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Notes on the Destruction of The
Scarlet Letter Manuscript
by
Matthew J. Bruccoli
All that survives of The Scarlet Letter manuscript is the title leaf with the table of contents on its verso.[1] There are two explanations of how the manuscript was destroyed: Hawthorne's obscure — in both senses — statement, and his son Julian's commonly-accepted but apparently untrue account.
On 3 November, 1850, Hawthorne added this postscript to a letter to his bibliophilic publisher James T. Fields: "The MS. of the Scarlet Letter was burnt long ago."[2] Although the part of this letter dealing with
Julian Hawthorne's version first appeared in print in Hawthorne and his Circle (1903): "I have seen the manuscripts of all his tales except The Scarlet Letter, which was destroyed by James T. Fields's printers — Fields having at that time no notion of the fame the romance was to achieve, or of the value that would attach to every scrap of Hawthorne's writing" (p.52). Julian does not absolutely contradict his father, for Hawthorne did not say who did the burning, himself or the printers; nevertheless it seems unlikely that Fields would have asked Hawthorne for a manuscript that had been destroyed by the publisher's own workmen. It does, however, appear that Julian was right in stating that Fields came to a late acquisitive appreciation of The Scarlet Letter, for the manuscript went through the press early in 1850.
Yet, it is unwise to place total faith in Julian's testimony, for he was a confirmed feuder and something of a con-man; and there had been bad feeling between Fields and him. Indeed, his statement about The Scarlet Letter manuscript merits less than complete belief because of its curious tone of personal injury. Julian seems, somehow, to feel that he had been deprived of a manuscript he could have sold. He did, in fact, make a good thing of selling his father's papers.
The publication of Hawthorne and his Circle brought a protest from Fields's widow, Annie, in a letter to Julian which has not previously been printed:
There is one passage which I think it would be well for you to omit in the reprinting of your last book.
I refer to the one in which you speak of Mr. Fields as inappreciative of the "Scarlet Letter," and for that reason having burned the manuscript. If you will re-read what your father himself published upon the subject of being appreciated and helped by his publisher I think you will cross out of your mind as well as off the printed page any such thought or remark.
Your father told me one day, after saying that he was glad to have me accept and treasure the manuscript of "The House of The Seven Gables", — "I wish I had the manuscript of "The Scarlet Letter" to give you also, but I put it up the chimney"
You may imagine, having heard this from his own lips, how the passage in your book amazed me.
Nothing is of much moment now, except the truth for your own sake, therefore you will, I am sure, cross off the passage in question and publish this brief note wherever and whenever it shall seem to you appropriate.[4]
In fairness to Julian, it should be noted that he had not charged Fields with "having burned the manuscript." What reply he made to Mrs. Fields is not known; and since Hawthorne and his Circle was not reprinted, he did not have the opportunity to revise it. Mrs. Fields, meanwhile, repeated her claim — and her defense of Fields — later in the year in a letter to Robert S. Rantoul.[5]
It is unlikely, though, that Julian would have changed his story, for he repeated it — with embellishments — as late as 1931 in what has become the best-known account of the destruction of the manuscript:
By the way, I was lately in contact with a gentleman who, in the fervour of the moment, said he would pay Twenty Thousand Dollars, cash or certified check, for the original manuscript of The Scarlet Letter, to him in hand delivered. I was obliged to decline; not from any foolish pride of possession, nor because no such manuscript ever existed; but because my father, after he had written the thing, delivered it to young Mr. James T. Fields, who, not to be too late for the Spring Book Market, promptly passed it on to the printers; and they, after they had set it up, dropped the sheets into the waste-basket, or used them for pipe-lighters. I have heard Fields, in later and wiser years, bitterly lament this indiscretion. But the rash deed was committed four-score-and-one years ago, and is irrevocable.
Possibly the eager virtuoso mentioned above, before making his proposition, may have been aware of its futility. Nevertheless, it was a gallant and eloquent gesture, and helps the trade.[6]
And again one is struck by Julian Hawthorne's irrational sense of outraged wallet.[7]
Notes
Now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, this leaf was formerly owned by Stephen H. Wakeman, but was not included in the Wakeman sale catalogue (American Art Association, 28-29 April 1924). See the Centenary Hawthorne volume of The Scarlet Letter (1962) for a facsimile of the title page. See also W. H. Cathcart, A Bibliography of Hawthorne (1905), p. 33.
Possibly dated 5 November. MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University. My colleague Professor William Charvat told me about the postscript.
Rome, 27 February 1904. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS. Am. 1745.1 (4). My thanks to Dr. William Bond and Professor Fredson Bowers for calling this document to my attention.
First Editions of Ten American Authors Collected by J. Chester Chamberlain . . . February 16 and 17, 1909 . . . The Anderson Auction Company . . . Part I, #170: "An interesting fact about 'The Scarlet Letter' is that the original MS. (with the exception of the title) was destroyed by Hawthorne. In a letter from Mrs. Annie Fields to Robert S. Rantoul, June 13th, 1904, she says in part: '. . . Hawthorne himself told me that he put the manuscript of "The Scarlet Letter" up the chimney, never thinking that it would be of any value.'"
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