Richard Henry Stoddard

“ His first public recognition came from England, where his genius was discovered in 1835 by Henry F. Chorley, one of the editors of the Athenaeum, in which he copied three of Hawthorne’s most characteristic papers from The Token. He had but little encouragement to continue in literature, for Mr Goodrich was so much more a publisher than an author that he paid him wretchedly for his contributions, and still more wretchedly for his work upon an American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, which he persuaded him to edit. ”

“ He inherited the gravity of his Puritan ancestors without their superstition, and learned in his solitary meditations a knowledge of the night-side of life which would have filled them with suspicion. ”

“ One of Hawthorne’s earliest admirers was Miss Sophia Peabody, a lady of Salem, whom he married in the summer of 1842. He made himself a new home in an old manse, at Concord, Mass., situated on historic ground, in sight of an old revolutionary battlefield, and devoted himself diligently to literature. ”

“ HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL (1804–1864) , American writer, son of Nathaniel Hathorne (1776–1808) , was born at Salem, Massachusetts, on the 4th of July 1804. The head of the American branch of the family, William Hathorne of Wilton, Wiltshire, England, emigrated with Winthrop and his company, and arrived at Salem Bay, Mass., on the 12th of June 1630. He had grants of land at Dorchester, where he resided for upwards of six years, when he was persuaded to remove to Salem by the tender of further grants of land there, it being considered a public benefit that he should become an inhabitant of that town. ”