10/7/2023 0 Comments Custom house sketch![]() government appeared to pay any respect to him as a writer, Hawthorne evidently decided to avenge himself by exhibiting the power of his pen in ways both somewhat petty and quite profound. Because neither his fellow citizens of Salem nor the U.S. With the prospect of losing that position, Hawthorne wrote a letter to his poet friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in which he promised literary revenge, and he couched the "vitriol" his pen would let drop in the context of his belonging to the tribe of sacred poets that should be immune to the vagaries of politics and therefore safe in the patronage system under which he had been appointed. Since he had earlier lost a large sum of money invested in the Brook Farm experiment and was in debt, he had, during the last year at the Old Manse, successfully urged friends with political connections to have President Polk appoint him to a governmental position. ![]() His Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1842), was no longer selling, and his next collection of short fiction, Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), which appeared just before he began duties at the Custom House, offered little promise of financial reward, inasmuch as American readers preferred novels and Hawthorne had been unable to write one. ![]() Before assuming his office at the Custom House, he had spent the first three years of married life at the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, publishing numerous tales in magazines, which never paid enough to support himself, Sophia, and their daughter. In addition to believing he had been falsely charged with wrongdoing, Hawthorne was distressed over losing a steady income. Why all the fuss? And what does it have to do with the sketch that announces itself as "introductory to 'the scarlet letter'"? Be that as it may, in "The Custom-House," he generally and mirthfully refers to his dismissal but only alludes to the ensuing controversy that raged in the press across the nation. Were it not for his having been charged by some Whigs in Salem with misusing his position to the advantage of Democrats, a charge that apparently had some validity, Hawthorne might have retained his office and not written his most famous novel. Polk, Hawthorne was sent packing three months after Whig president Zachary Taylor took office in March 1849. Commissioned as surveyor of custom in April 1846 by Democratic president James K. Both sides nonetheless understood that Hawthorne's motive in writing the satirical portraits was revenge for having been removed from his position. Those aligned with the Whigs, however, found them scandalous, and they derided Hawthorne for disparaging the characters of good public servants. Newspapers aligned with the Democratic Party considered the portrayals humorous and harmless. The local press took sides over Hawthorne's portraits of the men who served under his authority as the chief officer of the Salem Custom House from 1846 to 1849. When Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804–1864) The Scarlet Letter first appeared in March 1850, "The Custom-House" gained more attention than the story of Hester Prynne that the sketch purports to introduce.
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