Sketches from Memory

Sketches from Memory is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s series of reflective travel sketches, originally published in The New England Magazine in 1835 and later collected in his Mosses from an Old Manse collection of 1846. The sketches draw on Hawthorne’s own travels through northern New England in the early 1830s, with the various pieces working through specific places and experiences that the travels had produced.

Hawthorne had taken several extended walking tours through New England in his young adult years, with the travels providing the source material that several of his shorter pieces drew on. The Sketches from Memory series gathers his recollections of particular incidents and locations from these travels, with each sketch developing some specific scene or experience that had stayed with him as material worth reflecting on. The framing of memory rather than direct present observation gives the sketches a particular quality that distinguishes them from the more immediate travel writing format.

The sketches cover various northern New England locations and experiences, including encounters with various local figures, observations of particular places, and the kind of small reflective moments that walking travel through unfamiliar countryside reliably produces. Hawthorne’s prose style throughout the sketches is in his characteristic register, with careful observation, attention to small details, and the willingness to let an essay tip into a tale and back again.

For students of nineteenth century American literature, of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, or of the development of the American travel sketch tradition, Sketches from Memory is worth knowing.