Chippings with a Chisel

Chippings with a Chisel is a sketch by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1838 and collected in Twice Told Tales the following year. It is one of his finest short pieces, and one that shows his quiet humor on a subject most writers would have treated only with solemnity.

The narrator is spending a summer on Martha’s Vineyard and falls into conversation with the local gravestone cutter, an old man named Wigglesworth who has been carving headstones for the island’s families for decades. Hawthorne sits with him in the shop and watches him work, and the sketch is built around the small conversations they have about the people whose stones Wigglesworth is shaping. Each completed stone is a tiny story, and the cutter knows the lives behind every one of them.

The humor is genuine. Wigglesworth is a serious craftsman but he is also a practical New England tradesman who has opinions about the families that pay him too late, or that argue about the quality of the slate, or that demand inscriptions he privately thinks foolish. Hawthorne lets him talk and lets the comedy come out of his deadpan acceptance of the work. At the same time the sketch is genuinely sad. There are small portraits of children who died young, of sailors lost at sea, of women who outlived their husbands by decades.

The piece runs perhaps fifteen pages and is one of the most reliable pleasures in the Hawthorne shorter work. It pairs naturally with The Toll Gatherer’s Day, Sights From a Steeple, and A Bell’s Biography, all of which use a fixed observer to watch a community go by. For readers wanting to see why Hawthorne’s contemporaries thought of him as primarily a writer of sketches before The Scarlet Letter, this is one of the best places to look.