Old News

Old News is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reflective sketches, originally published in his 1842 collection Twice Told Tales. The piece uses the framing device of the narrator browsing through old newspapers from previous decades and reflecting on what the wider historical record can be reconstructed from these particular fragments of past communication. Hawthorne develops the format into a meditation on time, on the nature of historical memory, and on the strange way that the immediate news of one decade becomes the historical curiosity of another.

The sketch is structured as a series of reflections on different historical periods that the old newspapers cover, with each section taking the reader into the particular feeling of a past time through the kind of detail that newspaper writing preserves. Advertisements, public notices, political statements, and the various other content that filled colonial and early national American newspapers all become the material that Hawthorne reflects on.

The piece is more atmospheric and reflective than narratively driven, with Hawthorne’s characteristic prose style giving the essay the kind of careful weight that his shorter work often delivered. For readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, Old News shows him at his most directly engaged with the historical material that his major fiction also worked with. For students of nineteenth century American literature or of the wider tradition of historical reflection in American writing, the piece is worth knowing.