The Intelligence Office

The Intelligence Office is a sketch by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in the Democratic Review in 1844 and collected in Mosses from an Old Manse in 1846. It is one of his allegorical sketches from the Old Manse period and one of the more characteristic examples of the strange compressed mode that he favoured for his shorter Mosses pieces.

The sketch is set in an intelligence office, a kind of employment agency where servants and other workers come to find positions. Hawthorne uses this commonplace urban institution as the starting point for an allegorical reflection on what it would mean to have an office where people came to find not employment but the deeper things they had lost or had never possessed. A man comes in asking for his good name. A woman asks for a husband worthy of her. Various seekers arrive looking for fame, for understanding, for peace of mind, for the lost contents of their souls.

The device is characteristically Hawthornesque. He takes an ordinary situation and lifts it onto an allegorical plane where the spiritual meaning of ordinary urban activity becomes the subject. The sketch is short and is essentially a series of small encounters rather than a story with plot. The cumulative effect is a quietly melancholy reflection on the gap between what people want and what is actually available to them in any worldly institution.

The sketch runs about fifteen pages and works as a single sitting read. For readers who enjoyed The Hall of Fantasy and A Select Party from the same Mosses volume, this is the natural follow on.