The Village Uncle

The Village Uncle is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, originally published in 1834 and later collected in his Twice Told Tales collection. The piece is a reflective sketch in the imagined autobiographical mode that some of his shorter pieces worked in, with the central narrator presenting himself as an elderly uncle figure in a small New England fishing village reflecting on the long life he has led there.

The village uncle of the title gives Hawthorne room to develop the kind of imagined retrospective that the format encouraged. The narrator describes his memories of the village, his eventual marriage to a fisherman’s daughter, the children and grandchildren he has accumulated, and the wider life that has been built across the decades in the small coastal community. The sketch captures the kind of quiet domestic happiness that the standard Hawthorne shorter piece did not always work with, with the framing as a kind of imagined alternative life that the narrator might have lived rather than as a literal autobiographical statement.

The coastal New England setting is rendered with the careful detail that Hawthorne’s regional sketches reliably delivered, with the fishing village life, the tides and seasons, and the wider community providing the framework that the imagined life unfolds within. The sketch has been read by some critics as expressing a kind of wistful longing for the simple domestic happiness that Hawthorne’s actual life as a writer and intellectual did not always allow.

For students of nineteenth century American literature, of New England regional writing, or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, The Village Uncle is worth knowing.