P.'s Correspondence
Encyclopedia
"P.'s Correspondence" is a 1845 short story
by the 19th century American
writer Nathaniel Hawthorne
, constituting a pioneering work of alternate history. Some consider it the very first such work in the English language (depending on whether or not Benjamin Disraeli's "Alroy" of 1833 is defined as being alternate history). In any case, it is certainly among the earliest works of this genre in any language and apparently the first to introduce some features which were to become an essential part of it.
It was first published in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review
in April 1845 and collected with other Hawthorne stories (not of this genre) in "Mosses from an Old Manse
" (1846).
, common in literature of the period. It purports to transcribe a letter written by a mentally-deranged friend of the writer, identified only by the initial "P." (supposedly to protect his privacy). As presented in the preface, the writer seems to share with the rest of the world the belief that his friend is indeed mad, and publishes the text as an act of kindness rather than out of believing in its veracity.
However, the text attributed to P. is far from looking like the ravings of a madman. Rather, it seems the product of a rational and sensitive mind placed in the impossible situation of simultaneously perceiving two realities which contradict each other in numerous important details, having no explanation for this phenomenon, and being increasingly unable to decide which is true and which is imaginary:
In terms of the later fully developed alternate history genre, the basic premise can be described as two analogues of P. in two alternate timelines being able to communicate mentally and often share each other's consciousness.
The one in our history's 1845 is considered a madman, kept at the insistence of his relatives in a "little whitewashed, iron-grated room" somewhere in New England
, where he had been effectively incarcerated and being cared for by a keeper for several years already. His analogue is visiting London
and meeting with various VIP's in a different timeline's 1845 - where many prominent people had substantially different lives (and deaths) but the general political and social situation is the same (for example, both timelines have essentially the same Queen Victoria).
Hawthorne, however, did not yet possess any of the above terms - though he seems to have intuitively grasped many of the concepts involved. While some alternate history was written before the present story, this seems the first work in which two parallel realities are presented as co-existing and interacting with each other (though not physically).
The writer states in the preface: "Many of his [P.'s] letters are in my possession, some based upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise myself a pious pleasure in editing for the public eye."
This seems to indicate that Hawthorne considered writing further such stories, set in the same alternate reality and/or in a different one. Such additional stories were, however, never published.
poets and writers - who had long since died in our history but are still alive (though not necessarily well) in the other 1845. In contrast, there are also brief notices of the death there of people (Dickens, Longfellow
and several others) who were quite alive in the 1845 which we know, and long afterwards.
The point which Hawthorne tries to make becomes obvious quite soon, and is indeed stated explicitly towards the end of the story: "It may be as well that they have died.(...) The sad truth is that when fate would gently disappoint the world, it takes away the hopefulest mortals in their youth; when it would laugh the world's hopes to scorn, it lets them live." In short: it is better not to mourn too much the death in their prime of such poets as Lord Byron or Shelley
; had they lived, their subsequent careers might have proven unworthy or shameful.
The story begins with the alternate Lord Byron, who in this reality did not die at Missolonghi while joining the Greek War of Independence
, but returned to England
and underwent a total reversion: from a wild radical
to a staunch conservative
in politics, from one of the most sexually profligate people of his generation to a faithful husband and religious puritan
. In 1845 Byron, in his sixties, is monstrously fat, suffers from gout, and is busy re-writing and self-censoring his Don Juan
, expurgating everything which does not fit his new political and religious stance.
Shelley has gone through a similar change. The man who was expelled from Oxford University in 1811 for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism
has "become reconciled with the Anglican Church". More than that: Shelley became a clergyman himself, the bosom friend of the famous India missionary Dr. Reginald Heber
, and has just written a "volume of discourses treating of the poetico-philosophical proofs of Christianity on the basis of the Thirty-nine Articles
".
For a moment, P. recalls the other reality where Shelley died twenty-three years earlier: "Lost in the Bay of Spezzia, washed ashore near Via Reggio, and burned to ashes on a funeral pyre, with wine, and spices, and frankincense; while Byron stood on the beach and beheld a flame of marvellous beauty rise heavenward from the dead poet's heart, and his fire-purified relics were finally buried near his child in Roman earth" (and Byron himself died short afterwards). Plainly, Hawthorne felt all that to be a much more fitting end for Shelley - which among other things tells where Hawthorne himself stood on the political and religious issues involved.
Afterwards, a whole series of famous people from different walks of life appear one by one onstage, who in this reality outlived themselves and became decrepit or simply senile, and who obviously (in Hawthorne's depiction) would have better died when they did in our history.
First to be shown in such a light is the eighty-seven-year-old, white haired Robert Burns
- whose arrival on a rare visit to London is the occasion of a great celebration, but who is no longer capable of understanding even the words of his own Tam O' Shanter
.
Then the aged Napoleon Bonaparte is shown - fetched from St. Helena and walking uncomprehendingly in the streets of London
. He is accompanied everywhere by two policemen - not because he still poses any kind of threat, but just to prevent thieves from taking advantage of his condition and stealing the valuable star of the Legion of Honour which the ex-emperor is still wearing.
Former British Prime Minister
George Canning
still makes speeches in Parliament
, but "time blunts both point and edge, and does great mischief to men of his order of intellect" - and the agricultural reformer Cobbett
"looked as earthy as a real clodhopper, or rather as if he had lain a dozen years beneath the clods". The great Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean
still plays at Drury Lane
, but "his fame is scarcely traditional now. His powers are quite gone; he was rather the ghost of himself than the ghost of the Danish king."
A highly horrifying description is given of the senile and completely paralysed Sir Walter Scott:
The virtually only (partial) exception to Hawthorne's gloomy parade of ruined greatness: the longer-lived Keats of this timeline remains, like his younger self, a romantic poet and a romantic figure. Deeply hurt by the article in the Quarterly Review
which condemned his "Endymion
" (and which in the other reality helped bring about his death) Keats has ever since withdrawn from public life. Only occasionally is he seen gliding like a ghost around the streets of London, coughing blood and barely clinging to life.
He has published no more of his poetry, but to a small circle of close friends and admirers he has confided parts of an epic poem which he is writing, with a vast utopian vision of mankind's future. Hawthorne describes in considerable detail the vision of that poem, entitled "Paradise Regained
" (with a quite different sense than the Milton
poem of the same name).
Hawthorne closes, however, on a skeptical note: None but some admirers have heard this poem itself, Keats refuses to publish it on the plea that "the world is not ready", and possibly it is not all that good in reality.
as an example of Transatlantic Romanticism - i.e.
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
by the 19th century American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
writer Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...
, constituting a pioneering work of alternate history. Some consider it the very first such work in the English language (depending on whether or not Benjamin Disraeli's "Alroy" of 1833 is defined as being alternate history). In any case, it is certainly among the earliest works of this genre in any language and apparently the first to introduce some features which were to become an essential part of it.
It was first published in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review
The United States Magazine and Democratic Review
The United States Magazine and Democratic Review was a periodical published from 1837–1859 by John L. O'Sullivan. Its motto, "The best government is that which governs least," was famously paraphrased by Henry David Thoreau in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.-History:In 1837, O'Sullivan...
in April 1845 and collected with other Hawthorne stories (not of this genre) in "Mosses from an Old Manse
Mosses from an Old Manse
Mosses from an Old Manse was a short story collection by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 1846.-Background and publication history:...
" (1846).
The setting
The story uses the technique of the False documentFalse document
A false document is a literary technique employed to create verisimilitude in a work of fiction. By inventing and inserting documents that appear to be factual, an author tries to create a sense of authenticity beyond the normal and expected suspension of disbelief for a work of art...
, common in literature of the period. It purports to transcribe a letter written by a mentally-deranged friend of the writer, identified only by the initial "P." (supposedly to protect his privacy). As presented in the preface, the writer seems to share with the rest of the world the belief that his friend is indeed mad, and publishes the text as an act of kindness rather than out of believing in its veracity.
However, the text attributed to P. is far from looking like the ravings of a madman. Rather, it seems the product of a rational and sensitive mind placed in the impossible situation of simultaneously perceiving two realities which contradict each other in numerous important details, having no explanation for this phenomenon, and being increasingly unable to decide which is true and which is imaginary:
"More and more I recognize that we dwell in a world of shadows; and, for my part, I hold it hardly worth the trouble to attempt a distinction between shadows in the mind and shadows out of it. If there be any difference, the former are rather the more substantial."
In terms of the later fully developed alternate history genre, the basic premise can be described as two analogues of P. in two alternate timelines being able to communicate mentally and often share each other's consciousness.
The one in our history's 1845 is considered a madman, kept at the insistence of his relatives in a "little whitewashed, iron-grated room" somewhere in New England
New England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...
, where he had been effectively incarcerated and being cared for by a keeper for several years already. His analogue is visiting London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
and meeting with various VIP's in a different timeline's 1845 - where many prominent people had substantially different lives (and deaths) but the general political and social situation is the same (for example, both timelines have essentially the same Queen Victoria).
Hawthorne, however, did not yet possess any of the above terms - though he seems to have intuitively grasped many of the concepts involved. While some alternate history was written before the present story, this seems the first work in which two parallel realities are presented as co-existing and interacting with each other (though not physically).
The writer states in the preface: "Many of his [P.'s] letters are in my possession, some based upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise myself a pious pleasure in editing for the public eye."
This seems to indicate that Hawthorne considered writing further such stories, set in the same alternate reality and/or in a different one. Such additional stories were, however, never published.
The Decay of the Great
The story does not have a real plot, and essentially consists of a series of detailed descriptions of meetings which P. in the alternate London has with various famous people - mainly the great British RomanticRomantic poetry
Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era which began in the mid/late-1700s as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day , also influenced poetry...
poets and writers - who had long since died in our history but are still alive (though not necessarily well) in the other 1845. In contrast, there are also brief notices of the death there of people (Dickens, Longfellow
Longfellow
Longfellow may refer to:* Longfellow, Minneapolis, United States** Longfellow , Minneapolis, United States* Longfellow, Oakland, California, United States* Longfellow , one of America's first great thoroughbred racehorses...
and several others) who were quite alive in the 1845 which we know, and long afterwards.
The point which Hawthorne tries to make becomes obvious quite soon, and is indeed stated explicitly towards the end of the story: "It may be as well that they have died.(...) The sad truth is that when fate would gently disappoint the world, it takes away the hopefulest mortals in their youth; when it would laugh the world's hopes to scorn, it lets them live." In short: it is better not to mourn too much the death in their prime of such poets as Lord Byron or Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...
; had they lived, their subsequent careers might have proven unworthy or shameful.
The story begins with the alternate Lord Byron, who in this reality did not die at Missolonghi while joining the Greek War of Independence
Greek War of Independence
The Greek War of Independence, also known as the Greek Revolution was a successful war of independence waged by the Greek revolutionaries between...
, but returned to England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
and underwent a total reversion: from a wild radical
Radicalism (historical)
The term Radical was used during the late 18th century for proponents of the Radical Movement. It later became a general pejorative term for those favoring or seeking political reforms which include dramatic changes to the social order...
to a staunch conservative
Conservatism
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...
in politics, from one of the most sexually profligate people of his generation to a faithful husband and religious puritan
Puritan
The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...
. In 1845 Byron, in his sixties, is monstrously fat, suffers from gout, and is busy re-writing and self-censoring his Don Juan
Don Juan (Byron)
Don Juan is a satiric poem by Lord Byron, based on the legend of Don Juan, which Byron reverses, portraying Juan not as a womanizer but as someone easily seduced by women. It is a variation on the epic form. Byron himself called it an "Epic Satire"...
, expurgating everything which does not fit his new political and religious stance.
Shelley has gone through a similar change. The man who was expelled from Oxford University in 1811 for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism
The Necessity of Atheism
The Necessity of Atheism is a treatise on atheism by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, printed in 1811 by C. and W. Phillips in Worthing while he was a student at University College, Oxford. A copy of the first version was sent as a short tract signed enigmatically to all heads of Oxford...
has "become reconciled with the Anglican Church". More than that: Shelley became a clergyman himself, the bosom friend of the famous India missionary Dr. Reginald Heber
Reginald Heber
Reginald Heber was the Church of England's Bishop of Calcutta who is now remembered chiefly as a hymn-writer.-Life:Heber was born at Malpas in Cheshire...
, and has just written a "volume of discourses treating of the poetico-philosophical proofs of Christianity on the basis of the Thirty-nine Articles
Thirty-Nine Articles
The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion are the historically defining statements of doctrines of the Anglican church with respect to the controversies of the English Reformation. First established in 1563, the articles served to define the doctrine of the nascent Church of England as it related to...
".
For a moment, P. recalls the other reality where Shelley died twenty-three years earlier: "Lost in the Bay of Spezzia, washed ashore near Via Reggio, and burned to ashes on a funeral pyre, with wine, and spices, and frankincense; while Byron stood on the beach and beheld a flame of marvellous beauty rise heavenward from the dead poet's heart, and his fire-purified relics were finally buried near his child in Roman earth" (and Byron himself died short afterwards). Plainly, Hawthorne felt all that to be a much more fitting end for Shelley - which among other things tells where Hawthorne himself stood on the political and religious issues involved.
Afterwards, a whole series of famous people from different walks of life appear one by one onstage, who in this reality outlived themselves and became decrepit or simply senile, and who obviously (in Hawthorne's depiction) would have better died when they did in our history.
First to be shown in such a light is the eighty-seven-year-old, white haired Robert Burns
Robert Burns
Robert Burns was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide...
- whose arrival on a rare visit to London is the occasion of a great celebration, but who is no longer capable of understanding even the words of his own Tam O' Shanter
Tam o' Shanter (Burns poem)
"Tam o' Shanter" is a poem written by the Scottish poet Robert Burns in 1790. Many consider it to be one of the best examples of the narrative poem in modern European literature....
.
Then the aged Napoleon Bonaparte is shown - fetched from St. Helena and walking uncomprehendingly in the streets of London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. He is accompanied everywhere by two policemen - not because he still poses any kind of threat, but just to prevent thieves from taking advantage of his condition and stealing the valuable star of the Legion of Honour which the ex-emperor is still wearing.
Former British Prime Minister
Prime minister
A prime minister is the most senior minister of cabinet in the executive branch of government in a parliamentary system. In many systems, the prime minister selects and may dismiss other members of the cabinet, and allocates posts to members within the government. In most systems, the prime...
George Canning
George Canning
George Canning PC, FRS was a British statesman and politician who served as Foreign Secretary and briefly Prime Minister.-Early life: 1770–1793:...
still makes speeches in Parliament
Parliament of the United Kingdom
The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the supreme legislative body in the United Kingdom, British Crown dependencies and British overseas territories, located in London...
, but "time blunts both point and edge, and does great mischief to men of his order of intellect" - and the agricultural reformer Cobbett
William Cobbett
William Cobbett was an English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist, who was born in Farnham, Surrey. He believed that reforming Parliament and abolishing the rotten boroughs would help to end the poverty of farm labourers, and he attacked the borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" relentlessly...
"looked as earthy as a real clodhopper, or rather as if he had lain a dozen years beneath the clods". The great Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean
Edmund Kean
Edmund Kean was an English actor, regarded in his time as the greatest ever.-Early life:Kean was born in London. His father was probably Edmund Kean, an architect’s clerk, and his mother was an actress, Anne Carey, daughter of the 18th century composer and playwright Henry Carey...
still plays at Drury Lane
Drury Lane
Drury Lane is a street on the eastern boundary of the Covent Garden area of London, running between Aldwych and High Holborn. The northern part is in the borough of Camden and the southern part in the City of Westminster....
, but "his fame is scarcely traditional now. His powers are quite gone; he was rather the ghost of himself than the ghost of the Danish king."
A highly horrifying description is given of the senile and completely paralysed Sir Walter Scott:
"There he reclines, on a couch in his library, spending whole hours of every day in dictating tales to an amanuensis,- to an imaginary amanuensis; for it is not deemed worth any one's trouble now to take down what flows from that once brilliant fancy, every image of which was formerly worth gold and capable of being coined. (...) Now and then [there is] a touch of the genius - a striking combination of incident, or a picturesque trait of character, such as no other man alive could have bit off - a glimmer from that ruined mind, as if the sun had suddenly flashed on a half-rusted helmet in the gloom of an ancient ball. But the plots of these romances become inextricably confused; the characters melt into one another; and the tale loses itself like the course of a stream flowing through muddy and marshy ground".
The virtually only (partial) exception to Hawthorne's gloomy parade of ruined greatness: the longer-lived Keats of this timeline remains, like his younger self, a romantic poet and a romantic figure. Deeply hurt by the article in the Quarterly Review
Quarterly Review
The Quarterly Review was a literary and political periodical founded in March 1809 by the well known London publishing house John Murray. It ceased publication in 1967.-Early years:...
which condemned his "Endymion
Endymion (poem)
Endymion is a poem by John Keats first published in 1818. Beginning famously with the line "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever", Endymion, like many epic poems in English , is written in rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter...
" (and which in the other reality helped bring about his death) Keats has ever since withdrawn from public life. Only occasionally is he seen gliding like a ghost around the streets of London, coughing blood and barely clinging to life.
He has published no more of his poetry, but to a small circle of close friends and admirers he has confided parts of an epic poem which he is writing, with a vast utopian vision of mankind's future. Hawthorne describes in considerable detail the vision of that poem, entitled "Paradise Regained
Paradise Regained
Paradise Regained is a poem by the English poet John Milton, published in 1671. It is connected by name to his earlier and more famous epic poem Paradise Lost, with which it shares similar theological themes...
" (with a quite different sense than the Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
poem of the same name).
"Keats has thrown his poem forward into an indefinitely remote futurity. He pictures mankind amid the closing circumstances of the time-long warfare between good and evil. Our race is on the eve of its final triumph. Man is within the last stride of perfection; Woman, redeemed from the thralldom against which our sibyl uplifts so powerful and so sad a remonstrance, stands equal by his side or communes for herself with angels; the Earth, sympathizing with her children's happier state, has clothed herself in such luxuriant and loving beauty as no eye ever witnessed since our first parents saw the sun rise over dewy Eden. Nor then indeed; for this is the fulfillment of what was then but a golden promise. But the picture has its shadows. There remains to mankind another peril,- a last encounter with the evil principle. Should the battle go against us, we sink back into the slime and misery of ages. If we triumph-But it demands a poet's eye to contemplate the splendor of such a consummation and not to be dazzled."
Hawthorne closes, however, on a skeptical note: None but some admirers have heard this poem itself, Keats refuses to publish it on the plea that "the world is not ready", and possibly it is not all that good in reality.
An example of "Transatlantic Romanticism"
"P.'s Correspondence" is a story written by an American, set mostly in England, dealing mainly with famous romantic poets and writers and having the conspicuous point that it is better to be cut off in one's prime than live to an unworthy old age. As such, it was cited by Prof. William Keach of Brown UniversityBrown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
as an example of Transatlantic Romanticism - i.e.
"Literature in English produced between the American Revolution (1775-83) and the American Civil War (1861-65) [which] was part of a complex transatlantic culture of writing, publication, textual transmission, and influence [and which included], for example, literary texts written in Boston and published in London, texts published almost simultaneously in London and New York, texts that explicitly represented these very processes of culture connection. (...) Influences moved both ways across the Atlantic, [constituting] the cultural dialogue and material interactions between British and American writing" (March 2008 seminar on Transnational Romnaticism, as a guest lecturer at the University of MacerataUniversity of MacerataThe University of Macerata is a university located in Macerata, Italy. It was founded in 1290 and is organized in 7 Faculties.-Organization:These are the 7 faculties in which the university is divided into:* Faculty of Communication Sciences...
, Italy http://www.unimc.it/ateneo/canali-informativi/contenitore-eventi-2008/080513corsoecctransnationalromanticism2.doc ).
Significant points
- P.'s fictional letter to Hawthorne ends with "Good by! Are you alive or dead? and what are you about? Still scribbling for the Democratic? And do those infernal compositors and proof-readers misprint your unfortunate productions as vilely as ever? It is too bad." It was these compositors and proof-readers who had to deal with this story itself, in its first appearance on the pages of the "Democratic Review".
- P.'s letter is dated "London, February 29, 1845". However, 1845 was not a leap yearLeap yearA leap year is a year containing one extra day in order to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical or seasonal year...
, so there was not such a day (at least, not in our reality's timeline). - At the very end of his story, Hawthorne makes an intriguing short reference to "an epic on the war between MexicoMexicoThe United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
and TexasTexasTexas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
" attributed to this reality's Joel BarlowJoel BarlowJoel Barlow was an American poet, diplomat and politician. In his own time, Barlow was well-known for the epic Vision of Columbus. Modern readers may be more familiar with "The Hasty Pudding"...
, in which war "machinery contrived on the principle of the steam-engine" is used. This seems an early premonition of mechanized warfareMechanized WarfareMechanized Warfare is the sixth studio album released by American power metal band Jag Panzer, released in 2001. This album is more progressive than the band's previous work...
, or perhaps even of the invention of the tankTankA tank is a tracked, armoured fighting vehicle designed for front-line combat which combines operational mobility, tactical offensive, and defensive capabilities...
. - The story was written when the annexation of Texas to the US, which was to precipitate in the following year the U.S.-Mexican War, was already high on the US public agenda. The war referred to might be either the future war whose outbreak was clearly foreseeable, or a different version of the 1836 war.
- In a sense, Hawthorne seems to have anticipated George OrwellGeorge OrwellEric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
: "Byron is preparing a new edition of his complete works, carefully corrected, expurgated, and amended, in accordance with his present creed of taste, morals, politics, and religion. (...) Whatever is licentious, whatever disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our faith, whatever morbidly melancholic or splenetically sportive, whatever assails settled constitutions of government or systems of society, whatever could wound the sensibility of any mortal, except a pagan, a republican, or a dissenter, has been unrelentingly blotted out, and its place supplied by unexceptionable verses in his lordship's later style." This description seems strikingly similar to the way Nineteen Eighty Four describes the treatment meted out to Byron's poetry - as well as to those of Chaucer, Shakespeare, MiltonJohn MiltonJohn Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
and Kipling - in the preparation of "definitive editions" fitting with the Party's ideology. Orwell was an omnivorous reader, and was interested in American writers, but there is no direct evidence that he ever read Hawthorne's story or that it influenced his own book.