20 November

Melville and Hawthorne meet for (nearly) the last time, and take a walk in the sand dunes of Southport, Lancashire

1856 It was only just over six years after they first met on that picnic in the Berkshire Mountains (see 5 August). In return for his campaign biography of President Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne had been awarded the American consulship at Liverpool, then the chief port through which American goods and travellers entered the UK. Seeking a break from his work and family, Melville was on his way to the Holy Land.

Since their first meeting their literary fortunes had diverged. Contemporary critics actually preferred Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) to The Scarlet Letter (1850), and much admired The Blithedale Romance (1852), his satire on an idealistic farming commune. Melville’s monumental Moby-Dick (dedicated to Hawthorne) had appeared in 1851 to mixed reviews, while Pierre (1852), his next novel – and his last conventional one – was a disaster, both critically and financially.

On first seeing Melville at the Consulate, Hawthorne noted in his journal of 20 November that his old friend looked ‘a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder’, perhaps because he had ‘suffered from constant literary occupation, pursued without much success latterly’. So he invited him to stay for a few days in the family residence at Southport, to get a breath of sea air.

On a long walk, sitting down ‘in a hollow among the sand hills’, Melville announced ‘that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”’. He seems to have meant this in the metaphysical sense, not referring to his critical reputation, for Hawthorne reports that he had always lacked a ‘definite belief’ and seemed doomed to wander over these deserts of doubt ‘as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting’.

They did meet just once again, when Melville returned from his voyage and passed through Liverpool on 4 May 1857. But this time Hawthorne’s journal is silent on the occasion. As for Melville’s critical standing, that would have to wait nearly a century to be justly valued.