A Bell’s Biography

A Bell’s Biography is a short sketch by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in the Knickerbocker magazine in March 1837 and later collected in Twice Told Tales. It is one of the shortest and lightest pieces Hawthorne ever wrote, but it has the quiet historical feeling that runs through most of his New England work.

The sketch is exactly what the title suggests. Hawthorne imagines the life of a church bell from the moment it is cast in a foundry through its years of service in a steeple, its part in colonial weddings and funerals, its alarm calls during the French and Indian War, its tolling for the Boston Tea Party and the Revolution, and on into the nineteenth century. The bell becomes a kind of witness to a whole community across generations, hanging silent most of the time and then speaking on the days that matter.

Hawthorne is doing something he did often, which is taking a small physical object and using it as a way into a longer thought about time and memory. The same instinct that gave us the scaffold in The Scarlet Letter and the elm in The House of the Seven Gables is here in a smaller form. A church bell is not a complicated object, but in Hawthorne’s telling it becomes a measure of how much a single ordinary thing can survive while everything around it changes.

The sketch runs only a few pages and is best read alongside the other short pieces in Twice Told Tales, particularly The Toll Gatherer’s Day and Sights From a Steeple, which work in a similar mode. For readers who only know Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter or The House of the Seven Gables, these short sketches are a friendly way into his shorter work. They show a quieter Hawthorne, less concerned with sin and judgement, more interested in how an old New England town remembers itself.