Sketches and Studies

Sketches and Studies is a posthumous volume of shorter pieces by Nathaniel Hawthorne, gathered together for the Riverside Edition of his works in 1883. It collects sketches, fragments, biographical pieces, and a few essays that did not fit naturally into Twice Told Tales or Mosses from an Old Manse or The Snow Image, and were therefore floating around in magazine archives until the Riverside editors brought them together.

The contents are varied. There are biographical essays on Mrs Hutchinson and on Sir William Phipps, two figures from early New England history. There is a piece called The Old Apple Dealer that is one of Hawthorne’s most affectionate observational sketches, a long study of a single street vendor at a Boston railway station. There are short historical pieces, fragments of travel notes, and a few impressionistic essays that read like prose poems.

The collection is uneven. Some of the pieces are clearly minor work that Hawthorne would not have collected himself. Others, particularly The Old Apple Dealer and the Sir William Phipps essay, are excellent and deserve to be better known. The Hutchinson essay is interesting because it shows him thinking about an early Puritan dissident, material that fed directly into The Scarlet Letter many years later.

The book works best dipped into rather than read straight through. It is useful for the serious Hawthorne reader who has already gone through the major work and wants to see the texture of the periodical writing that paid the bills in his early years. It also gives a fuller sense of how he thought about American history as a subject, both as a fiction writer and as a kind of amateur historian. It pairs naturally with the True Stories from History and Biography volume, where the same material is handled in a more juvenile mode for the children’s books market.