The Seven Vagabonds

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 6, 1837

About the author

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a 19th century American novelist and short story writer. He is seen as a key figure in the development of American literature for his tales of the nation's colonial history.

Shortly after graduating from Bowdoin College, Hathorne changed his name to Hawthorne. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. In 1837, he published Twice-Told Tales and became engaged to painter and illustrator Sophia Peabody the next year. He worked at a Custom House and joined a Transcendentalist Utopian community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before returning to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, leaving behind his wife and their three children.

Much of Hawthorne's writing centers around New England and many feature moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. His work is considered part of the Romantic movement and includes novels, short stories, and a biography of his friend, the United States President Franklin Pierce.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin]

This charming character-driven vignette, first published in The Token and Atlantic Souvenir (1833), gives us an instructive glimpse into Hawthorne’s reflections on the position of the artist in society, in the days when the trade of fiction writer was only beginning to be respectable.

Our narrator, a “strolling gentleman” of eighteen years, pauses at a fork in the road and seeks shelter from the coming rain in a traveling show man’s caravan wagon. There he meets six entertainers on their way to Methodist camp meeting in Stamford: the show man himself, with his puppets and barrel organ, an itinerant bookseller and novelist, a man and a woman who fiddle and dance and operate a mahogany “showbox”, a “red Indian” who demonstrates his archery skills, and a sly old beggar/card sharp/ fortune teller. Our young traveler, struck by the colorful nature of the company, declares he will go to Stamford too, and the show man asks him what his particular talent might be:

I proceeded to inform the company, that, when Nature gave me a propensity to their way of life, she had not left me altogether destitute of qualifications for it; though I could not deny that my talent was less respectable, and might be less profitable, than the meanest of theirs. My design, in short, was to imitate the story tellers of whom Oriental travellers have told us, and become an itinerant novelist, reciting my own extemporaneous fictions to such audiences as I could collect.

The six seem uncertain, but Mirth (the young lady with the showbox) puts in a good word for the young man and he joins the company. Soon after, however, a Methodist preacher arrives on horseback and tells them that the camp-meeting has broken up.”Our union being thus nullified,” says the story teller, “by the removal of its object, we were sundered at once to the four winds of Heaven.”

[Glen Engel-Cox]

Seven people gather in a wagon during a drenching rain, seven very different people, all with a purpose to go to a meeting. They share their professions, with the narrator, an itinerate novelist barely managing to gain any respect from the others: a puppet master, a bookseller, a young man and woman musicians with a slide show, a fortune-teller, and a native American. It’s not a story, but a vignette used to describe these characters of the time.

[Forked Radish]

Moderately interesting.

[Sean Harding]

Hawthorne Hawks #12
Average yarn from Hawthorne here, some interesting aspects, but this one did not do it for me.
The quest reaches a dozen yarns now.