P.’s Correspondence

P.’s Correspondence is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1845 and collected in Mosses from an Old Manse the following year. It is one of his stranger and most playful pieces, and the kind of literary in joke he occasionally let himself write.

The story takes the form of a letter from a mentally unwell correspondent named P, written to a friend in Boston, reporting on people P claims to have met in London during a recent visit. The catch is that nearly all the people P describes meeting are by 1845 long dead. He describes a conversation with the poet Byron, who in P’s version did not die at Missolonghi in 1824 but instead grew old and fat and conservative and became a respectable peer in the House of Lords. He meets Robert Burns, also greatly aged and a public moralist. He has tea with Shelley, who survived the boating accident and turned to the Church of England. Napoleon turns up. So does Coleridge. So does the poet Keats, who in P’s version never died of consumption and has produced volume after volume of late work.

The joke runs throughout. P keeps complaining that his famous acquaintances have not lived up to their early promise, when of course in our timeline they did not live at all. Hawthorne is partly playing a literary game and partly making a point about the way reputation depends on early death. He is also doing something gentler with P, who is a sympathetic figure and whose confusion has its own logic.

The story is about fifteen pages long and is one of the most enjoyable single sittings in the Mosses collection. It pairs naturally with The Hall of Fantasy and A Select Party from the same period, both of which use a similar device of literary figures gathered in an imaginary space. For readers who love alternative history fiction, this is one of the earliest examples in English.