[In the following essay, Badaracco places Hawthorne's editorship of her husband's journals in historical context and reflects on the process of editing Hawthorne's own Cuba Journal.]

When I began to edit the Cuba Journal as a solo editorial project, I recall describing in blithe naivete my aspirations and goals. I told a distinguished colleague that because the collection which housed the document permitted neither microfilm nor typewriters, I was planning to transcribe in pencil the three-volume, one-thousand-page holograph during the day, type a transcript from the handwritten copy in the evenings, eventually proofread typescript against holograph, and perform the necessary tasks of annotation, apparatus, and introduction. My friend looked at me squarely enough—man to man, so to speak—and admitted sympathetically: “My dear, you will need a wife.” Indeed, in a discussion of the pitfalls and rewards of the solo editor, the labor of more than a few of the wives of literary and historical men, who have delved in, proofed and indexed, done whatever tasks were necessary, would have to be acknowledged. For without their careful work, many editorial projects never would have been accomplished.

Sophia Peabody, who wrote the Cuba Journal, was the wife, sometime muse, and amanuensis of Nathaniel Hawthorne; and after his death in 1864, left with little other than her husband's papers, she was a “solo editor.”¹ Though best known in this century for the omissions in her 1868 edition of Hawthorne's Notebooks, and as the model for Hilda in The Marble Faun, Sophia was a minor painter of some ability, well-educated for a female of that day, and an able writer.² Hawthorne called her “The Queen of Journalizers” and admired her Cuba Journal.³ Because they shared an understanding of his literature during their twenty-two-year marriage, Sophia was possibly the best person to act as Hawthorne's editor. But as it developed, the edition was one upon which she was too heavily dependent financially, and too closely allied with emotionally.

Sophia's rationale for editing Hawthorne's Notebooks was entirely typical of the late nineteenth century's Victorian attitude toward editing, which regarded the process as a business of “cutting out” rather than one which entailed search and discovery, selection and arrangement, “adding in” through annotation, and “reporting fully” the circumstances of every emendation.⁴ The late-nineteenth-century editor tried to protect or “veil” the author from the rudely inquisitive reader who might “pry,” in some cases extending the veil to cover editorial identity. It might be said that their scrupulous concern about authorial intention led them to edit for a posthumous audience rather than for their contemporaries, and in contrast with our own time, where editing has been described as “providing the protein in the Nation's diet for all time to come,” the nineteenth-century editor was at heart retrospective.⁵ During the last century, a posthumous edition was regarded as having slightly less literary merit than a biography, and as being a bit more ambitious than a memoir or an elegy. Further, editing the papers of a great public man—whether author, minister, or statesman—frequently was the occupation of widows.

When James Ticknor Fields asked Sophia to write a biography of her late husband, some ten months after his death, she said she did not feel the “call,” but admitted “trembling” at the thought of entering the world again.⁶ In the spring of 1865, she recorded her first reading of Hawthorne's notebooks.⁷ That fall she began editing the papers out of sentiment: one day she copied three pages from an early journal of their married life, at another time twelve pages from the Brook Farm Journal, then several pages from his American Notebook, and random passages from “Footprints on the Sea Shore.”⁸ Deeply contented, happy for the chance to “live once again all day” with her “Gorgeous Flower of Time,” Sophia was soon copying from nine a.m. until nine p.m., “taking time only for a walk to the post.”⁹

Soon she no longer deferred to Fields's editorial judgment, and began to develop her own, particularly with regard to selection and arrangement. Without discussion, they agreed that contemporary names should be deleted.¹⁰ Sophia began copying a steady twenty pages a day, “driven by a sort of iron necessity to keep copying,” her sense of mission complete.¹¹

By late November, 1865, she was working straight through until midnight, correcting the first printer's copies, returning proof with long letters of her own, sometimes several in one day. In one she listed fifteen points of editorial disagreement with Fields, including capitalization, placement of quotation marks and accuracy of word transcription, paragraph structure, reliability of dates, and the proper title for the whole edition:

This book, dear Mr. Fields, is not truly a Diary because by no means is there a daily record. It is, as Mr. N says a note-book. So should not the title be “Passages from Hawthorne's Notebooks.” There are such long intervals—sometimes a months intervals—that it is in no wise a diary. And it is especially desirable that all these brackets should be “expunged”—and the lines put between the sentences as I have put them, and as they are put in the MSS by Mr. Hawthorne himself—thus—For otherwise I think the breaths of all the readers would be taken away, and they would be all dead men—for brackets cause one to suspend breath, as it were, in reading, and if this suspension continue too long, mortal life ceases.¹²

Sophia began to think of her role as editor in an increasingly defensive posture when the proofreaders of Fields's publishing house began to make unauthorized changes upon the printer's copy:

The “S” in Revelations must be retained. Why is it crossed out?

The expression ‘dreadful earnest’ … must remain … unless we undertake to improve Mr. Hawthorne's english, which I think cannot well be done, for he uses words very thoughtfully and conscienciously.

My dear Mr. Fields—That pathetic and interesting sentence “In this dismal chamber Fame was won”—should not be put as a part of a paragraph. It is in the manuscript quite by itself, and a page or two removed from the sentence about choosing wives. Pray have that altered. …¹³

Since 1829, when Sophia had been given arsenic as a part of a series of heroic cures administered by Dr. Walter Channing, her health had not been strong.¹⁴ It was poor health which sent Sophia south to Havana in the winter of 1833. In January of 1866, again her health was a problem: she was unable to work because of a perennial winter cough, which would lead to an early death within five years.¹⁵ Stating that she had mastered the difficult skill of “leaving myself out” of the transcription, she acknowledged several months later, “I have grown wiser and look at the manuscript from a less inward point of view,” yet in the next breath she exploded: “I lost my head copying the Old Manse Journal—all the heavenly spring time of my married life comes back in these cadences—so rich and delicate—and what I cannot copy is of course sweeter than the rest.”¹⁶ The winter of 1867 brought Sophia again the expected ill health—which was expensive, she reminded Fields—as she vacillated about whether or not to publish a piece she had found about her “children's doings” called Twenty Days.

With the American Journal completed by the winter of 1866, there were “six and a half volumes of English notes left to copy, plus all the Italian Notebooks which had not been absorbed in The Marble Faun”; Sophia was on the brink of bankruptcy, lacking money for coal and food.¹⁷ With the coming of June, Sophia worried about July's bills. She had copied over four hundred pages of the English Journals and decided against publishing the memoir titled Twenty Days because it was “too domestic.”¹⁸ With “no money left,” she was “aghast” to learn from Fields that he was claiming she had spent the ＄10,000 payment for transcription and in addition owed him ＄700. She immediately relinquished the disputed article Twenty Days and put the remainder of Nathaniel's private papers in his hands, hoping the “publishment” would “bail her out.”¹⁹

At the same time she worried about her insolvency, the inevitable sale of The Wayside and move to board at Salem, she was occupied correcting proof. Five months later, Sophia had not yet sold the family home, but walked the garden paths in bitterness, long separated from the fashionable literary circles of Fields's drawing room, recovering from another winter illness which apparently left her in partial physical paralysis and losing her hair. She longed for Europe, for “the other side of the sea,” far away from “meddlesome Concord.”²⁰

When Sophia's ＄10,000 plus copyright income apparently had been used, and Fields offered her 12٪ royalty rather than the 15٪ which Hawthorne customarily received, Sophia became hysterical, offering to give Fields the Norway Spruce trees on her property if he would pay her as much money as he could for her edition. Though she relented eventually, Sophia at first refused to complete an index.²¹ When the edition was finished, she sold The Wayside and moved to Dresden, then to England, where after another winter bout of influenza, she died in London in February, 1871. Coincidentally, about the same time, Fields sold a Hawthorne autograph manuscript for the benefit of the Boston Consumptives' Home. In a letter dated the same day as Sophia's death, he insisted to the seller that if the manuscript did not fetch ＄25, it should be returned to him.²²

When the full text of Hawthorne's American Notebooks appeared, edited by Randall Stewart, some sixty years after Sophia's work had been completed, the New York Times Book Review managed the announcement with indignation, exulting on Christmas Day, 1932, in bold-face banner headlines, that “nice Nellieism” had been replaced at last by the “bite and tang” of Hawthorne's “elemental rusticity,” and the author himself was no longer a “victim” of “too loving an editor.”²³ Though the zealous quality of that well-known review was later tempered by Stewart and by Claude Simpson, evidence of the same tone persists today among scholars who continue to write in the Victorian vein about Sophia as an “emasculating” editor.²⁴

Like their brethren of the previous century, the literary scholars of the “new critical” school were scrupulous about textual matters, eager to derive moral lessons from language, a bit pious about the significance of their labor, and, I submit, oblivious to the external evidence provided by history. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne's edition should be regarded in the historical light of the circumstances under which it was accomplished. Clearly, the Widow Hawthorne produced the 1868 edition out of financial necessity rather than excessive love.

Similarly, for editors to regard Sophia's editorial work other than within the framework of the history of nineteenth-century women in New England would be shortsighted.²⁵ Sophia belonged to that last generation of the women of pre-industrial American society who were not admitted to public schools, but who had access to the schoolrooms only in the evening or summer, when the boys were resting or playing.²⁶ Within that tradition, where girls were educated in front parlors, “reading” was commonly understood to mean elocution, “composition” was making copies, and “writing” was primarily an exercise in journals and copy-books. Certainly one could talk also about the rhetorical proprieties of the female dame school which were typical of the age, and in addition, about the role of journals, diaries, and letters as surrogates for women's artistic achievements in the nineteenth century as well as in our own time; but these are other subjects.

Sophia's Cuba Journal was written as an exercise in her continuing self-education, upon the prescription of her painting teacher, Washington Allston; her minister, Rev. William Ellery Channing; her doctor, Walter Channing; and her sister, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.²⁷ She wrote self-consciously, keeping well within the proprieties of the travel letter genre, and she had Lord Chesterfield as well as Mrs. Jameson in mind as models.²⁸ Sometimes this had the happy effect of producing an interesting narrative, but more generally, the result was one which attempted to please several expectations of genre at once. Allston expected to read a painter's notebook, Channing an invalid's prayerbook. Elizabeth anticipated a conversational Record such as the one she kept in 1834 for A. B. Alcott's Temple schoolroom.²⁹ Sophia's sense of her audience's expectations overwhelmed her at times, and she possessed virtually no authorial intention which was distinguishable from that which she perceived her audience would demand. This point is fundamental to an understanding of Sophia's 1868 edition, because her rationale there was a maturation of her earlier stance as a journalist.

When considering Sophia as an editor, it is also useful to examine the extent to which her own journals were edited and the characteristics of these changes. Although her Cuba Journal letters were addressed to her mother, as any good daughter's might be, they were sent to her sister Elizabeth, through her brother George, care of Searle and Upham, in Boston. When Elizabeth received the letters, she distributed some singly, some in small packets, among twenty-five eminent Bostonians, including A. B. Alcott and George Emerson.³⁰ During the year 1834, Elizabeth held seven-hour “reading parties” in Boston for the girls of Judge Charles Jackson and the Burroughs-Rice families, where she read aloud the first volume of Sophia's Cuba Journal, deleting verbally any passages which she thought might cause her sister embarrassment, such as all references to slavery and enthusiasm for Cuba.³¹ After being read among the Bostonians, the letters were forwarded to Mrs. Peabody in Salem, who recopied those she sought to improve and invented letters for those which had been lost. As a result, nearly one-third of the extant first volume of Sophia's Cuba Journal exists only as copies in the hand of Mrs. Peabody.

Within the year after the sisters' return from Cuba in the spring of 1835, the Peabody women had handsewn and bound the fifty-seven letters plus an “Appendix” into three volumes of identical size and color, with the title “Letters from Cuba” embossed in gilt upon leather spines. When the volumes were given to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1837 or 1838, he probably read only the second and third. They are superior to the first in narrative interest and literacy, and copies by Mrs. Peabody occur infrequently. In any case, Nathaniel Hawthorne copied sixteen passages from the second and third volumes of Sophia's Cuba Journal into his first American Notebook.³² Those passages were among those which Sophia deleted from her 1868 edition of his papers.

Hawthorne would have been aware when he was given Sophia's Cuba Journal that he was not reading a private diary or notebook such as his own. (Indeed, a comparison of the journal style of Sophia and Nathaniel during the 1830s is startling and instructive—and also another subject.) When Hawthorne read the Cuba Journal, he read a homemade book, a family's edition of the letters of a young woman who had not sullied herself with authorial ambition, but who was, nonetheless, intensely literate. He would have known or guessed, one would like to conjecture, how lovingly the Peabody women had selected and arranged the contents, how carefully considered had been the copies, how proud the entire family was of Sophia's illustrations and of the entire three-volume production.³³

In January of 1976, when I began editing the Cuba Journal, and my distinguished colleague said that I would need a wife, I regarded my situation historically. The proposed work was to be an edition of an edition, written by a woman best known as Hawthorne's editor, who had been taken to task severely by early twentieth-century editors for having censored the “best parts” of Hawthorne's papers. Yet it was more than probable that the most interesting part of the document called the Cuba Journal had been destroyed in the process of having been edited by Sophia's family.

While I knew I was not without company in my solo endeavor, and was merely one more hand in a long history of those who had read and copied and edited the document, still this remained: one hundred and fifty years after the fact, the document was inaccessible to most readers. What was available in print were several dubious critical commentaries by Hawthorne scholars and two sentimental biographical accounts.³⁴ The document had suffered by being read only in its narrowest literary context: in the shadow of Hawthorne's “manly” production, Sophia's seemed “thin and melodic.”³⁵ Despite the valid claims for the literary interest of the Cuba Journal, traditionally the document had been read with more attention to internal, textual criteria than regard for external evidence.

Like Sophia's 1833 Journal, consideration of her 1868 solo editorial endeavor, in its own way a period piece, profits by an examination of the external evidence. The Widow Hawthorne's edition was not only typical of the day, it might have been produced by any number of other Victorian editors. Sophia's experience as a solo editor serves well as an example of the pitfalls which any editor might encounter. Though the pitfalls of solitary editorial work might emerge from too intimate an association with one's materials, and one's effectiveness might diminish in proportion to one's reliance upon the edition for income, an editor's rationale, whatever it might become eventually, should proceed from a policy of inclusiveness rather than exclusivity. The document ought to be considered authentic, that is, worth including, until proven otherwise by evidence or circumstance. The pitfalls of any edition are determined by the kind of document one has chosen to edit. Whether or not one edits literature or history is less important, finally, than whether the document is public or private, and whether or not the author of the document led a public life.³⁶

I submit that there is a kind of edition which is well suited to the solo scale: one where editors regard themselves contentedly as “mere” scribes, involved in a non-canonical, non-corporate project, dealing with anonymous documents, or with documents by authors who led non-public lives. Motivated by investigative rather than critical, interpretive or curatorial instincts, this hypothetical solo editor would perceive herself to be more archeologist than archivist and would treat the document as if it were a shard, regarding the burden of her scholarship to be reporting on the state of an artifact, rather than describing, interpretively or critically, proceedings of an artistic or evidential nature. This would dispose the editor to prefer to work from holographs, providing a close reading of the physical properties of the original in introductory materials which would precede the text.

Hypothetically, the editor would embrace the possibility that the document might be of greater interest than its author; this would place the editor in the position of the connoisseur. By that I mean the editor's rationale would be determined more by her conception of authority and authenticity than by audience. For if an audience is considered to be more fundamental than the document, or is thought to be posthumous, as it was commonly misunderstood to be in the late nineteenth century, there is the temptation to suppress or reveal or confess or, in some way, to alter the original. Yet if one edits for the future, one tends to oversay; this thrusts the editor into an ungainly defensive posture, inherently off-balance, pitting apparent necessity against the unpredictable, what might be read eventually as pedantry or bias. One edits for one's own time; that is all an editor is able to do. For this editor, albeit “solo,” is in very good company, and the rewards of the unrelieved holographic association which solitary scholarship provides are very great indeed.

Notes

1. The Cuba Journal, 1833-1835, is a letter series in three-volume holograph, from the Papers of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Volume III, edited by Claire Badaracco, will be published by the Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts, in 1983. Correspondence pertaining to Sophia's editorial work is among her papers in the Boston Public Library, some of which have been published by Randall Stewart and Edward Wagenknecht in the Boston Public Library Quarterly.

2. See Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, ed., Passages From The American Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 2 vols. (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868); Randall Stewart, The American Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1860). Sophia's painting teachers were Thomas Doughty, the early leader of the Hudson River School, and Washington Allston. Her ability as a painter is displayed in her oil portrait of Allston, copied after Chester Harding, which hangs in the Massachusetts Historical Society. See also Mrs. E. F. Ellet, Women Artists (New York: Harper, 1859), p. 316.

3. See John D. Gordan, “Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Years of Fulfillment” (Catalogue for the Berg Collection Exhibition, New York Public Library, 1954), p. 18.

4. Lester J. Cappon, “A Rationale for Historical Editing Past and Present,” William and Mary Quarterly, 23 (January 1966), 59-60; Lyman H. Butterfield, “Editing American Historical Documents,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 78 (1966), 94.

5. Haskell M. Monroe, Jr., “Some Thoughts for an Aspiring Historical Editor,” American Archivist, 32 (April 1969), 159.

6. Sophia Hawthorne to James Ticknor and Annie Adams Fields, July 29, September 14, 1864. Boston Public Library.

7. Sophia Hawthorne to James T. Fields, April 18, 1865. Boston Public Library.

8. Sophia Hawthorne to James T. Fields, October 1, October 8, 1865. Boston Public Library.

9. Sophia Hawthorne to Annie Adams Fields, January 19, 1865; Sophia Hawthorne to James T. Fields, October 13, 1865. Boston Public Library.

10. Sophia Hawthorne to James T. Fields, October 12, 14, November 20, December [16], 1865. Boston Public Library.

11. Sophia Hawthorne to James T. Fields, October 20, 1865. Boston Public Library.

12. Sophia Hawthorne to James T. Fields, November 20, 1865. Boston Public Library.

13. Sophia Hawthorne to James T. Fields, November 20, 1865. Boston Public Library.

14. 1829 Diary of Sophia Peabody. Peabody Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

15. Sophia Hawthorne to Annie Adams Fields, January 4, 1866. Boston Public Library.

16. Sophia Hawthorne to James T. Fields, July 24, 1866. Boston Public Library.

17. Sophia Hawthorne to James T. Fields, February 25, March 23, March 28, 1867. Boston Public Library.

18. Sophia Hawthorne to James T. Fields, June 10, July 7, 1867; January 30, 1868. Boston Public Library.

19. Sophia Hawthorne to James T. Fields, October 8, 27, November 3, 1867; May 20, 24, 1868. Boston Public Library.

20. Sophia Hawthorne to James T. Fields, May 2, 10, 1868. Boston Public Library.

21. Sophia Hawthorne to James T. Fields, June 2, 7, 12, July 28, August 2, 1868. Boston Public Library.

22. James T. Fields to an unknown correspondent, February 27, 1871. Houghton Library, Harvard.

23. Herbert Gorman, “Hawthorne's Notebooks Are Rescued From Distortion,” New York Times Book Review, December 25, 1932, p. 3.

24. Randall Stewart, Regionalism and Beyond, ed. George Core (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968); Lyman H. Butterfield and Julian P. Boyd, “Historical Editing in the United States,” Proceedings of the Amerian Antiquarian Society, 72 (1962), 315; Hyatt H. Waggoner, “A Hawthorne Discovery: The Lost Notebook, 1835-1841,” New England Quarterly, 49 (December 1976), 623-25.

25. See Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).

26. Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in the U.S. (1929; rpt. New York: Octagon, 1966); Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “Female Education in Massachusetts,” Barnard's American Journal of Education, 30 (1880), 584.

27. While an invalid, Sophia assisted Elizabeth with her translation of Self-Education, or the Means and Art of Moral Progress, by M. Le Baron De Gerando (Boston: Carter & Hendee, 1830).

28. Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his son and Mrs. Jameson's Diary of the Ennuyeé.

29. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Record of a School: Exemplifying the General Principles of Spiritual Culture (Boston: J. Munroe, 1835); A. Bronson Alcott, Conversations with Children About the Gospels (Boston: J. Munroe, 1836-37).

30. Among the Cuba Journal readers I have identified are the families of Rev. William Ellery and Dr. Walter Channing, Martha Cochrane, Amelia and Caroline Ethridge, Sally Gardiner, Rev. F. W. P. Greenwood, Elizabeth Hibbard, the Charles Jackson family, Mrs. Lee and her six daughters, Thomas B. Park, Sophia Pickman, Mrs. Rice, Sophia Ripley, the Rodman family, and Fanny Searle.

31. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody to Mary Tyler Peabody, October 24, 31, November 21-26, 1834. Peabody Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

32. See Hawthorne's Lost Notebook, 1835-1841, facsim. from the Pierpont Morgan Library (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), pp. 62-64.

33. See Claire Badaracco, “The Night-Blooming Cereus/A Letter from the Cuba Journal 1833-35 of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne/With a Check List of Her Autograph Materials in Amerian Institutions,” New York Public Library Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 81 (Spring 1978), 56-73.

34. Newton Arvin, Hawthorne (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929); Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948); Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950).

35. Arvin, p. 79.

36. G. Thomas Tanselle, “External Fact as An Editorial Problem,” Studies in Bibliography, 32 (1979), 32-33.