"The Wrong Side of the Tapestry": Hawthorne's English Travel Writing

Allan Lloyd-Smith

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    Abstract

    Hawthorne's period in England as American Consul at Liverpool brought him into contact with British and American eccentrics and enabled him to ramble the old towns and significant places he had known through reading, and the churchyards to which he seemed inexorably drawn. His views of the English and of English places were in some respects conventional but demonstrate his powerfully emblematic imagination and profound concern for mortality and an unease related to his feelings about sexuality, dirt, and foreignness which is seen not only in "Our Old Home," but also in his "English Notebooks" and "The Marble Faun." Some episodes are particularly disturbing: his expression of anti-Semitism (about the "Lord Mayor's Dinner"), and his encounters with poverty, in particular with a sickly and perhaps syphilitic child in an almshouse.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)127-137
    Number of pages11
    JournalThe Yearbook of English Studies, Nineteenth Century Travel Writing
    Volume34
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Jan 2004

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