of what i was thinking about and if if you want to have me i would be happy to come this evening and kind of give you a progress report because it is a work in progress i well hawthorne kind of through the back door a few years ago i was doing some research on the old doing grounds of washington d c if you weren't allowed to have dools in the district of columbia so everybody came over the line into maryland and there's a nice little doing ground under the trees in the town of bladensburg maryland which is about a quarter mile from where sally and i presently  and so i was doing some research on the doing grounds and one of the was dools to be held at the doing grounds involved a fellow by the name of jonathan silly  silly was from thomas the name he made it quite big in politics here in maine served in the main senate certainly in legislature went on to become a congressman from the state of maine after main apparently said something that one of the other congressman from kentucky didn't like and this congressman challenged him to a dual apparently the congressman from kentucky was quite well versed in the handling of firearms  storm in congress about this is not the way congress should act maybe we should take some lessons from that today and one of the out of the main cries of the death of john seely came from an individual the name of nathaniel hawthorne the reason he was so incensed because he was a loyal democrat just like so he was but also john facility and he were classmates at boden college presented at the hawthorne society meeting that was held in bowden college a few years back so that's kind of how i came into my interest and the thing you know how often it's expanded since then and so a raymond and i hadn't known about it really but when i was over there giving the talk i i got this idea as well if he lived in raymond when i was a boy and he  mother there when he was attending bowden college there's a good chance that he may have passed this way going between raman and brunswick and so i started looking more into what kind of connections  might have with new gloucester and as i was doing this research and came across some of his interest in the shakers i went well he came to go also there was a possible but he went and visited the day late community and so i wanted to kind of follow through on that and so that's what i told lenny i was going to do this summer when i came up and in fact that what i had done i spent some time over in the  library and quite a bit of time up in the college library i've done some previous research over the bowden library where love and hip hoppers papers are and anyway that's how i came to the thing of hawthorne and and subject of him and the shakers bottom line i found absolutely no evidence in the shaker library and all my other research pursuing that line of research i wanted to go in that well just how much did that then you'll hawthorn really care about the shakers why did he become interested in the shakers how did that all evolve and whatever became of that interest in the shakers and so that's what i want to talk a little bit about tonight this is very very informal this is not a lecture this is not an academic paper got some notes here in front of me that i'm going to refer to if there's anything that's totally unclear when i say it don't have any hesitation to ask me questions i'll be happy to clarify something for you so first of all let me give you a little background i don't know any of you familiar i mean i'm sure you probably all heard of the thing you hawthorne you know that he wrote books and stories you know anything more about him because he's actually a very interesting fellow  he is primarily known as an important early eighteenth century the early nineteenth century american writer author of such works as the scarlet letter which was published and eight hundred fifty one the house of the seven gables just published in the eight hundred fifty two also the bligh's dale romance which  primarily known as the author of a number of tales we might call short stories but he called tales and these were published independently over the years and then and the snow image or more twice told tales in eighteen fifty eight nothing hawthorne also had a life outside of literature or he was the district surveyor for salem and peabody massachusetts after he graduated from bowden went back home to his family in salem he was inspector for revenue for the port of salem and he was the where engager at the boston customs house all of these jobs were political appointments and as i mentioned earlier he was a good democrat and as long as there was a democrat in office he had a job but in eight hundred fifty when the whigs came in he lost his jobs and he was quite insistent about that because he figured he was doing a good job why can he continue to do a good job regardless of who's in him power at the time but he lost his job due to the turning of the political tide and his specially when he wasn't working he lived as a reckless back in salem he went to work and he came home and he buried himself in books and he read and the more he read the more he decided that he could also write and that's when he started to become seriously  interested in literature he became the recording secretary for the salem lyceum and this state helped him stay connected with the literary and cultural life of boston and the greater new england area his father died when he was quite young you never really got to know him and he was very dependent on his mother and he had two sisters his older sister elizabeth were they were bosom buddies they did everything together and not get involved with the outside world but after he lost his job and became tired of simply staying in his room in salem he decided that there might be other fellow by the name of franklin pierce and he probably all of her franklin pierce one of our less notable presidents but he and franklin were were bosom buddies bowdon jonathan seeley and hawthorn entered into a tontines that there was going to be a barrel of madeira wine and whoever got married first the one who stayed single would get the barrel of madeira so it's really a bet is that who's going to get married first who's going to stay unmarried longest and  get married but he had no concrete plans and  youthful uncle by the name of samuel manning which was manning family that was living over in raymond who ran a stage line and he was a horse trader and so he would make these business trips up in he's traveling around now one of these trips an eighteen thirty one they sam had to make a business trip up to canada very new hampshire they've been in concord and they did business there and then had heard that you know he was going to he heard about the shakers and he thought you know i hear that you know you can stop there and they'll give you lodging they'll give you a nice meal and pull up with sam you know let's do that want to say i'm not interested in doing that at all  the taverns and he was looking forward to getting up to canterbury and holding court with all those of his business buddies over a tankard of ale and had really no interest in hanging out at the shaker community and in can  there were some people who had a higher opinion of the shakers than others and so he decided he wanted to make his own take his own decision on like so he wanted to visit the village and us so he went down and he was very impressed by the the appearance of the village all the old buildings with the red roofs the fields in the past years in the order factories in the farm buildings and he stayed and attended this is sunday and so he has stayed to attend one of the public meetings  and he noted in his notebook at there were over two hundred people that came to watch the shakers worship he decided he was going to stay in the back and be as  and one of the elders after him right up to the front row so he could have a nice clear view of the happenings and he described the shaker women as relatively pretty he said they look pretty much is that they just stepped out of the coffins the muslim clothing that they wore made were very trying to their complection there was nothing remarkable about the men except for their stupidity and it did look queer to see these great boobies cutting all sorts of ridiculous capers with the greatest countenance imaginable so that's what nathaniel hawthorne thought of the shakers upon first encounter he found their dancing comical and then he returned the following day and was shown around the community and the shakers with whom he spoke seemed very intelligent and happy he said they had a good and comfortable life and if it were not for their ridiculous ceremonies a man might not do wise thing then to join them so despite these initial impressions that he had attending the public meeting many of certainly impressed by the layout of the village and how neat orderly and clean everything was  he did not take too much to their their ceremonies but yet he found the people very pleasant and seemingly happy and  after he got back home he wrote a letter to one of his cousins over in massachusetts and said i have some idea of joining the shakers as i had an opportunity of inspecting one of their villages and was much pleased with their manner of life then he wrote to another cousin a couple months later and said when i join the shakers i will send you a great slice of rye and indian bread so this was first impression of the figures and when you look at it and when you consider all the things that he wrote into his journal and then these letters to his cousins one had to wonder whether he was serious about joining the shaker or if this was just a kind of a tongue in cheek playfulness he was having with his cousins that you know just watch you know i just might join them so i  as i mentioned earlier you know he was never really interested in the fairer sex or now at that time anyway his sisters always doubted that he would ever get married and then there was this this bet that he to who could stay single the longest so this is what this is the first hint that that hawthorn had some kind of an interest in the generally unfavorable view of the shaker life he was cordial to the individual shakers that he met but found their lifestyle to be a cold negative withdrawal from the world he found it a confused misconceived and even an anti social turning away from the human community after his visit to canterbury in the summer of eight hundred thirty one there is virtually no more references to the shakers in his notebook secret numerous no books now there is no and in his relationship with the other transcendental list but he never really took to the idea of communal living not just communal living in the sense of the shaker communities but and they fell in love and i got married and that was the end fortunately jonathan ceilidh already got married and so the bet was safe but he found she was also somewhat of a recluse in her own right and but they really struck it off at brook farm and so when they got back to concord they got married and he was concern for his friend and so in september of eighteen forty two he took nathaniel aside and said you know i need to go out and and he suggested that for this walk that they walk over to the shaker community in harvard massachusetts which is about twenty miles  away they took their meals with the brethren in the community and stayed at a nearby in and emerson wrote quite extensively in his journals about the visit  he just he described their visit to the community going through all the different buildings emerson got into a somewhat  will call it heated but a theological discussion with with some of the brother and about their faith and their ways of worship and such you tried to talk them out of living to shake a lifestyle but emerson said upon the conclusion of their visit that he found them less stupid and more honest than we looked for found even some humor and had our fill of walking in sunshine emerson found the village to be organized and prosperous but what about impressions of the harvard community you heard what he thought of his initial visit in canterbury frankly he didn't have  one and then he went to speak of anyway anxious to return to his new bride after their first separation during their marriage it was two weeks before he wrote anything down in his notebook about the visit essentially rehashed what emerson had already reported and then said but the particulars of the trip have faded from my memory and all the other adventures of that to have now lost their freshness that i cannot adequately recall them wherefore let them remain untold nothing hawthorne was in love and shake life held no interest for him anymore it was another decade eight hundred fifty one before we find another reference to visiting a shaker community almost a decade pass at that time in the early eighteenth fifties nathaniel and safire were living out in lenox massachusetts in the berkshires they had written a little nice little farmhouse out there and he was living there writing his tales and while they were there so if i was away on a trip and nathaniel sitting on the front porch with his young son julian and herman melville and a couple of his friends arrived in a carriage and invited hawthorn and his son julian to go out on a picnic so they went out into the murk shares and had a nice picnic and then melville suggested that they visit the shaker community in hancock massachusetts which is a thing west of pitts go over to the new york border and he was kind of anxious coming to his father and asking him what are shakers what are shakers so i thought this would be a good opportunity for him to see the shaker up close and he wrote i don't know what he expected to see perhaps some strange sort of quadrupeds i suppose the term shaker was a great puzzlement to him he was very disappointed when his father pointed out an old man wearing a wide brimmed hat and telling him that's a shaker they visited some some of the principal brick dwelling at that community and hawthorne commented on that the the polished wood and plaster so smooth as marble and everything so neat and in its place but then he added it did not imply any real delicacy or moral purity in the occupants of the house as they continued their tour hawthorne became quite invisibly disturb separate sleeping arrangements now this could have been anything new to him having visited canterbury and harvard but he was quite incensed about the sleeping arrangement and the fact that sexes were separated and there were these narrow small narrow beds in each of the rooms to accommodate two people and he didn't like that at all he was also disturbed by the fact that there was no private bathing facilit s and as he continued he repeated a number of observations that he made during his visit to canterbury twenty years ago twenty years before the women looked pale and none of the men had a aspect they are certainly the most singular and be devil set of people that ever existed in the civil laws land and one of these days when their sect in system shall have passed away a history of the shakers will make a very curious book continuing to describe hancock he described it as this outlandish village where in the shakers a system in establishing that is foolish he found the working women in the community to be no better than a the beast of burden they were alive but got no enjoyment out of life and his final conclusion upon leaving and the fact shows that all their miserable pretense of cleanliness better a consummation which i am happy to hear is thought to be not a great many years distant so why the big change in hawthorn's attitude toward the shakers when he visited cana bury he was curious when he visited harvard he was indifferent and then ten years later when he visited hancock he was violently negative negative reaction to an appraisal of the shaker lifestyle may and i think it's probably true may reflect his general view of communal living arrangements growing out of his experiences at brooks farm it was it was well understood to hawthorne that the at first affects of living in voluntary isolation from a community had a dangerous effect on personality something he experienced and he saw in the shakers what he feared might be happening to him due to his sensitive nature so ok the blight their romance didn't really address the shakers specifically did the shakers show up i mean they obviously showed up in his literature in his in his i'm sorry not  but in his is no books and his correspondence and although he might have touched in the by dale romance about communal living but not the sacred specifically did the shakers show up in and he was fiction and the answer are two instances he wrote two tales that dealt specifically with the shakers first one was published in eight hundred thirty three two years after his initial visit to the can of barry village entitled the canterbury programs so it was published in thirty three and then collected in eight hundred fifty one the story tells of a two young shakers of a boy or girl who are fleeing the can of very village at night they decided that they're in love and they want their they've grown tired of the shake lifestyle they want to see what life was like in the big world and so they're going down the road from the village down toward concord and there's a little and still there today a cistern water cistern and  when they got there they ran into five individuals who were heading toward the village to become shakers and while they sat there and drank water the two young shakers said why they wanted to go out into the world to see what the ruled it was like and each of the programs then related their destruction dissatisfaction with the outside world what was wrong with the outside bowl it's one of them had a reason that they wanted to leave the world behind and go to the security that they thought the shaker community who would offer them the the seeker use go out into the real world decide that regardless even though that their their hopes of been chastened a little bit by what they heard from the program they decided they were still going to go out in this story hawthorne shows us that shaker life is the grave for the living for those who have failed in life and are hopeless bridal it was published nine hundred thirty eight and it and this was during between the times of who actually before his second visit to the harvard community old very infirm he's dying and decides he's going to turn over his patriarchal staff to a new leader and he has chosen two members of the community a brother and one and one of the brothers of one of the sisters both in their early thirty's both who had come to the community from the real world a few years before adam the boy young man and martha they had been friends with pros in the outside world and just never really gave them a fair shake and every time they thought they were going to get married something would happen and so we can get married the everything's too uncertain and eventually the marriage gets put off and put off and it never happens it never happened and finally adam suggest that they both join the shaker community which they do and adam fairs quite well in the community he works hard to feel he's given a number of responsibilities in the community and martha fulfills the role of a traditional sister and she's not happy she's not satisfied with what life has given her although adam is brother and sister in the spiritual sense dollars from all the other communities come to hear what the elder of the motion has to say and why he wants to do it this way they all debate about whether this is the right way to do it and hawthorns has a chance to kind of lay out more of how the secret communities are function and what their concerns are and what the problems they have with the outside world and long story short they are finally agree that martha and adam will be able to lead the community as a brother and sister she knows that they will never become old man and wife the the the joint leadership of sanctioned by the other elders and as adam stands there beaming that this is going to be good for him and he will be able to prosper the way he hoped he would always be able to prosper martha realized that she was not going to be able to function the way she had hope since youth and she has a heart attack and dies so it's kind of a gruesome tale but it's another way that hawthorne addressed some of the problems he saw with the ship the lifestyle that the the the inequality of the sexes in this community that of communal communal lifestyles the way the vision it was the way everybody was on an equal footing develop some other ideas and i'm still trying to hopefully define possibility of a connection with with hawthorne and gloucester in the seventh day community but this gives you a little general i know it said this is this is a work in progress but it hopefully gave you a little idea of who nathaniel hawthorne is in the does have a very solid connection with this area of maine and in with the shakers and  with her ratio bridge and jonathan sally and franklin pierce they were lifelong friends my flung friends as a matter of fact in eight hundred sixty four when franklin pierce became president hawthorne's family travelled around europe together and butt in and they stayed there for quite some time and then when the civil war was over and  came back permanently to united states hawthorne's health was hit with had gone downhill quite a bit while they were in europe and they were living back in concord at the so they went up and they got as far as a stop in concord for a little bit and i got a farce plymouth and checked into an inn and went to bed that night and when chris got the next morning he found that hawthorn had passed away during the night so he brought his body back to concord to see family but it is a funeral which a lot of people were upset about and frank prince was a very very unpopular and popular guy and but hawthorn and so her family the mannings and salem kind of took them under their wing and so this is eighteen eleven eighteen twelve two uncles who had farming concerns up up around raym and so between eighteen sixteen and eighteen nineteen he was for the most part in rainman then he got sent back to salem to go to school and then he spent some brief time in schooling and at the academy in scrubs water which is done by portland and then his uncle richard who decided he should go to college arrange for him to attend bo and so when he was coming up on the stage to brunswick to start bowden they picked up frank a guy by name franklin pierce and in portland and they rode to brunswick together and that's how they became became friends around eight hundred forty when he went over to concord and then out to the berkshires around eight hundred fifty when he came back from from europe they resettled in concord because i have not found anything in any of his notebooks there's some references in some of the letters that imply that he did do certainly was visiting his mother and from everything i can been able to reconstruct it looked like his mother during those visit was still still in rayman so a lot of it's conjecture but i'm still working on it but i think there's ever maine he's traveling around maine so i think there's every good possibility that during that those years he was the bowden he was he was going to raman and you draw a line in a map to come pretty close to come pretty close where he first got interested in the shakers is hard to pin down he was a brace is the reader of the variations reader and his mother insisted that a lot of the books that he read have some kind of religious connection and so there's every chance that he was exposed to the shakers you know as as a as the society and how the how they formed and how they came to the united states and where they were settled  decide you want to know a little bit more about it but it it's hard to say for certain for certain there's a real dichotomy between the writers of the priests of war period there their visits to the shakers and so on the so forth but nobody ultimately gives them a plus graded you know in that time time period but ask of the civil war and how they divide themselves into villages and in homes and so on and so forth the looks pretty damn good to the huge cotto that industrialization  place was clean but they are deluded than attics that was his that was his impression charles dickens came and visited in two or three communities i have not found any evidence that that hawthorne was reading be certain had he  had direct contact with these people but more than likely through his reading he knew how other people felt about the shakers other writers wrote about this because so many more cooper i country decided to go visit shake a community that that was that was what they were going to do one of all the possibilities that they had in the berkshire's why go to the commune and i think really the  experiences and this this description of his visit to hancock is a rare outburst of spleen i mean you just don't find that in his letters or and his notebooks and so why all of a sudden he just i mean he could not have been surprised by what he found it hancock he would have seen the exact same thing that can agree with us in the exact same thing at harvard i mean it their lifestyle how they the separation of the sexes you know had a know about all of that so why had this violent reaction to it now that i've looked at other things that were going on in his life during that time periods that you know maybe was just ticked off about something and they set him off for some reason i don't know but it's interesting that he went from that curiosity to in deference to just this really hundred fifty there was an internal revival growling mother rand's work of the year of manifestations and it was something that was started with some of the younger sisters but it was encouraged by and he was totally in the sense at that kind of treatment and that's why he opens his american books with the grim claw and reem says i think uses the word nice things to say about them his descriptions of the of the woman being corpse like oh that's a little that's all rough but you know and then the describing the women young canterbury is these boobies dancing you know and they're being stupid and acting strangely but when he actually had a chance to sit down and talk with them one on one he seemed to be very impressed if they seemed he he thought that they were generally happy but i think the real problem was the fact that because of his own life and this after his father and not having the rule rule outside contact with people or that that left a sour feeling on life lived in isolation and so when he go to the community communities he couldn't quite comprehend or grasp how anybody could be happy living like that because he was trying to escape with crimes figure out some way to escape in his own life and he just certainly couldn't understand why somebody would voluntarily take on that lie and that that certainly comes out in his story