William Allen Butler's friendly notice of THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES

As previously shown on Melvilliana, William Allen Butler (1825-1902) the Wall Street lawyer and genial satirist in prose and verse only served as an "occasional" New York correspondent for the Washington National Intelligencer in 1850-1 and most certainly did not write the long and largely favorable review of Moby-Dick, or the Whale attributed to him since 1953 in published Melville studies.

The real reviewer of Melville's "prose Epic on Whaling" in the regular "Notes on New Books" column of the National Intelligencer (December 16, 1851) was literary editor James C. Welling (1825-1894). 

Although William A. Butler never dreamed of writing the learned and perceptive review of Moby-Dick in the National Intelligencer, he probably deserves credit for another, more ordinary notice in the same newspaper: the friendly and favorable review of Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables that appeared on April 22, 1851 under the heading "New York Correspondence." 

Butler's first published letter to the National Intelligencer appeared on July 19, 1850 under the heading, "Cursory Notices of New Books, and Literary and Fine Art, in New York." Dropping Cursory, Butler or his editors gave subsequent letters the revised title, "Notices of New Books, Literature, and the Fine Arts in New York," shortened to "New Books, Literature, and the Fine Arts in New York" (Daily National Intelligencer, February 3, 1851), and then changed again to "Society, New Books, and the Fine Arts in New York" (February 11, 1851). Through February 1851, all of Butler's letters from New York were signed "Jacques du Monde," also Butler's pseudonym in verse contributions to the Literary World and other periodicals. 

The last letter from William Allen Butler to the National Intelligencer signed "Jacques du Monde" appeared on March 1, 1851, under the heading "New York Correspondence." A few more appeared after that under the same heading but without any signature. Several of these closely resembled the contributions from Butler aka "Jacques du Monde" in their contents and style of writing. The last anonymous contribution of "New York Correspondence" in the usual vein of William Allen Butler contains the glowing notice, transcribed below, of Hawthorne's most recent work The House of the Seven Gables. Extant notes to his old classmate and traveling companion George L. Duyckinck at NYPL provide documentary support for ascribing the Hawthorne notice to William Allen Butler.

One mention of Hawthorne occurs near the close of a letter to George L. Duyckinck dated April 3, 1851 and written at Willard's Hotel in Washington, D. C. where Butler had been staying with his wife Mary:

"The Scarlet Letter we have been reading. It is Hawthorne all over, & capital at that. I think it will do more for his reputation than anything else."

The clincher however is this short note dated April 14, 1851 wherein Butler asks Duyckinck to obtain for him a review copy of Hawthorne's latest work, doubtless meaning The House of the Seven Gables.

Citation: 

Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "1843-1849" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1843 - 1849. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/83e4c970-2731-0133-8a0e-58d385a7bbd0 

29 Wall St.

Ap. 14, 1851

Dear Duyckinck, 

Can you get me a copy of Hawthorne's Book? I will read & notice it incontinently. I believe I understood you that you had spoken to Fields about notices for the Intelligencer. If you can get it without any trouble please send it to the office & much oblige 

Yours Truly

Wm: Allen Butler 

By incontinently Butler meant "instantly," "immediately."

Evidently William Allen Butler got the book with the help of George L. Duyckinck and made good on his promise to "read & notice it" without delay. Five days after requesting a review copy, Butler worked a warm and generous treatment of Hawthorne's new book into his letter to the National Intelligencer dated April 19, 1851 and published there on April 22nd under the heading "New York Correspondence." Reprinted in the weekly edition of the same newspaper on April 26, 1851, this may have been the last of Butler's published contributions as an occasional correspondent of the Washington, D. C. National Intelligencer. 

This item is not recorded in Gary Scharnhorst's Nathaniel Hawthorne: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism Before 1900 (The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1988). 

Washington Weekly National Intelligencer
April 26, 1851 - via genealogybank.com

The House of the Seven Gables, a romance, by NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Boston. Ticknor, Reed & Fields.

A greater treat than this volume, fresh from the magic pen of HAWTHORNE and the dainty press of TICKNOR & CO., (a fit conjunction of author and publishers,) has not been given to the reading public for this long time. Mr. HAWTHORNE, after having occupied for a number of years the position of an occasional essayist, writing more from impulse than from any settled purposes or plans of authorship, and appealing necessarily to a limited class of readers, has emerged into a position far better suited to his breadth of genius, and taken his stand in the front rank of that class of writers of fiction with whom fiction is only the medium for the exhibition and analysis of human thought and passion. The Scarlet Letter, published about a year ago, was his first experiment in this new and enlarged sphere. It was a book which no man could read without acknowledging an unrivalled power in the author; a book of intense interest and pathos, not from any startling developments of plot or incident, but from its masterly painting of character and strange revelations of the human heart. It proved deservedly successful, and enlarged Hawthorne's sphere of readers and admirers from a New England to a national circumference. His present book is a pleasing authentication of the success of the former one, and will be eagerly sought after by all who have already made themselves familiar with the author.

The House of the Seven Gables is a New England story, true in all its details and descriptions as to its locale, and yet in its spirit and mode of treatment as far removed from the commonly received notion of New Englandism, and as dissimilar, as the castles of Niederwald are from the factories at Lowell. It is one of the peculiarities of our literature that in the midst and centre of the most practical and least romantic of communities, both in action and thought, we should find a writer like Hawthorne eliminating the elements of a purely imaginative tale from the life going on around him. He is thoroughly native in his taste in almost all his works, taking as their ground-work some local tradition of the old Puritan or Colonial times, and giving prominence to the characteristics and peculiarities of his immediate neighbors as the best material for his purpose. The House of the Seven Gables stands in a street of a Massachusetts town; its occupants are Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, an old maid of veritable New England stamp, and Phoebe, her niece, and idealized "smart girl" such as one meets with, but entirely unidealized, all along  the valley of the Connecticut. The shadow of a curse has rested upon the old house, and pervaded its dark time-blackened interior, ever since the original Puritan proprietor built it over the spot of ground which he had wrested from the heirs of old Mathew Maule, who had been hung for witchcraft, and in one way or another has darkened the life of all its inmates. Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon is driven by her poverty to the sad extremity of keeping a shop in the once aristocratic mansion, and the story opens with the bitter experience of the worthy dame in this emergency. The old maid and her brother, a man whom an unjust sentence has kept thirty years in prison, and who comes home to the Pyncheon homestead a wreck and ruin, and his cousin, Judge Pyncheon, the respectable and moral wealthy citizen, but in reality the author of the convict's misfortunes, and his deadly enemy, are the principal characters, not forgetting a streak of sunlight, woven through the otherwise dark texture of the tale, in the person of Phoebe, a beautiful and complete character, who is the good genius of the story. The plot is simple, and the thread of the narrative even, its whole power lying in the marvellous chiaroscuro in which the characters are painted, and the subtle analysis presented thereby of thoughts and passions common to the race of man, of which the Pyncheons are only single embodiments and types. I can safely pronounce the House of the Seven Gables the most strikingly original romance of American authorship, viewed as a work of imaginative power, which has yet appeared.

Related posts

• James C. Welling, his Notes on New Books
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/james-c-welling-his-notes-on-new-books.html

• Unabridged! Welling's review of Moby-Dick in the National Intelligencer
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/unabridged-wellings-review-of-moby-dick.html