Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7085] [Yes,
we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This
file was first posted on March 8, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** Start of the project gutenberg
EBOOK Fanshawe ***
This eBook was produced by Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
BY
[Illustration]
Fanshawe.
In 1828, three years after graduating from Bowdoin
College, Hawthorne published his first romance, “Fanshawe.”
It was issued at Boston by Marsh & Capen, but made
little or no impression on the public. The motto
on the title-page of the original was from Southey:
“Wilt thou go on with me?”
Afterwards, when he had struck into the vein of fiction
that came to be known as distinctively his own, he
attempted to suppress this youthful work, and was
so successful that he obtained and destroyed all but
a few of the copies then extant.
Some twelve years after his death it was resolved,
in view of the interest manifested in tracing the
growth of his genius from the beginning of his activity
as an author, to revive this youthful romance; and
the reissue of “Fanshawe” was then made.
Little biographical interest attaches to it, beyond
the fact that Mr. Longfellow found in the descriptions
and general atmosphere of the book a decided suggestion
of the situation of Bowdoin College, at Brunswick,
Maine, and the life there at the time when he and Hawthorne
were both undergraduates of that institution.
Professor Packard, of Bowdoin College, who was then
in charge of the study of English literature, and
has survived both of his illustrious pupils, recalls
Hawthorne’s exceptional excellence in the composition
of English, even at that date (1821-1825); and it
is not impossible that Hawthorne intended, through
the character of Fanshawe, to present some faint projection
of what he then thought might be his own obscure history.
Even while he was in college, however, and meditating
perhaps the slender elements of this first romance,
his fellow-student Horatio Bridge, whose “Journal
of an African Cruiser” he afterwards edited,
recognized in him the possibilities of a writer of
fiction—a fact to which Hawthorne alludes
in the dedicatory Preface to “The Snow-Image.”
G. P. L.
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