Passages from the English notebooks

Passages from the English Notebooks is the published version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s personal journals from his years of consular service in Liverpool, England, from 1853 to 1857. The notebooks were published posthumously in 1870 under the editorial supervision of his widow Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and they represent one of the most valuable primary sources for understanding both Hawthorne’s personal life during his English residence and his observations of mid Victorian England.

Hawthorne kept extensive personal notebooks across his life, recording his daily observations, his ideas for stories, his reflections on the various people and places he encountered, and the kind of working notes that any serious writer accumulates across years of practice. The English notebooks cover the four years he spent in Liverpool and the wider time he spent traveling through England and Scotland, with the entries providing the kind of detailed daily observation that the more polished essays of Our Old Home grew out of.

The published version that Sophia prepared was edited with the kind of family piety that the Victorian era expected, with some of the more intimate or personally critical material apparently moderated or omitted in ways that modern scholarly editions of the complete notebooks have since reconsidered. Even with the editorial interventions, the published Passages remain valuable both as primary source material for understanding Hawthorne’s English years and as examples of the careful observational writing that the notebook format 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, Passages from the English Notebooks is essential. The book complements Our Old Home by providing the underlying daily observations that the polished essays grew out of.