Collected Prose

domestic history to be made public, and I am astonished at myself that I ever thought of it.” In 1884, when Julian published his own book, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife , he included a number of extracts from Twenty Days , commenting that the three weeks he spent alone with his father “must have been weary work, sometimes, for Hawthorne, though for the little boy it was one uninterrupted succession of halcyon days.” He mentions that a full version of the diary would make “as unique and quaint a little history as was ever seen,” but it wasn’t until 1932, when Randall Stewart put together the first scholarly edition of the American Notebooks , that Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny was finally made available to the public. Not as a separate book (as Julian had suggested) but as one section in a lengthy volume of 800 pages that spans the years 1835 to 1853.
    Why publish it now as an independent work? Why should this small, uneventful piece of prose command our interest more than one hundred-fifty years after it was written? I wish I could mount a cogent defense on its behalf, make some dazzling, sophisticated argument that would prove its greatness, but if the piece is great, it is great only in miniature, great only because the writing, in and of itself, gives pleasure. Twenty Days is a humorous work by a notoriously melancholic man, and anyone who has ever spent an extended length of time in the company of a small child will surely respond to the accuracy and honesty of Hawthorne’s account.
    Una and Julian were raised in an unorthodox manner, even by the standards of mid-nineteenth-century Transcendentalist New England. Although they reached school-age during their time in Lenox, neither one was sent to school, and they spent their days at home with their mother, who took charge of their education and rarely allowed them to mingle with other children. The hermetic, Eden-like atmosphere that Hawthorne and Sophia tried to establish in Concord after their marriage apparently continued after they became parents. Writing to her mother from Lenox, Sophia eloquently delineated her philosophy of childrearing: “… Alas for those who counsel sternness and severity instead of love towards their young children! How little they are like God, how much they are like Solomon, whom I really believe many persons prefer to imitate, and think they do well. Infinite patience, infinite tenderness, infinite magnanimity,—no less will do, and we must practise them as far as finite power will allow. Above all, no parent should feel a pride of power . This, I doubt not, is the great stumbling-block, and it should never be indulged. From this comes the sharp rebuke, the cruel blow, the anger. A tender sorrow, a most sympathizing regret, alone should appear at the transgression of a child … Yet how immitigable is the judgment and treatment of these little misdemeanors often! When my children disobey, I am not personally aggrieved, and they see it, and find therefore that it is a disinterested desire that they should do right that induces me to insist. There is all the difference in the world between indulgence and tenderness.”
    Hawthorne, who acceded to his wife in all family and household matters, took a far less active role in raising the children. “If only papa wouldn’t write, how nice it would be,” Julian quoted Una as having declared one day, and according to him “their feeling about all their father’s writings was, that he was being wasted in his study, when he might be with them, and there could be nothing in any books, whether his own or other authors’, that could for a moment bear comparison with his actual companionship.” When he finished working for the day, it seems that Hawthorne preferred acting as playmate with his children than as classic paternal figure. “Our father was a great tree-climber,” Julian recalled, “and he was also fond of playing the magician. ‘Hide your eyes!’ he would say, and the next moment, from being there beside us on the moss, we would hear his voice descending from the sky, and behold! he swung among the topmost branches, showering down upon us a hail-storm of nuts.” In her numerous letters and journal entries from that period, Sophia frequently noted glimpses of Hawthorne alone with the two children. “Mr. Hawthorne,” she informed her mother, “has been lying down in the sunshine, slightly fleckered with the shadows of a tree, and Una and Julian