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Hawthorne's years in England, the least studied phase of his career, are especially significant for the challenge that English materialism posed to his New England austerity and his romancer's idealism. Beyond recording his complex response to English life and character, his “English Notebooks” and “Our Old Home” show how England permanently inflected his character and sense of experience.

Responding in 1957 to a question about his fictional subject, William Faulkner insisted that he did not write about the South and southern civilization save as they constituted the particular “country” that he knew; his interest was “the human heart” (10). Hawthorne spoke similarly when he described himself as “burrowing . . . into the depths of our common nature, for the purposes of psychological romance” (XI: 4). Faulkner and Hawthorne did write about their regions, past and present, explicitly and on levels available to conscious control, but they also wrote from their regions insofar as their notions of “the heart” were inflected by their personal and cultural relationship to a distinctively local world and by the sense of life they introjected, half-unconsciously, from its ethos. Some writers (Melville, for one) are imaginable apart from their birthplace and authorial homes; Hawthorne is not. Over the course of his career, Hawthorne had four major “habitations” that were the scene and literal or figurative subject of his writing: Salem, MA, his ancestral home and ingrained point of reference; Concord, MA, where he lived from 1842 to 1845 (and again in 1852–53 and after 1860) and came into contact with the Adamic

With their fluent colloquial prose and curiosity about life's spectacle, Hawthorne's voluminous notebooks belie the common notion that temperament and talent led him to write works of allegorical romance rather than realism. The essay argues that Hawthorne cultivated romance not because he believed in its idealizing vision but rather because, extrapolating from his experience of “the real,” he didn't.

The seasonal rhythm of writing (winter) and repose (summer) that marked Nathaniel Hawthorne9s literary practice can be taken as something between an etiological source and a usable trope for his constitutional ambivalence toward nature, human nature, and the prospect of a natural religion dedicated to the soul9s fulfillment within secular time. As a boy, Hawthorne divided his life between periods in Raymond, Maine, where he "ran quite wild," and residence among his Manning relatives in Salem. Raymond and Salem, summer and winter became his felt symbols of freedom and confinement, sensous delight and sober discipline, much as Quincy and Boston would be for the young Henry Adams. Hawthorne9s darker early tales, associated with his "dismal and squalid chamber" in Salem, originated in obscure sexual guilts, which he came to project outward upon the canvas of history and universalize into a belief in common frailty. His marriage to Sophia Peabody and their life together at Concord9s Old Manse constituted a programmatic effort to exorcise "Salem" and regenerate himself through sunny middle-class domesticity. Responding partly to the Emersonian spirit of cultural renewal, Hawthorne turned in the early 1840s from historical to contemporary subjects, finding his characteristic themes in the prospect of reform. Yet even at the height of New England9s reformist summer, Hawthorne was precluded from a thoroughgoing social critique by the psychic residue of winter. Returning to Salem in 1845, he found once again, as he had on periodic visits to his mother and sisters, that only a concerted hold upon domesticity and socialization kept him from lapsing into the guilt-ridden solitariness of former days. The richness and tension of the mature romances derive from the collision of figurative "Concord" and "Salem," "summer" and "winter"-the naturalist9s prospect of a life of the unfettered senses and the skeptic9s fear that nature, however alluring, meant moral anarchy and spiritual oblivion. What I call Hawthorne9s "winter dreams" are the fables woven by a sensibility powerfully attracted by the vision of a "natural" life-wild, sensuous, and creatively free-yet obliged by guilt and fear to record in the end a stern, self-suppressing "No."