Our old home

Our Old Home is a book of travel sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1863. It is based on the years he spent in England between 1853 and 1857 as American consul in Liverpool under President Pierce, and on the later year and a half he spent traveling in England before he went on to Italy. It is the last book he published in his lifetime.

The sketches are not really a continuous account of his time as consul. They are essays on the things he found most interesting about English life and landscape, with the consular work mostly kept in the background. He writes about Lichfield and Uttoxeter, where he visited the spots associated with Samuel Johnson. He writes about a long walk in the Lake District, about the gloom of Liverpool, about the surprising warmth of English country houses, about a workhouse he was taken to inspect, about Westminster Abbey and Stratford and a hundred smaller places.

The tone is mixed. Hawthorne genuinely loved England in many ways and clearly respected the depth of its history. He was also a New Englander who could not quite get past certain English habits and certain English assumptions about Americans. Some of his complaints about English food and English weather are funny. Some of his harder observations about class and poverty are less comfortable. The book caused some offense in England at the time, and Hawthorne in his preface offers a mild apology for any feelings he might have hurt.

The book runs to about four hundred pages and reads best in chapter sized pieces rather than straight through. For readers interested in Hawthorne it is essential late material, because it shows him moving outside his New England subjects and trying to think about a culture he was both drawn to and uneasy with. It pairs naturally with the consul years notebooks, with The Marble Faun, and with Henry James’s own later book on Hawthorne, where James discusses Our Old Home with both affection and reservation.