SOURCE: “Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Revival Movement,” in American Transcendental Quarterly, Vol. 44, Fall, 1979, pp. 311–32.

[In the following essay, Shuffelton examines “Young Goodman Brown” in the context of New England spiritual revival movements of the 1820s and 1830s, finding some parallels between revival meetings and Brown's experience in the forest.]

Because the best of Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction so often incorporates historical materials, a great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted both to these materials and to his use of them. Although this activity is crucial to our understanding of Hawthorne's work, our concern with his artful transformation of his sources can also mislead us about the nature of his imagination and his art. Intensive study of Hawthorne's use of history ironically tends to encourage the stereotype of the recluse writer in a Salem attic by suggesting that his working out of universal human dilemmas in historical terms displaced any interest in the immediate problems of his society. Hawthorne the lonely artist is such an appealing figure that it is easy to forget Samuel Goodrich's industrious editor, the worker at Brook Farm, the customs official, and the campaign biographer; he was enmeshed in the issues of his age even if they did not appear directly in his fictions.¹

His ability to connect past and present has not been overlooked, but the presence of so many portraits of ancestral Hawthornes has focused critical attention upon the personal nature of the connection at the expense of its social dimension. “Young Goodman Brown” for example has stimulated many valuable studies of Hawthorne's use of his sources and of his family's involvement in persecuting Quakers, killing Indians, and hanging witches, and these studies have considerably enriched our understanding of the story.² Our understanding can be still richer, however, if we also consider certain intellectual and religious crises of the early 1830's when Hawthorne was writing the story he first published in 1835. The religious revivals of the late 1820's and early 1830's in particular seem to provide a background against which the events of the story take on a more definite shape and a larger dimension of meaning.

At the end of his study of Hawthorne's theology Leonard Fick is forced to conclude, “In the accepted sense of the term, … Nathaniel Hawthorne was not a religious man. He attended church only by way of exception, was unalterably opposed to all attempts at proselytizing, and cannot in any sense be considered a sectarian.”³ Nevertheless, he was an interested observer of other men's religion, most notably that of Puritans, Shakers, and Roman Catholics, but also that of the more conventional nineteenth-century Protestants who were his neighbors and acquaintances. If his tales did not usually deal with their religious extravagances directly, stories like “Earth's Holocaust” and “The Celestial Railroad” provided screens from behind which he could satirize various protestant aberrations. When he looked into that best-seller of the early eighteen-thirties, Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), his observant eye might have been caught by her account of an overnight visit to a camp-meeting “in a wild district on the confines of Indiana.”⁴ Mrs. Trollope's journey into the forest bears an obvious structural similarity to Goodman Brown's withdrawal and return to society, but it is interesting to note that the religious upheaval she sees in the forest is also surprisingly like what Brown encounters.

No alert reader of “Young Goodman Brown” can miss the tale's inverted religious imagery: Goodman Brown keeps covenant with his diabolical companion, overhears allusions to a young man and woman who will “be taken into communion” in “tonight's meeting,” and thinks he sees residents of his village who have a peculiarly religious signification for him—Goody Cloyse, who taught him his catechism, Deacon Gookin, and his minister.⁵ When he approaches the meeting in the forest, he hears “what seemed a hymn … a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house,” and discovers “a numerous congregation” before “a rock bearing some rude natural resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit” (84). Next appears an “apparition” which “bore no slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the New England churches” (86). At the command “Bring forth the converts!,” Brown advances into the dark man's “worshipping assembly,” there to receive “the mark of baptism” (86-88). This imagery is usually understood as establishing Goodman Brown's attendance at a witches' sabbath, itself a diabolic inversion of orthodox Christian ritual. But because of its associations with the traditional New England religion of covenants and congregational meetings, this imagery may also invite us to meditate less on witchcraft than on other perversions of conventional religion. Hawthorne's twilight imagery reflects daylight realities even as it portrays the night's darker visions.

Mrs. Trollope set out not as a potential convert but as a good British empiricist, “determined to see with my own eyes, and hear with my own ears, what a camp-meeting really was” (167), but her possible categories for defining camp-meetings seem as rigidly dualistic as Goodman Brown's. On one hand she “had heard it said that being at a camp-meeting was like standing at the gate of heaven, and seeing it open before you,” and on the other it “was like finding yourself within the gates of hell” (167). Observing the ambiguous scene, she first chooses for particular description two characters who could almost have been Goodman Brown and Faith together before the dark man:

… a handsome looking youth of eighteen or twenty, kneeled just below the opening through which I looked. His arm was encircling the neck of a young girl who knelt beside him, with her hair hanging dishevelled upon her shoulder, and her features working with the most violent agitation; … as if unable to endure in any other attitude the burning eloquence of a tall grim figure in black, who, standing erect in the centre, was uttering with incredible vehemence an oration that seemed to hover between praying and preaching.

(169)

After strolling about the grounds and noticing “the distorted figures that we saw kneeling, sitting, and lying amongst it, joined to the woeful and convulsive cries” (170), she received a midnight summons to join the whole camp in the central area of the grounds before “a rude platform” for the preacher and surrounded by “Four high frames, constructed in the form of altars, … on which burned immense fires of blazing pine-wood” (168). Mrs. Trollope's friend, the French artist Auguste Jean Jacques Hervieu, visited this camp meeting with her and supplied for Domestic Manners an illustration showing three of the four fires, the ministers’ platform, and the participants writhing in grotesque postures before it in the half-obscurity of the firelight. The picture reinforces the similarity of this scene to Hawthorne's, where “four blazing pines … obscurely discovered shapes and visages of horror on the smoke-wreaths, above the impious assembly” (84).

After an exhoration by a preacher which assured them “of the enormous depravity of man as he comes from the hands of his Maker,” the crowd began “to sing a hymn, calling upon the penitents to come forth” (171). Just as the hymn Goodman Brown heard was both “familiar … in the choir of the village meeting-house” and a “dreadful anthem” (84, 85-86), the context of this hymn struck Mrs. Trollope as ambivalent:

… the combined voices of such a multitude, heard at dead of night, from the depths of their eternal forests, the many fair young faces turned upward, and looking paler and lovelier as they met the moon-beams, the dark figures of the officials in the middle of the circle, the lurid glare thrown by the altar-fires on the woods beyond, did altogether produce a fine and solemn effect, that I shall not easily forget; but ere I had well enjoyed it, the scene changed and sublimity gave place to horror and disgust.

(171-172)

The would-be converts who next came forward were, she says, “above a hundred persons, nearly all females, … uttering howlings and groans, so terrible I shall never cease to shudder when I recall them” (172). After the dark man's company finished their impious hymn but before the call went out for the converts to come forward, Young Goodman Brown, also caught up in the emotional excess of the moment, thought “the unconverted wilderness” itself was in uproar, but Mrs. Trollope, like Hawthorne himself a detached observer, located the source of horror in the disturbed mental states and shocking behavior of the human figures. She heard “Hysterical sobbings, convulsive groans, shrieks and screams the most appalling, burst forth on all sides” and she “felt sick with horror” (172).

She was most repelled by the implicitly sexual undertone of the comforts offered by the preachers who “moved about among them, at once exciting and soothing their agonies.”

I heard the muttered “Sister! dear sister!” I saw the insidious lips approach the cheeks of the unhappy girls; I heard the murmured confessions of the poor victims, and I watched their tormentors, breathing into their ears consolations that tinged the pale cheek with red.

(173)

Mrs. Trollope was not alone in connecting licentiousness and camp-meetings, for charges of sexual misbehavior as a result of revival-inspired emotionalism were a recurring theme in criticisms of the revival movement.⁶ It should be noted that the “secret deeds” Hawthorne's dark man promises to reveal to his converts are all either manifestly or latently sexual in nature.

After the “atrocious wickedness of this horrible scene” drove her from the meeting, Mrs. Trollope spent the rest of the night in her carriage, “listening to the ever increasing tumult.” Yet in the morning the picture is as different from the night before as Brown's orderly Salem village was from his night in the forest:

At day-break the horn again sounded, to send them to private devotion; and in about an hour afterwards I saw the whole camp as joyously and eagerly employed in preparing and devouring their most substantial breakfasts as if the night had been passed in dancing; and I marked man a fair but pale face, that I recognized as a demoniac of the night, simpering beside a swain, to whom she carefully administered hot coffee and eggs.

(174)

Mrs. Trollope's ironic, even cynical, view of human nature in America saved her from having to decide whether she has seen the gates of heaven or of hell, but Brown's naivete gave him ground only for suspicion and horror concerning his neighbors. (The English lady's ironies, however, were used to undercut democratic pretensions, whereas Hawthorne's ironic treatment of Brown made democracy possible in the face of seemingly damning truths about human nature.)

The similarities listed here are the most obvious, although by no means the only ones, and the general structural parallel between Mrs. Trollope's account and Hawthorne's story is perhaps as important as any similarity of detail. As Terence Martin has observed, “the motif of withdrawal and return” is basic to Hawthorne's fiction,⁷ and in The Domestic Manners of the Americans as in “Young Goodman Brown,” the narrative carries the reader from the order of everyday life through scenes of drastic emotional and moral upheaval back to a re-establishment of the daily order which now cannot be perceived in quite the same way. But even if we assume Hawthorne to have been thinking of Mrs. Trollope's report of the camp meeting, it is clearly not a source for the story of the same kind as the writings of the Mathers or Deodat Lawson to which other scholars have pointed. Historical documents provided Hawthorne with his facts; his point of view and the attitudes with which he shaped his material came from elsewhere. In this regard Mrs. Trollope's account is merely a curious analogy which points to a larger body of opinion concerning religious enthusiasm, a morbid and perverse enthusiasm from the liberal Unitarian point of view with which Hawthorne must surely have been acquainted.

Mrs. Trollope was not unique in the 1830's in remarking upon the demonic aspects of protestant zeal, for her camp-meeting was only a western instance of a wave of revivals which from 1825 to 1835 swept all parts of the country, but particularly New England and the East.⁸ Hawthorne might not ordinarily have interested himself in the traditional camp-meetings, which were primarily southern and western events, but when revivalists employed camp-meeting tactics in Boston's Park Street Church, they provoked lengthy debates among the New England clergy, both Unitarian and orthodox. These debates over the revival movement generated a field of public opinion which suggested categories of image and situation to Hawthorne and which provide for us a context in which “Young Goodman Brown” acquires richer meanings. To understand the contemporary background which informs Hawthorne's story, we must look beyond the parallels with Mrs. Trollope's camp-meeting, then, to the positions of the revival movement's leading exponent and those of his most articulate critics.

Charles Grandison Finney began the new wave of revivals in upstate New York, overcame initial resistance from more conservative ministers like Asahel Nettleton and Lyman Beecher who vigorously opposed his coming into New England, and by August of 1831 was preaching in Boston on Beecher's invitation. Revivals were hardly a novelty in New England, but Finney's evangelical techniques were both new and widely debated. His “new measures,” as they were called, included holding protracted evenings, employing a “holy band” of assistants to work on would-be converts, praying for individuals by name without their consent, permitting women to pray during services, holding inquiry meetings for the spiritually distressed, and, perhaps most important, using the “anxious seat.” This was a row of seats or a bench placed at the front of the meeting for the use of those who felt themselves under special conviction of sin. After coming forward to occupy the anxious seat, sinners were prayed for and encouraged to make an immediate decision to accept the offer of salvation. The use of these new measures was accompanied by vigorous rhetoric in preaching and prayer, and elsewhere some of Finney's more enthusiastic disciples invented other stimulating techniques. “Every nerve and muscle was called into requisition,” observed one critic of Jedediah Burchard's preaching, adding that as soon as he entered the pulpit, the church “at once became a theatre.” Luther Myrick was accused of using “Profane language such as you are black as hell, The Devil is in you, Hell hardened, God provoking,” and Daniel Nash, “Father Nash,” at one time wore a double black veil over his face while participating in revival meetings.⁹

According to William G. McLoughlin, “Finney was convinced from his own experience that the use of anxious seats and anxious meetings was ‘undoubtedly philosophical and according to the laws of mind.’”¹⁰ Finney's notions of “the laws of mind,” however, were simplistic in a number of important ways, dangerously so from the point of view of a man like Hawthorne who was aware of the complex integrity of the human mind. Finney's new measures were obviously sophisticated techniques for inducing psychological and emotional crisis, but his understanding of how the crisis was to be resolved seemed unsatisfactory. “I understand a change of heart,” said Finney, “to be just what we mean by a change of mind … the world is divided into two great political parties: the difference between them is that one party choose Satan as the god of this world … The other party choose Jehovah for their governor.” The grounds of this choice appeared clear enough to Finney, who could see in drinking, smoking, card-playing, dancing, and reading of “Byron, Scott, Shakespeare, and a host of triflers and blasphemers”¹¹ indubitable signs of diabolic service, but critics not prepared to make these easy assumptions, feared that Finney's dualism was more likely to increase anxiety than to allay it. Albert Dod, an important critic of Finney's Lectures on the Revivals of Religion, argued in 1835 that the new measures, particularly the anxious seats, tended to “foster delusion and create false hopes,” and “should be deprecated as fraught with almost certain evil.”¹²

Dod attacked Finney from the conservative viewpoint of orthodox Calvinism, but attacks couched in somewhat similar language came from the Unitarian left as well. Whereas Dod and the orthodox feared religious “delusions,” the Unitarian critics were more concerned with social dissension and with increasingly bitter divisions among the general protestant community. James Walker and others in articles in The Christian Examiner began in 1827 to attack the Finney revivals as “extravagances” with a “tendency to create even in well disposed minds a distrust of religion itself.”¹³ Walker referred to Finney and his associate Nathaniel S. Beman as “incendiaries,” who wished to “have the satisfaction of beholding the fires of religious frenzy, which have flashed up in particular places, spread through the land, to use their own expression, ‘as fires spread and roar through the parched forests.’”¹⁴ Quoting observers of the New York revivals, Walker criticized the revivalists’ “pungent preaching” for its crude or blasphemous language, their praying for the unconverted by name as a libel on the character of good men, and their inquiry meetings as nocturnal excesses designed to stimulate unhealthy emotions. “They are generally, if not always, held in the night. The room is darkened, so that persons can only see to walk and discover each other, and the reign of universal silence is interrupted only by now and then a dolorous groan from different parts of the room.”¹⁵

The result of all this religious frenzy as Walker saw it was “division and estrangement of families, a neglect and contempt of the social duties, the ascendancy of men of coarse and vulgar minds.”¹⁶ Little wonder that some men ascribed the revivalists’ abuses of decency to “the direct and preternatural agency of the evil one.” Although Walker himself as a rational Unitarian put no stock in diabolic intervention, he enjoyed quoting the Calvinists against each other, particularly when they saw Satan standing at their neighbors' backs. Thus he quoted Lyman Beecher,” … churches must be instructed and prepared to resist the beginnings of evil,—the mask must be torn off from Satan coming among the sons of God, and transforming himself into an angel of light.”¹⁷ C. C. Felton, another Unitarian critic, saw the revivalists as “deluded but crafty agitators” who drew “monstrous terrors” from their “exhaustless imaginations.” He was particularly critical of revivals got up among the young, for the “ordinary pursuits of sound and wholesome learning have been thrown aside. The buoyant and throbbing joyousness of youth and childhood have been changed to an indescribable sadness and gloom.”¹⁸

The volumes of The Christian Examiner containing the attacks on the Finneyite revivals were variously charged from the Salem Atheneum by Hawthorne and his aunt, Mary Manning, and although Aunt Mary would have been the more likely reader, Hawthorne might have found suggestive material in their pages.¹⁹The Christian Examiner articles linked the revivals with both unhealthy, disordered emotionalism and Satanic intrusion upon society. At least one essay discussed the Great Awakening of George Whitefield as an implicit historical analogue to the contemporary wave of revivals, thus pointing to the appropriateness of criticizing the Finneyite movement through historical displacement.²⁰ Whether or not Hawthorne read The Examiner, however, the real question, as with Mrs. Trollope's Domestic Manners, is not one of sources, interesting as that is, but of the climate of opinion. Mrs. Trollope's much talked about book presents a widely disseminated portrayal of evangelical religion, and the Examiner articles reveal an attitude toward revivals which would have been held by enlightened, rational Christians, even non-sectarian ones like Hawthorne. The revivals were such notorious events that Hawthorne could not have escaped a knowledge of them, nor could he have overlooked the significance of the language of terror purveyed by the revivalists and their critics.

If “Young Goodman Brown” is in some ways similar to Mrs. Trollope's account of a camp-meeting, it also reflects the conditions of a revival meeting; the aberrant behavior of the spiritually distressed in the western forests was also induced in those who attended the revivals of Finney and his disciples in Boston and the East. In Hawthorne's version of the revival meeting, Goodman Brown is caught up in a world as starkly dualistic as Finney's where, whipsawed by its polarities, he is manipulated by a quasi-religious leader into an emotional and ethical crisis. Finney exhorted sinners to grasp their salvation as an act of individual will, and the dark man subtly urges Goodman Brown to choose his own fate. The dark man has his own holy band of assistants to guide Brown down the path to conversion, his own anxious seat before the congregation. Just as Finney continually showed the anxious sinner the depravity of seemingly innocent social customs and of any previous religious professions, so the dark man apparently reveals to Brown the evil of even his Faith and promises to initiate him into “the mystery of sin.”

When the diabolic minister tells Goodman Brown and Faith, “Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped, that virtue were not all a dream; now are ye undeceived!” (88), he puts “virtue,” “hope,” and “depending upon one another's hearts” into an ontological relationship—they are not necessarily linked by cause and effect, yet they cannot exist apart. To accept the dark man's promised happiness is to accept evil as “the nature of mankind,” and it is to accept one's almost solipsistic isolation from humanity, for to reject virtue is to reject the essential communal bonds of hope and trust. The community of evil described by the devil is a community of suspicion and cynicism, and as Goodman Brown turns his back on Salem village in order to venture into dark nature and his darker self, he rejects the society which has nurtured him from the self-willed terrors of the imagination. This perception is for Hawthorne the central truth of the story, and it is simultaneously the old error toward which Puritanism tended and the mistake of the contemporary revivalists. Even defenders of the revival movement recognized as one of its possible evils “a spirit of self-righteousness” in which men reject “fellow Christians” for not conforming to their own private visions of order.²¹ This self-righteousness is a fundamental misreading of the “mystery of sin” which repeats in Hawthorne's own century the error of Goodman Brown. The answer is in the old Puritan truth which Thomas Hooker called rational charity—a recognition of hypocrisy in men but a willingness to accept a neighbor's professions of righteousness when supported by apparently good actions.

Unlike Finney's successful converts, Goodman Brown is trapped in the seat of his own guilt and suspicion. Unable to join the dark man's church, he cannot accept the daylight Christianity of his family and neighbors either, and thus living in a self-created twilight, “his dying hour was gloom.” A Unitarian critic of revivals like Felton might have predicted as much, for showing man the monstrous terrors of sin does not necessarily enable him to become a more loving husband or virtuous citizen. In a well-known sermon, “Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts,” preached in Boston's Park Church in October 1831, Finney used a famous trope illustrating a sinner's rescue by an evangelist:

Suppose yourself to be standing on the bank of the Falls of Niagara. As you stand upon the verge of the precipice, you behold a man lost in deep reverie, approaching its verge, unconscious of his danger. He approaches nearer, until he actually lifts his foot to take the final step that shall plunge him in destruction. At this moment you lift your warning voice above the roar of the foaming waters and cry out, Stop. The voice pierces his ear and breaks the charm that binds him; he turns instantly upon his hell, all pale and aghast, quivering from the verge of death.²²

Finney thought the dream-walker was successfully awakened, but a more skeptical reading of the passage reveals that he is still “pale and aghast”; if turned from inevitable commitment to destruction, he is still “on the verge of death” and not yet returned to safety. The voice that stops Brown is less clearly providential, but when he awakes, his cheek “besprinkled … with the coldest dew” (88), he too is still on the brink, a position from which he is unable to find an easy retreat.

In making Brown's own voice break the binding charm, Hawthorne is surely a better psychologist than Finney was in his illustrative trope. He recognizes the integrity of dreaming and waking consciousness, the singular identity of the conscious and the subconscious, and he knows that dreams are in their own manner the result of the same will that leads to daylight actions. Finney and the revivalists in their eagerness to simplify man's answer to the evangelical call extended their moral dualism to consciousness itself; one either slept or waked, knew the mystery of sin or didn’t. Finney's moral and psychological dualism recognized no middle ground, but in “Young Goodman Brown” Hawthorne shows us the twilight regions in which our imaginations are most intensely alive and in which we must make our profoundest moral decisions. For Hawthorne our ability to live in this middle world defines our humanity, and we can resolve the anxiety inherent in this situation only by hope and love rather than by willing ourselves toward impossible absolutes.

We should not, however, conclude that the story is about the revivals any more than we should conclude that it is about his own family or about Salem witchcraft. David Levin has reminded us, “By recognizing that Hawthorne built ‘Young Goodman Brown’ firmly on his historical knowledge, we perceive that the tale has a social as well as an allegorical and a psychological dimension.”²³ If beginning with the tale's historical dimension leads us to a recognition of its social implications, our examination of the story's social context must lead us back to an enriched understanding both of its other dimensions and of the nature of Hawthorne's art. By seeing that the story's meaning has an anchor in a specific social situation in Hawthorne's nineteenth-century present, we understand the balancing power of the specific richness of the story's historical knowledge as detailed by so many scholars. Hawthorne can thus simultaneously comprehend the nature of the past and shed light on the present while avoiding the literary equivalent of historicism and presentism: his past does not determine the present nor his present the past.²⁴ The tale's fidelity both to the Puritan experience and to the revival experience thus allows it to draw direction-finding lines upon ahistorical truths of the human heart, for the tale is about neither Puritan nor revivalist situations but about the human situation as portrayed in the universal terms of art.

James W. Clark, Jr. is undoubtedly right when he claims Hawthorne saw “that in the shades of the forest existed a storyteller's complex world.”²⁵ Hawthorne's imagination worked upon what he learned from looking within himself, what he learned from his researches into the world that had gone before, and what he learned from looking at the world about him. His best stories like “Young Goodman Brown” synthesize from the complete range of his experience in order to substitute the mystery of art for the mystery of sin.²⁶ If his imagination in his best work most frequently found itself at home in dealing with historical materials, it is an imagination solidly grounded in his present, and no understanding of his fiction can be complete unless it understands both that present and that past.

Notes

1. Although scholars are long past believing in the recluse Hawthorne, most studies of his social interests focus on the last decade and a half of his career, e.g., Lawrence Sargent Hall, Hawthorne, Critic of Society, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944) and Terence Martin, “Hawthorne’s Public Decade and the Values of Home,” American Literature, 46 (1974), 141–152.

2. For a recent survey of the scholarship, see James W. Clark, Jr., “Hawthorne's Use of Evidence in ‘Young Goodman Brown’,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 111 (1975), 12. A step beyond the articles in Clark's list is Michael Colacurcio's “Visible Sanctity and Specter Evidence: The Moral World of Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown’,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 110 (1974), 259-299, which argues that the issue of specter evidence determines the tale's “ultimate psychological meaning” and that “from ‘Alice Doane’ straight through his unfinished romances Hawthorne allowed the Puritan language of the ‘invisible world’ to determine his vocabulary and set the limits to his own psychological investigations,” p. 261.

3. Leonard J. Fick, The Light Beyond, A Study of Hawthorne's Theology (Westminster, Maryland: Newman, 1955), p. 155.

4. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Donald Smalley (New York: Knopf, 1949), p. 167. Further quotations from Mrs. Trollope will be identified parenthetically in the text. See Smalley's Introduction, pp. vii-x, for a discussion of the wide circulation of the book. When Hawthorne met Thomas Adolphus Trollope in Florence on 27 June 1858, he referred to him in his note book as “the son, I believe, of Mrs. Trollope, to whom America owes more for her shrewd criticisms than we are ever likely to repay.” The French and Italian Notebooks, ed. Thomas Woodson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), p. 339. This comment, unfortunately, does not establish when Hawthorne read her “criticisms.”

5. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses From an Old Manse, Centenary Edition (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), pp. 79, 81. Further quotations from “Young Goodman Brown” will be identified parenthetically in the text.

6. See Charles S. Cole, Jr., The Social Ideas of the Northern Evangelists, 1826-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), p. 93.

7. Martin, “The Method of Hawthorne's Tales,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. J. Donald Crowley (New York: McGraw, 1975), p. 17. The essay originally appeared in Hawthorne Centenary Essays, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964).

8. On Mrs. Trollope and the revival movement, the anonymous reviewer of Domestic Manners in the American Quarterly Review, for instance, quarreled with her portrayal of American life, but in a long comment on the camp-meeting chapter he felt forced to agree that she, “unhappily, has too much occasion for sneer and censure. Her description of what may be styled the maladie du pays … is scarcely exaggerated.” He goes on to deplore the “readiness with which the unconscious, the young and timid, fall victims to wild and exaggerated sentiments—startling delusions—gloomy and devastating terrors—the chimeras of a deeply roused imagination” (“Mrs. Trollope and the Americans,” American Quarterly Review, 12 [1832], p. 122).

9. Quoted by William G. McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism (New York: Ronald, 1959), pp. 133-134.

10. McLoughlin, p. 95.

11. Finney quoted in McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism, pp. 120, 69-70. This radical distinction was frequently drawn by both sympathizers and opponents of the revivals; e.g. “One of these two positions must be true: either revivals of religion are a work of evil origin and a delusion, or else they result from an outpouring of the Spirit of God.” The Christian Spectator, 4 (1832), p. 26. The Spectator supported revivals.

12. William G. McLoughlin, “Introduction” to Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on the Revivals of Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. xxxviii.

13. The Christian Examiner, 4 (1827), 242-243.

14. Examiner, 4 (1827), 243-244. The charge of spiritual incendiarism was a commonplace.

15. Examiner, 4 (1827), 249-256, 257.

16. Examiner, 4 (1827), 262.

17. Examiner, 6 (1829), 127, 107.

18. Examiner, 8 (1830), 112.

19. Marion L. Kesselring, Hawthorne's Reading, 1828-1850 (New York: New York Public Library, 1949), p. 47. Hawthorne was in Salem when the volumes I quote from were charged, and books he obviously was reading himself were charged on the same dates.

20. Examiner 4 (1827), 464-495. Historical analogues were frequently called up. Calvin Colton in his History and Character of American Revivals of Religion (London: Frederick Westley and A. H. Davis, 1832) had a chapter showing “The Connexion of American Revivals with the Spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers.” Spirit of the Pilgrims was also the title of a religious journal generally favorable to the revivals; it began publication in Boston in 1828.

21. William B. Sprague, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (New York: D. Appleton, 1833), pp. 181-182.

22. Quoted by McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism, p. 71.

23. Levin, “Historical Fact in Fiction and Drama: The Salem Witchcraft Trials,” in In Defence of Historical Literature (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), p. 87.

24. Michael D. Bell, Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) claims that in his later fiction “Hawthorne becomes increasingly concerned with the relation between past and present” while the earlier fiction more simply “attempts to understand the past,” p. 194. This is a suggestive distinction, yet Hawthorne even in the 1830's is concerned about the relevance of the past for the present. Consider, for example, a story like “The Gray Champion.”

25. Clark, p. 22.

26. The relatively inferior tale, “Earth's Holocaust,” may also have some connection to a review in The Christian Examiner. In Boston's Hollis Street Church the Reverend John Pierpont preached a sermon entitled “The Burning of the Ephesian Letters” from Acts 19: 19-20—“Many also of them who used curious arts, brought their books together, and burned them before all men; and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So mightily grew the word of God with them.” Pierpont's sermon defended temperance and abolitionism under the figure of burning the books. If Hawthorne found an idea here, he, like Pierpont, chose to give it an allegorical instead of an historical setting, and his tale is the poorer for the missing element of his experience. This sermon of December 1833 was published in Boston in 1834 and reviewed by The Examiner in 16 (1834), 98-103; unlike the above volumes of The Examiner, however, there is no evidence that Hawthorne checked this volume out of the Salem Atheneum.