August 9th, 1857 - Hawthorne, reluctant Consul

It's a week since Hawthorne has been to the Art Treasures exhibition. Why? He’s been busy. Not only has the family moved lodgings, but he had to go into work every day last week. Imagine.

Hawthorne had sent his letter of resignation (from the office of US Consul to Liverpool) back in February1857. He heard that it had been accepted and a replacement found during April, and he was just serving his time until the new Consul was installed. He planned a summer tour of the UK, visiting Scotland and the North East, and moved away from Liverpool to Manchester to be near the Art Treasures Exhibition. But the new Consul hasn’t arrived yet. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tenure as Consul began on August 1st 1853; in his resignation letter he proposed a handover date of 31st August 1857. But no, the new Consul, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, would not arrive in England during August, or September. Hawthorne had to hang on. During the last week of July Hawthorne spent more time at the Art Treasures Exhibition than he did at work, but the first week of August was a different matter.

Chorlton Road, 
August 9th. — 

We have changed our lodgings since my last date, those at Old Trafford being inconvenient, and the landlady a sharp, peremptory housewife, better fitted to deal with her own family than to be complaisant to guests. 

We are now a little farther from the Exhibition, and not much better off as regards accommodation, but the housekeeper is a pleasant, civil sort of a woman, auspiciously named Mrs. Honey. 

The house is a specimen of the poorer middle-class dwellings as built nowadays, — narrow staircase, thin walls, and, being constructed for sale, very ill put together indeed, — the floors with wide cracks between the boards, and wide crevices admitting both air and light over the doors, so that the house is full of draughts. The outer walls, it seems to me, are but of one brick in thickness, and the partition walls certainly no thicker; and the movements, and sometimes the voices, of people in the contiguous house are audible to us. 

The Exhibition has temporarily so raised the value of lodgings here that we have to pay a high price for even such a house as this. 

Mr. Wilding having gone on a tour to Scotland, I had to be at the Consulate every day last week till yesterday; when I absented myself from duty, and went to the Exhibition.

Nathaniel Hawthorne 

Henry J. Wilding, the Vice consul is first mentioned in Hawthorne’s published English Journals in January1854 . Before that another Vice Consul is referred to (Samuel Pearce). These were two of the three clerks Hawthorne had working under him during his term of office. The third is anonymous. 

Wilding was still in post in 1865, when he informed Washington that John Surratt, wanted in connection with Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, was in Liverpool. Another man accused of being a co-conspirator was Hawthorne’s successor Beverley Tucker.