Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Childhood
- Eduardo Montes-Bradley
- Aug 8, 2025
- 5 min read
In 2001, my father published an article that illuminated a little-known corner of American literary history through our family’s own story. It was a labor of love, drawn from years of archival investigation and passed on to me not only as a researcher, but as a son.
At the heart of that story stands Lucy Ann Sutton, cousin to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her recollections, published in the New York Observer on August 4, 1887, constitute one of the few intimate, emotionally textured accounts of Hawthorne’s formative years. Her testimony, signed under the pseudonym “Vieja,” survives as both a precious artifact of American literary memory and a thread connecting the great author to Argentina’s immigrant legacy. Lucy was my father’s great great-great grandmother.
A Childhood in Salem
Lucy Ann was nearly ten when financial ruin during the War of 1812 sent her to live with Aunt Mary Manning in Salem, Massachusetts. There she encountered her cousin Nathaniel, then a quiet, bookish boy whose reserve would later infuse his fiction with its characteristic psychological depth. She captured their first meeting with remarkable economy:
When I was nearly ten years of age … Aunt Mary, with much ceremony, led me to the sitting room, where Nathaniel was reading aloud. He extended his hand with the book in it … and said: ‘She can play with my dominoes’ … In leaving the room, I heard him say: ‘I wish she were a boy.’
These spare, telling words reveal the temperament that would distinguish Hawthorne’s mature work. Lucy Ann recalled their shared days in Salem’s gardens and parlors:
He was reserved and gentle, and not fond of the rude sports of boys. He loved to read and to dream … He seemed happiest when alone with a book, or when we were both silent, seated on the hearth-rug.
What emerges is a portrait of an emotionally complex child—introspective, gentle, imaginative. Few other accounts offer such unfiltered access to young Hawthorne’s inner world, years before Bowdoin College or the psychological sophistication of The Scarlet Letter.
From New England to Buenos Aires
Lucy Ann later emigrated to the River Plate, becoming Luciana Sutton de Bradley. She married into the Bradley family in Buenos Aires, eventually connecting through marriage to Lucio V. Mansilla, a prominent figure in Argentine intellectual life. She died in 1888, shortly after her memoir appeared in New York. Her reflections on Salem and cousin “Nat” were written from this distant perspective, combining childhood memory’s precision with nostalgia’s soft focus:
I have never forgotten those days in Salem. The shadows and silences of that house shaped us both. I see now how Nathaniel became what he was, how his heart drew strength from solitude.
My father, excavating these accounts from library microfilm and genealogical records, recognized their literary and historical significance. His article positioned Lucy Ann’s memories within Argentina’s broader emigration narrative, demonstrating how even canonical American literary voices connect to forgotten corners of the world. He understood that Lucy Ann’s testimony—as both witness and participant—merited inclusion in the cultural memory of both Americas.
Scholarly Implications and Recovery Work
Lucy Ann’s account challenges standard Hawthorne biography in several ways. First, it provides concrete details about his childhood social relationships, contradicting the common portrayal of him as entirely solitary. Her presence in his early life suggests a more complex emotional landscape than previously documented.
Second, her perspective as a female contemporary offers insight into how Hawthorne related to women from his earliest years—significant given the centrality of female characters in his mature fiction. Her observation that he “wished she were a boy” hints at early discomfort with conventional gender dynamics that would later manifest in characters like Hester Prynne and Zenobia.
Third, her immigrant trajectory from Massachusetts to Buenos Aires embodies the global circulation of American literary influence in ways that traditional literary history often overlooks. Her testimony survives not in American archives but in the cultural memory of Argentine intellectual life, suggesting how diaspora communities preserve and transmit literary heritage.
Methodological Considerations
Working with Lucy Ann’s memoir requires careful attention to the complex layers of memory, time, and perspective involved. Written nearly forty years after the events described, her account filters childhood experience through adult understanding and geographical distance. Yet this temporal complexity may actually enhance rather than compromise its value, allowing her to perceive patterns in young Hawthorne’s behavior that might have escaped contemporary observers.
The memoir’s publication in the New York Observer—a Protestant weekly with broad circulation—suggests Lucy Ann intended her memories for public consumption, not merely personal reflection. This context shapes both the memoir’s tone and its selection of details, emphasizing moral and character formation over purely biographical information.
Continuing the Work
In recovering this story for contemporary readers, I continue the archival work my father began: preserving Lucy Ann’s testimony not as anecdote but as legitimate historical source. Her account remains in the public domain yet absent from standard Hawthorne biographies—an omission that reveals more about gaps in literary historiography than about the material’s intrinsic value.
Through Lucy Ann’s eyes, we access something irreplaceable: not scholarly reconstruction or theoretical hypothesis, but a child’s direct, loving, unvarnished portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne as a boy. As a filmmaker and storyteller devoted to recovering overlooked legacies, I recognize this work’s broader significance. But this story carries deeply personal weight—passed from Lucy Ann to the Observer’s readers, from my father to me, and now to my children.
I write these words in Dublin, Ireland, at my wife’s gentle insistence that I leave behind notes about our family history. What began as a simple family record has become something larger: an argument for understanding Hawthorne not only as a writer but as a human being shaped by family, memory, and displacement—the same forces that carried Lucy Ann from Salem to Buenos Aires and brought me to Dublin to preserve her story.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s childhood endures—in the recollections of a girl who loved books, crossed an ocean, and never forgot Salem’s shadows and silences.
Bibliographic Notes
1. Lucy Ann Sutton (as “Vieja”), “Reminiscences of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” New York Observer, August 4, 1887.
2. Nelson Montes-Bradley, “Recuerdos porteños de una pluma de Salem,” La Nación, August 19, 2001.
3. Historic Ipswich Archive, “Nathaniel Hawthorne Recalled by Cousin Lucy Ann Sutton de Bradley,” accessed July 2025, historicipswich.net.
4. For broader context on Hawthorne’s childhood, see Edwin Haviland Miller, Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), and Brenda Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2003).