A Book of Autographs

A Book of Autographs is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, a sketch in the personal essay tradition that Hawthorne worked in alongside his more famous novels and tales. The piece is built around the experience of looking through a collection of historical autographs and the reflections that the letters and signatures of past notable people prompt in someone who is paying close attention to what handwriting can reveal about character and time.

Hawthorne was the descendant of Puritan settlers in Salem, Massachusetts, and he spent his entire writing life working through the moral and historical legacies of the region where his family had lived for almost two centuries. His major novels, including The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, are the most famous results of that engagement, but his shorter sketches and tales make up a significant body of work that often gets overshadowed by the novels. A Book of Autographs sits in the territory of his more reflective sketches, where the central interest is less in narrative and more in the slow unfolding of a particular meditation.

The sketch turns on the strangeness of holding the actual handwritten signature of a person long since dead, and Hawthorne uses that experience to think about how the past survives or fails to survive in physical objects. The autographs prompt brief portraits of the various historical figures whose hands made the marks, with Hawthorne’s characteristic attention to moral nuance and to the gaps between public reputation and private character. The piece moves at its own slow pace and rewards readers who are willing to sit with reflective prose rather than narrative momentum.

Readers coming to Hawthorne through his major novels may find the sketch slighter than they expect, but the sketches are part of how he developed the imagination that would later produce the novels. The reflective voice, the moral attention to small details, the willingness to let an essay tip into a tale and back again, are all on display here in compressed form. For students of nineteenth century American literature, of New England regional writing, or of the development of the American personal essay, Hawthorne’s shorter pieces are essential reading.