Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7372] [Yes,
we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This
file was first posted on April 22, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** Start of the project gutenberg
EBOOK Septimius Felton ***
Produced by Eric Eldred, Emily Ratliff, Curtis A.
Weyant
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
Septimius Felton;
Or,
The Elixir Of Life.
By Nathanial Hawthorne
1883
Septimius Felton.
The existence of this story, posthumously published,
was not known to any one but Hawthorne himself, until
some time after his death, when the manuscript was
found among his papers. The preparation and copying
of his Note-Books for the press occupied the most
of Mrs. Hawthorne’s available time during the
interval from 1864 to 1870; but in the latter year,
having decided to publish the unfinished romance,
she began the task of putting together its loose sheets
and deciphering the handwriting, which, towards the
close of Hawthorne’s life, had grown somewhat
obscure and uncertain. Her death occurred while
she was thus engaged, and the transcription was completed
by her daughters. The book was then issued simultaneously
in America and England, in 1871.
Although “Septimius Felton” appeared so
much later than “The Marble Faun,” it
was conceived and, in another form, begun before the
Italian romance had presented itself to the author’s
mind. The legend of a bloody foot leaving its
imprint where it passed, which figures so prominently
in the following fiction, was brought to Hawthorne’s
notice on a visit to Smithell’s Hall, Lancashire,
England. [Footnote: See English Note-Books,
April 7, and August 25, 1855.] Only five days after
hearing of it, he made a note in his journal, referring
to “my Romance,” which had to do with
a plot involving the affairs of a family established
both in England and New England; and it seems likely
that he had already begun to associate the bloody
footstep with this project. What is extraordinary,
and must be regarded as an unaccountable coincidence—one
of the strange premonitions of genius—is
that in 1850, before he had ever been to England and
before he knew of the existence of Smithell’s
Hall, he had jotted down in his Note-Book, written
in America, this suggestion: “The print
in blood of a naked foot to be traced through the street
of a town.” The idea of treating in fiction
the attempt to renew youth or to attain an earthly
immortality had engaged his fancy quite early in his
career, as we discover from “Doctor Heidegger’s
