Our Old Home, Vol. 2

Our Old Home Volume 2 is the second volume of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1863 book Our Old Home, the collection of essays drawn from his years of consular service in Liverpool, England, from 1853 to 1857. The book gathers the observations and reflections that Hawthorne made during his residence in England, with the title pointing to the way that nineteenth century Americans of English ancestry often thought of England as a kind of older ancestral home even when they had never lived there themselves and even when their actual American identity had been built across multiple generations of separation from the old country.

Hawthorne had been appointed to the Liverpool consulate by his college friend Franklin Pierce, who had become president in 1853, and the four years of consular service gave Hawthorne extended time in England that he used to observe the country and its culture with the careful attention his fiction had been built around. The essays in Our Old Home cover various aspects of English life, including the architecture, the social customs, the political situation of the mid Victorian era, the literary culture, the religious institutions, and various specific places that Hawthorne visited and reflected on.

The Volume 2 portion of the book covers the second half of the collected essays, continuing the various themes that Volume 1 had established and bringing the wider observations to their cumulative conclusion. Hawthorne’s perspective as an American observer of England gives the essays their particular character, with his reflections on what the various English institutions and customs reveal both about English life and about American life by contrast running across the entire collection.

The book has been criticized in some respects for the limitations of Hawthorne’s perspective, with his observations sometimes reflecting the period assumptions of the mid nineteenth century American gentleman in ways that more recent travel writing has moved past. Even so, the essays remain valuable both as primary sources for understanding mid Victorian England through American eyes and as examples of the kind of reflective travel essay that the period produced.

For Hawthorne completists, for students of nineteenth century American travel writing, or for readers interested in how American writers of the period observed and engaged with England, Our Old Home is essential.