My First Visit to New England, and Others (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance) — Edition Insights

A Landscape of Contrasts

Howells frames his first view of New England through a series of deliberate contrasts. Fresh from the “affluent farms” of Ohio, he notes the “meagre fields of corn and wheat” and the grass “capped with canvas in the little haycocks.” The land is lovelier than any he has seen, yet he bestows a “rude pity” on its care. The trees, though numerous, look small to eyes used to “primeval forests.” This attention to scale and cultivation recurs throughout the excerpt, as when he describes the road running through woods and issuing into “the glisten of the open fields.” The landscape is not merely backdrop but a measure of difference—between regions, between expectation and reality, and between the ordinary and the literary.

The Weight of a Letter

Howells’s anxiety before meeting Hawthorne centers on a letter of introduction from Lowell, which he calls “infinitely precious.” He would almost have foregone the meeting to keep it, and years later Mrs. Hawthorne returns it, “doubly enriched by Hawthorne’s keeping.” The letter becomes a tangible link between writers, a token of praise that Howells values almost above the encounter itself. His hesitation—wasting an evening and a morning in “fond delaying”—reveals the reverence and fear that accompany literary pilgrimage. The modest cottage called The Wayside, with its preliminary carpentry, stands in sharp contrast to the weight of the letter and the imagined presence of Hawthorne’s characters.

Fictional Shadows in a Real House

Howells arrives at Hawthorne’s door carrying not just a letter but a mental crowd of characters: “Priscilla and Zenobia, and Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and Miriam and Hilda.” He lists them in a breathless sequence, as if they might step out of the pages. The real house—a modest cottage with a hill of low pines behind—is immediately linked to the setting of Septimius Felton, where an involuntary duel occurs. Howells’s memory of the woods “coming quite down to the house” competes with a grassy slope, a detail he cannot reconcile. This uncertainty underscores how literary expectation shapes and sometimes distorts perception of actual places.

The Structure of Retrospect

Howells wrote these papers over a decade, beginning with “My First Visit to New England” in the early 1890s. He notes that the study of Lowell was the latest written and the most labored, submitted to Charles Eliot Norton for criticism. Norton found it “wanting in unity” and urged Howells to draw the sketches together. The resulting volume thus bears the marks of revision and self-conscious arrangement. Howells admits his memory, though “retentive beyond the common,” is not as full as he could wish, and he wishes for more instances. This frankness about the limits of recollection gives the memoir a reflective, provisional quality, as if the past is being assembled rather than simply recalled.

Howells’s narrative moves between the particular—a stone wall, a bird-like song, a letter—and the abstract weight of literary reputation. Readers attentive to these shifts will find a memoir that is as much about the act of remembering as about the people and places remembered. The incomplete excerpts leave the full arc of his friendships and impressions untold, but the care with which he renders a single journey suggests a method worth following.

Reading Howells’s first glimpse of those rocky New England fields, I felt that same quiet awe he carried into Hawthorne’s study. His careful, almost hesitant reverence for place brought to mind the thorny social observations tucked inside my old copy of Latter-Day Pamphlets — Reading Notes. Both feel like letters from another mind, measured and sincere, asking nothing of me but company.