odd, the typical, and the momentarily significant, trusting that the pattern will emerge over time.

Reading these notebooks requires a shift in expectation: they are not a continuous story but a series of glimpses. Hawthorne’s eye moves from seaweed to pigsty to stagecoach companion, and the connections are left for the reader to make. The value lies in the precision of the seeing and the quiet presence of a mind that never stops noticing. Approach the volume as a companion for slow, attentive reading; let each entry stand alone, and watch how the world of 1830s New England comes into focus, one detail at a time.

That gray afternoon, Hawthorne’s notebook caught a pigstry’s stench and a sea-wracked shore with equal patience, and I found myself slowing down, matching his unhurried gaze. Later, almost by accident, I opened the Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume 15: March/April 1661-62 — Story, Setting & Ideas — another man jotting down his days, same quiet candor, different century’s rain.