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Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) by Henry James
page 36 of 179 (20%)
pioneers of American periodical literature. He is better known to the
world as Mr. Peter Parley, a name under which he produced a multitude
of popular school-books, story-books, and other attempts to vulgarize
human knowledge and adapt it to the infant mind. This enterprising
purveyor of literary wares appears, incongruously enough, to have been
Hawthorne's earliest protector, if protection is the proper word for
the treatment that the young author received from him. Mr. Goodrich
induced him in 1836 to go to Boston to edit a periodical in which he
was interested, _The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining
Knowledge_. I have never seen the work in question, but Hawthorne's
biographer gives a sorry account of it. It was managed by the
so-called Bewick Company, which "took its name from Thomas Bewick, the
English restorer of the art of wood-engraving, and the magazine was to
do his memory honour by his admirable illustrations. But in fact it
never did any one honour, nor brought any one profit. It was a penny
popular affair, containing condensed information about innumerable
subjects, no fiction, and little poetry. The woodcuts were of the
crudest and most frightful sort. It passed through the hands of
several editors and several publishers. Hawthorne was engaged at a
salary of five hundred dollars a year; but it appears that he got next
to nothing, and did not stay in the position long." Hawthorne wrote
from Boston in the winter of 1836: "I came here trusting to Goodrich's
positive promise to pay me forty-five dollars as soon as I arrived;
and he has kept promising from one day to another, till I do not see
that he means to pay at all. I have now broke off all intercourse with
him, and never think of going near him.... I don't feel at all obliged
to him about the editorship, for he is a stockholder and director in
the Bewick Company ... and I defy them to get another to do for a
thousand dollars, what I do for five hundred."--"I make nothing," he
says in another letter, "of writing a history or biography before
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