A Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne --

Having Little or Nothing to Do With the Grimshaw Family

Image of Hawthorne from 1870 - several years after he wrote Doctor Grimshawe's Secret

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Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret in 1861, but he never considered the work finished and did not publish it before his death. It was published posthumously in 1883, by Hawthorne’s son, Julian. Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret, according to literature historians, contains more autobiographical material than any of Hawthorne's other writings. One of the principal topics is Hawthorne’s unresolved feelings about his childhood guardian, whose character is represented by Dr. Grimshawe, a spider-cultivating eccentric. The central motif (i.e., the "secret") of the book is an all-encompassing spider web.

The Grimshawe name, probably learned when Hawthorne spent extensive time in England (he was the American consul in Liverpool for four years), was apparently picked because he felt that it fit the grim and foreboding character of the central character (i.e., Hawthorne’s guardian.) Thus neither the name nor the novel appear to have anything to do with members of the Grimshaw family.

Webpage Credit

Cover and Title Page

Drawing of Doctor Grimshaw and Children

Hawthorne's Handwriting of a Sample from the Book

Biographical Summary of Nathaniel Hawthorne

The First Chapter of "Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret

Gloria Erlich’s Interpretive Analysis

Where was Hawthorne Born?

Peabody House (aka Grimshawe House) - Setting for Doctor Grimshawe's Secret

Where is Grimshawe House Located?

Chapters Two and Three of Doctor Grimshawe's Secret

References

Thanks go to the staff in the Special Collections Department of the Marriott Library, the University of Utah, for making the original 1883 edition of Doctor Grimshawe's Secret available for study and for scanning of the cover and title page.

The original published version of Doctor Grimshawe's Secret¹ (1883) has fascinating images both on the book cover and the title page. Both are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Cover and title page from Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, showing images depicting the central themes of the book.

A subsequent publication of Doctor Grimshawe's Secret², in 1890, included an interesting drawing of the main characters -- the good doctor and the two children, Elsie and Ned -- who were the main characters, as frontispiece (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Drawing of Doctor Grimshaw and the two children, the three main characters of the book.

The 1890 edition of the book also included in the Preface a sample of the handwritten text from Hawthorne's manuscript for Doctor Grimshawe's Secret. This four-page sample is shown in Figure 3 below.

Figure 3. Sample pages of the original manuscript of "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret"

The photo of Hawthorne at the top of this webpage, taken in 1870, is from Hoeltje³. Another photo, taken eight years earlier, is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Photo of Hawthorne in 1862, the year after he wrote Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret.

A brief, concise biography of Hawthorne is provided by Encyclopedia Brittanica Online⁴ -- it is provided below.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

American novelist and short-story writer who was a master of the allegorical and symbolic tale. One of the greatest fiction writers in American literature, he is best-known for The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Born July 4, 1804 , Salem, Mass., U.S.; Died May 19, 1864, Plymouth, N.H.

Early years.

Hawthorne's ancestors had lived in Salem since the 17th century. His earliest American ancestor, William Hathorne (Nathaniel added the w to the name when he began to write), was a magistrate who had sentenced a Quaker woman to public whipping. He had acted as a staunch defender of Puritan orthodoxy, with its zealous advocacy of a "pure," unaffected form of religious worship, its rigid adherence to a simple, almost severe, mode of life, and its conviction of the "natural depravity" of "fallen" man. Hawthorne was later to wonder whether the decline of his family's prosperity and prominence during the 18th century, while other Salem families were growing wealthy from the lucrative shipping trade, might not be a retribution for this act and for the role of William's son John as one of three judges in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. When Nathaniel's father —a ship's captain — died during one of his voyages, he left his young widow without means to care for her two girls and young Nathaniel, aged four. She moved in with her affluent brothers, the Mannings. Hawthorne grew up in their house in Salem and, for extensive periods during his teens, in Raymond, Maine, on the shores of Sebago Lake. He returned to Salem in 1825 after four years at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. Hawthorne did not distinguish himself as a young man. Instead, he spent nearly a dozen years reading and trying to master the art of writing fiction.

First works.

In college Hawthorne had excelled only in composition and had determined to become a writer. Upon graduation, he had written an amateurish novel, Fanshawe, which he published at his own expense—only to decide that it was unworthy of him and to try to destroy all copies. Hawthorne, however, soon found his own voice, style, and subjects, and within five years of his graduation he had published such impressive and distinctive stories as "The Hollow of the Three Hills" and "An Old Woman's Tale." By 1832, "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" and "Roger Malvin's Burial," two of his greatest tales—and among the finest in the language—had appeared. "Young Goodman Brown," perhaps the greatest tale of witchcraft ever written, appeared in 1835.

His increasing success in placing his stories brought him a little fame. Unwilling to depend any longer on his uncles' generosity, he turned to a job in the Boston Custom House (1839–40) and for six months in 1841 was a resident at the agricultural cooperative Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, Mass. Even when his first signed book, Twice-Told Tales, was published in 1837, the work had brought gratifying recognition but no dependable income. By 1842, however, Hawthorne's writing had brought him a sufficient income to allow him to marry Sophia Peabody; the couple rented the Old Manse in Concord and began a happy three-year period that Hawthorne would later record in his essay "The Old Manse."

The presence of some of the leading social thinkers and philosophers of his day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, in Concord made the village the centre of the philosophy of Transcendentalism, which encouraged man to transcend the materialistic world of experience and facts and become conscious of the pervading spirit of the universe and the potentialities for human freedom. Hawthorne welcomed the companionship of his Transcendentalist neighbours, but he had little to say to them. Artists and intellectuals never inspired his full confidence, but he thoroughly enjoyed the visit of his old college friend and classmate Franklin Pierce, later to become president of the United States. At the Old Manse, Hawthorne continued to write stories, with the same result as before: literary success, monetary failure. His new short-story collection, Mosses from an Old Manse, appeared in 1846.

Mature novels.

A growing family and mounting debts compelled the Hawthornes' return in 1845 to Salem, where Nathaniel was appointed surveyor of the Custom House by the Polk administration (Hawthorne had always been a loyal Democrat and pulled all the political strings he could to get this appointment). Three years later the presidential election brought the Whigs into power under Zachary Taylor, and Hawthorne lost his job; but in a few months of concentrated effort, he produced his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter. The bitterness he felt over his dismissal is apparent in "The Custom House" essay prefixed to the novel. The Scarlet Letter tells the story of two lovers kept apart by the ironies of fate, their own mingled strengths and weaknesses, and the Puritan community's interpretation of moral law, until at last death unites them under a single headstone. The book made Hawthorne famous and was eventually recognized as one of the greatest of American novels.

Determined to leave Salem forever, Hawthorne moved to Lenox, located in the mountain scenery of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. There he began work on The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the story of the Pyncheon family, who for generations had lived under a curse until it was removed at last by love.

At Lenox he enjoyed the stimulating friendship of Herman Melville, who lived in nearby Pittsfield. This friendship, although important for the younger writer and his work, was much less so for Hawthorne. Melville praised Hawthorne extravagantly in a review of his Mosses from an Old Manse, and he also dedicated Moby Dick to Hawthorne. But eventually Melville came to feel that the friendship he so ardently pursued was one-sided. Later he was to picture the relationship with disillusion in his introductory sketch to The Piazza Tales and depicted Hawthorne himself unflatteringly as "Vine" in his long poem Clarel.

In the autumn of 1851 Hawthorne moved his family to another temporary residence, this time in West Newton, near Boston. There he quickly wrote The Blithedale Romance, which was based on his disenchantment with Brook Farm. Then he purchased and redecorated Bronson Alcott's house in Concord, the Wayside. Blithedale was disappointingly received and did not produce the income Hawthorne had expected. He was hoping for a lucrative political appointment that would bolster his finances; in the meantime, he wrote a campaign biography of his old friend Franklin Pierce. When Pierce won the presidency, Hawthorne was in 1853 rewarded with the consulship in Liverpool, Lancashire, a position he hoped would enable him in a few years to leave his family financially secure.

Last years.

The remaining 11 years of Hawthorne's life were, from a creative point of view, largely anticlimactic. He performed his consular duties faithfully and effectively until his position was terminated in 1857, and then he spent a year and a half sight-seeing in Italy. Determined to produce yet another romance, he finally retreated to a seaside town in England and quickly produced The Marble Faun. In writing it, he drew heavily upon the experiences and impressions he had recorded in a notebook kept during his Italian tour to give substance to an allegory of the Fall of man, a theme that had usually been assumed in his earlier works but that now received direct and philosophic treatment.

Back in the Wayside once more in 1860, Hawthorne devoted himself entirely to his writing but was unable to make any progress with his plans for a new novel. The drafts of unfinished works he left are mostly incoherent and show many signs of a psychic regression, already foreshadowed by his increasing restlessness and discontent of the preceding half dozen years. Some two years before his death he began to age very suddenly. His hair turned white, his handwriting changed, he suffered frequent nosebleeds, and he took to writing the figure "64" compulsively on scraps of paper. He died in his sleep on a trip in search of health with his friend Pierce.

Works.

The main character of The Scarlet Letter is Hester Prynne, a young married woman who has borne an illegitimate child while living away from her husband in a village in Puritan New England. The husband, Roger Chillingworth, arrives in New England to find his wife pilloried and made to wear the letter A (meaning adulteress) in scarlet on her dress as a punishment for her illicit affair and for her refusal to reveal the name of the child's father. Chillingworth becomes obsessed with finding the identity of his wife's former lover. He learns that Hester's paramour is a saintly young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth then proceeds to revenge himself by mentally tormenting the guilt-stricken young man. Hester herself is revealed to be a compassionate and splendidly self-reliant heroine who is never truly repentant for the act of adultery committed with the minister; she feels that their act was consecrated by their deep love for each other. In the end Chillingworth is morally degraded by his monomaniac pursuit of revenge, and Dimmesdale is broken by his own sense of guilt and publicly confesses his adultery before dying in Hester's arms. Only Hester can face the future optimistically, as she plans to ensure the future of her beloved little girl by taking her to Europe.

The House of the Seven Gables is a sombre study in hereditary sin based on the legend of a curse pronounced on Hawthorne's own family by a woman condemned to death during the witchcraft trials. The greed and arrogant pride of the novel's Pyncheon family down the generations is mirrored in the gloomy decay of their seven-gabled mansion, in which the family's enfeebled and impoverished poor relations live. At the book's end the descendant of a family long ago defrauded by the Pyncheons lifts his ancestors' curse on the mansion and marries a young niece of the family.

In The Marble Faun a trio of expatriate American art students in Italy become peripherally involved to varying degrees in the murder of an unknown man; their contact with sin transforms two of them from innocents into adults now possessed of a mature and critical awareness of life's complexity and possibilities.

Hawthorne's high rank among American fiction writers is the result of at least three considerations. First, he was a skillful craftsman with an impressive arthitectonic sense of form. The structure of The Scarlet Letter, for example, is so tightly integrated that no chapter, no paragraph, even, could be omitted without doing violence to the whole. The book's four characters are inextricably bound together in the tangled web of a life situation that seems to have no solution, and the tightly woven plot has a unity of action that rises slowly but inexorably to the climactic scene of Dimmesdale's public confession. The same tight construction is found in Hawthorne's other writings also, especially in the shorter pieces, or "tales." Hawthorne was also the master of a classic literary style that is remarkable for its directness, its clarity, its firmness, and its sureness of idiom.

A second reason for Hawthorne's greatness is his moral insight. He inherited the Puritan tradition of moral earnestness, and he was deeply concerned with the concepts of original sin and guilt and the claims of law and conscience. Hawthorne rejected what he saw as the Transcendentalists' transparent optimism about the potentialities of human nature. Instead he looked more deeply and perhaps more honestly into life, finding in it much suffering and conflict but also finding the redeeming power of love. There is no Romantic escape in his works, but rather a firm and resolute scrutiny of the psychological and moral facts of the human condition.

A third reason for Hawthorne's eminence is his mastery of allegory and symbolism. His fictional characters' actions and dilemmas fairly obviously express larger generalizations about the problems of human existence. But with Hawthorne this leads not to unconvincing pasteboard figures with explanatory labels attached but to a sombre, concentrated emotional involvement with his characters that has the power, the gravity, and the inevitability of true tragedy. His use of symbolism in The Scarlet Letter is particularly effective, and the scarlet letter itself takes on a wider significance and application that is out of all proportion to its literal character as a scrap of cloth.

Works.

Hawthorne's work initiated the most durable tradition in American fiction, that of the symbolic romance that assumes the universality of guilt and explores the complexities and ambiguities of man's choices. His greatest short stories and The Scarlet Letter are marked by a depth of psychological and moral insight seldom equaled and never surpassed by any American writer.

Major Works:

Novels. Fanshawe, a Tale (1828); The Scarlet Letter (1850); The House of the Seven Gables (1851); The Blithedale Romance (1852); The Marble Faun: Or, the Romance of Monte Beni (British title, Transformation, 1860). (Unfinished novels): Septimius Felton (1872); The Dolliver Romance, and Other Pieces (1876); Doctor Grimshawe's Secret (1883); The Ancestral Footstep (1883). Stories. Twice-Told Tales, including "The Gray Champion," "The Gentle Boy," "A Rill from the Town Pump," "The Great Carbuncle," "Sights from a Steeple," and "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" (1837); 2nd enl. ed., including also "The Celestial Railroad" (1842); Mosses from an Old Manse (1846); The Snow-Image, and Other Tales (1851; also published as The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales, 1852). (Stories for Children): Grandfather's Chair (1841); Famous Old People (1841); Liberty Tree (1841); Biographical Stories for Children (1842); A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1851); Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys (1853). Biography. Life of Franklin Pierce (1852). Autobiographical. Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches (1863); Passages from the American Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1868); Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1870); Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1871).

The text of the first chapter of Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret (original 1883 edition published by Julian Hawthorne) is provided below to demonstrate Hawthorne's style and his character development of the grim Doctor Grimshawe. Two additional chapters are provided near the bottom of the webpage.

CHAPTER I

A long time ago, in a town with which I used to be familiarly acquainted, there dwelt an elderly person of grim aspect known by the name and title of Doctor Grimshawe, whose household consisted of a remarkably pretty and vivacious boy, and a perfect rosebud of a girl, two or three years younger than he, and an old maid-of-all-work, of strangely mixed breed, crusty in temper and wonderfully sluttish in attire. It might be partly owing to this handmaiden's characteristic lack of neatness (though, primarily, no doubt) to the grim Doctor's antipathy to broom, brush, and dusting-cloth) that the house - at least, in such portions of it as any casual visitor caught a glimpse of - was so overlaid with dust, that, in lack of a visiting card you might write your name with forefinger upon the tables; and so hung with cobwebs that they assumed the appearance of dusky upholstery.

It grieves me to add an additional touch or two to the reader's disagreeable impression of Doctor Grimshawe's residence, by confessing that it stood in a shabby by-street, and cornered on a grave-yard, with which the house communicated by a back door; so that with a hop, skip, and jump, from the threshold across a flat tombstone, the two children were in the daily habit of using the dismal cemetery as their play-ground. In their graver moods, they spelled out the names and learned by heart doleful verses on the headstones; and in their merrier ones (which were much the more frequent) they chased butterflies, and gathered played hide and seek behind the slate and marble, and tumbled laughing over the grassy mounds which were too eminent for the short legs to bestride. On the whole, they were the better for the grave yard, and its legitimate inmates slept none the worse for the two children's gambols and shrill merriment overhead. Here were old brick tombs with curious sculptures on them, and quaint gravestones, some of which bore puffy little cherubs, and one or two others the effigies of eminent Puritans, wrought out to a button, a fold of the ruf, and a wrinkle of the skull-cap; and these frowned upon the two children as if death had not made them a whit more genial than they were in life. But the children were of a temper to be more encouraged by the good-natured smiles of the puffy cherubs, than frightened or disturbed by the sour Puritans.

Drawing of Graveyard from 1890 Edition of Dr. Grimshawe's Secret

This grave yard (about which we shall say not a word more than may sooner or later be needful) was the most ancient in the town. The clay of the original settlers had been incorporated with the soil; those stalwart Englishmen of the Puritan epoch, whose immediate ancestors had been planted forth with succulent grass and daisies for the sustenance of the parson's cow, round the low battlemented Norman church towers in the villages of the father-land, had here contributed their rich Saxon mould to tame and Christianize the wild forest earth of the new world. In this point of view - as holding the bones and dust of the primeval ancestors – the cemetery was more English than anything else in the neighborhood, and might probably have nourished English oaks and English elms, and whatever else is of English growth, without that tendency to spindle upward and lose their sturdy breadth, which it is said to be the ordinary characteristic both of human and vegetable growth, productions, when transplanted hither. Here, at all events, used to be some specimens of common English garden flowers, which could not be accounted for – unless, perhaps, they had sprung up from some English maiden's heart, where the intense love of those homely things, and regret of them in this foreign land, had conspired together to keep their vivifying principle, and cause its growth after the poor girl was buried. Be that as it might, in this grave had been hidden from sight many a broad, bluff visage of husbandmen, who had been taught to plough among the hereditary furrows that had been ameliorated by the crumble of age: much had these sturdy laborers grumbled at the great roots that obstructed their toil in these fresh acres. Here, too, the sods had covered the faces of men known to history, and reverenced when not a piece of distinguishable dust remained of them; personages whom tradition told about; there, mixed up with successive crops of native-born Americans, had been ministers, captains, matrons, virgins good and evil, tough and tender, turned up and battened down by the sexton's spade, over and over again; until every blade of grass bad its relations with the human brotherhood of that old town. A hundred and fifty years was sufficient to do this; and so much time, at least had elapsed since the first hole was dug among the difficult roots of the forest trees, and the first little hillock of all these green beds was piled up.

Thus rippled and surged, with its hundreds of little billows, the old grave yard about the house which cornered upon it; it made the street gloomy, so that people did not altogether like to pass along the high wooden fence that shut it in; and the old house itself, covering ground which else had been sown thickly with buried bodies, partook of its dreariness, because it seemed hardly possible that the dead people should not get up out their graves, and steal in to warm themselves at the convenient fireside. But I never heard that any of them did so; nor were the children ever startled by spectacles of dim horror in the night-time, but were as cheerful and fearless as if no grave had ever yet been dug. They were of that class of children whose material seems fresh, not taken at second hand, full of disease, conceits, whims, weaknesses, that have already served many people's turns, and moulded up, with some little change of combination, to serve the turn of some poor spirit that could not get a better case.

So far as ever came to the present writer's knowledge, there was no whisper of Doctor Grimshawe’s house being haunted; a fact on which both writer and reader may congratulate themselves, the ghostly chord having been played upon, in these days, until it has become as wearisome and nauseous as the familiar tune of a barrel organ. The house itself, moreover, except for the convenience of its position, close to the seldom disturbed cemetery, was hardly worthy to be haunted. As I remember it (and, for aught I know, it still exists in the same guise) it did not appear to be an ancient structure, nor one that could ever have been the abode of a very wealthy or prominent family – a three-story wooden house perhaps a century old, low studded, with a square front, standing right upon the street, and a small enclosed porch, containing the main entrance affording a glimpse up and down the street through an oval window on each side, its characteristic was a decent respectability, not sinking below the boundary of the genteel. It has often perplexed my mind to conjecture what sort of man he could have been who, having the means to build a pretty spacious and comfortable residence, should have chosen to lay its foundation on the brink of so many graves; each tenant of these narrow houses crying out, as it were, against the absurdity of bestowing much time or pains in preparing any earthly tabernacle save such as theirs. But deceased people see matters from an erroneous – at least a too exclusive – point of view; a comfortable grave is an excellent possession for those who need it but a comfortable house has likewise its merits and temporary advantages.

The founder of the abode house in question seemed sensible of this truth, and had therefore been careful to lay out a sufficient number of rooms and chambers, low, ill-lighted, ugly, but not unsusceptible of warmth and comfort; the sunniest and cheerfulest of which were on the side that looked into the grave yard. Of these, the one most spacious and convenient had been selected by Doctor Grimshawe as a study, and fitted up with book shelves, and various machines and contrivances, electrical, chemical, and distillatory, wherewith he might pursue such researches as were wont to engage his attention. The great result of the grim Doctor's labors, so far as known to the public, was a certain preparation or extract of cobwebs which, out of a great abundance of material, he was able to produce in any desirable quantity by the administration of which he professed to cure diseases of the inflammatory class and to work very wonderful effects upon the human systems. It is a great pity for the good of mankind, and the advantages of his own fortunes, that he did not put forth this medicine in pill-boxes or bottles, and then, as it were, by some captivating title, inveigle the public into his spider's web, and suck out its golden substance, and himself wax fat in the central intricacy.

But grim Doctor Grimshawe, though his aim in life might be no very exalted one, seemed singularly destitute of the impulse to better his fortunes by the exercise of his wits: it might even have been supposed indeed that he had a conscientious principle, or religious scruple – only, he was by no means a religious man – against reaping profit from this particular nostrum which he was said to have invented. He never sold it; never prescribed it, unless in cases selected upon some principle that nobody could detect or explain. The grim Doctor, it must be observed, was not generally acknowledged by the profession, with whom, in truth, he had never claimed a fellowship; nor had ever assumed, of his own accord, the medical title by which the public chose to know him. His professional practice seemed, in a sort, forced upon him; it grew pretty extensive, partly because it was understood to be a matter of favor and difficulty, dependent on a capricious will, to obtain his services at all. There was unquestionably an odor of quackery about him; but by no means of an ordinary kind. A sort of mystery – yet which, perhaps, need not have been a mystery, bad anyone thought it worth while to make systematic inquiry – in reference to his previous life, his education, even his native land – assisted the impression which his peculiarities were calculated to make. He was evidently not a New Englander, nor a native of any part of these Western shores. His speech was apt to be oddly and uncouthly idiomatic, and even when classical in its form, was emitted with a strange, rough depth of utterance, that came from recesses of the lungs which we Yankees seldom put to any use. In person, he did not look like one of us; a broad, rather short personage, with a projecting forehead, red irregular face, and a squab nose; eyes that looked a dull enough in their ordinary state, but had a faculty, in conjunction with the other features, which those who had ever seen it described as especially ugly and awful. As regarded dress, Doctor Grimshawe had a rough and careless exterior, and altogether a shaggy kind of aspect, the effect of which was much increased by a reddish beard, which, contrary to the custom of the day, he allowed to grow profusely; and the wiry perversity of which seemed to know as little of the comb as of the razor.

We began with calling the grim Doctor an elderly personage; but, in so doing, we looked at him through the eyes of the two children who were his intimates, and who had not learnt to decipher the purport and value of his wrinkles nd furrows and corrugations whether as indicating age or a different kind of wear and tear. Possibly – he appeared so vigorous, and had such latent heat and fire to throw out when occasions called, he might scarcely have seen middle aged; though here again we hesitate, finding him so stiffened into his own way, so little fluid, so encrusted with passions and humors, that he must have left his youth very far behind him; if indeed, he ever had any.

The patients, or whatever other visitors were ever admitted into the Doctor's study, carried abroad strange accounts of the squalor of dust and cobwebs in which the learned and scientific person lived; and the dust, they averred, was all the more disagreeable because it could not well be other than dead men's intangible atoms, resurrected from the adjoining grave-yard. As for the cobwebs, they were no tokens of housewifely neglect on the part of crusty Hannah, the handmaiden but the Doctor's scientific material, carefully encouraged and preserved, each filmy thread more valuable to him than so much golden wire. Of all barbarous haunts in Christendom or elsewhere, this study was the one most overrun with spiders. They dangled from the ceiling, crept upon the tables, lurked in the corners, and wove the intricacy of their webs from point to point across the window panes, and even across the upper part of the doorway, and in the chimney-place. It seemed impossible to move without breaking some of these mystic threads. Spiders crept familiarly towards you, and walked leisurely across your hands; these were their precincts, and you only an intruder. If you saw none about your person, yet you had an odious sense of one crawling up your spine, or spinning cobwebs in your brain, - so pervaded was the atmosphere of this place with spiderlife. What they fed upon (for all the flies for miles roundabout would not have sufficed them) was a secret known only to the Doctor. Whence they came was another riddle; though, from certain inquiries and transactions of Doctor Grimshawe’s with some of the shipmasters of the port, who followed the East or West Indian, the African, or the South American trade, it was supposed that this odd philosopher was in the habit of importing choice monstrosities in the spider kind from all those tropic regions.

All the above description, exaggerated as it may seem, is merely preliminary to the introduction of one single, enormous spider, the biggest and the ugliest ever seen, the pride of the grim Doctor's heart, his treasure, his glory, the pearl of his soul, and, as many people said, the demon to whom he had sold his salvation, on condition of possessing the web of the foul creature for a certain number of years. The grim Doctor, according to this theory, was but a great fly which this spider had subtly entangled in his web. But, in truth, naturalists are acquainted with this spider, though it be a rare one; the British Museum has a specimen, and, doubtless, so have many other scientific institutions. It is found in South America, its most hideous spread of legs covering a space nearly as large as a dinner-plate, and radiating from a body as big as a door knob, which one conceives to be an agglomeration of sucked up poison, which the creature treasures through life, probably, to expend it all, and life itself, on some worthy foe. Its colors were variegated in a sort of ugly and inauspicious splendor, were distributed over its vast bulb in great spots, some of which glistened like gems. It was a horror to think of this thing living; still more a horror to think of the foul catastrophe, the crushed out and wasted poison, that would follow the casual setting a foot upon it.

No doubt, the lapse of time, since the Doctor and his spider lived, has already been sufficient to cause a traditionary wonderment to gather over them both; and especially this image of a spider dangles down to us from the dusky ceiling of the Past, swollen into somewhat huger and uglier monstrosity than he actually possessed, Nevertheless, the creature had a real existence, and has left kindred like himself; and as for the Doctor, nothing could exceed the value which he seemed to put upon him, the sacrifices which he made for the creature's convenience, or the readiness with which he adapted his whole mode of life, apparently, so that the spider might enjoy the conditions best suited to his tastes, habits, health. And yet there were sometimes tokens that made people imagine that he hated the infernal creature as much as everybody else who caught a glimpse of him.

(From the title page of the original published edition of Doctor Grimshawe's Secret)

An excellent analysis of Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret was prepared by Gloria Erlich⁵ in a more comprehensive work on Hawthorne. Chapter 5 of her work, which focuses on the unfinished romance, is provided on a companion webpage. The contents and initial paragraphs of the analysis in Chapter 5 are shown below.

FIVE

(See companion webpage for additional text of Erlich's analysis).

Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts on July 4, 1804 (Figure 3); his father, a ship's captain, died when Nathaniel was only four years old. His mother went to live with her affluent brothers (the Mannings) in Salem. Hawthorne was raised in their home . 

Figure 3. House in Salem (27 Union Street) where Hawthorne was born in 1804.

Source:  

http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/Architecture/HousesinSalem/HawthornesHouse/Introduction.html 

Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody in 1842. When he was courting Sophia, she was living with her family (her father was a dentist) at 53 Charter Street in Salem, Massachusetts. The home was a large three-story building known as the "Peabody House". Later, Hawthorne used the house as the setting for Doctor Grimshawe's Secret and it has since received the moniker "Grimshawe House". Two views of the house are shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Two views of Grimshawe House at 53 Charter Street in Salem, Massachusetts

 

Sources:    http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/images/image.php?name=MMD6;

                http://www.salemweb.com/tales/grimshawe.shtml 

Robin Emrich has posted on the internet the following interesting image of the entry to Grimshawe House, along with a few descriptive words (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Robin Emrich's drawing of the Grimshawe House entry with explanatory text

Grimshaw House

The Grimshaw (sic) House is 1 of 4 pieces created in early 1999. The historic significance of this building is its relationship to Nathaniel Hawthorne. This is where he courted his wife, Sophia Peabody. The house still stands and is bordered by one of the oldest graveyards in Salem , which sits on a raised expanse that abuts directly against the house midway up the first floor. It is known that Sophia's father was a dental surgeon ... dentist's had far reaching roles in the 1800's and often dealt with life threatening abscesses and other ailments much beyond what we attribute to today's modern dentistry. The parlor of the house (also the waiting room) conveniently overlooks the graveyard. Many was the patient who may have pondered their own future and the course of their treatments as they sat patiently looking out into the scene that would often include a funeral or two for their more morbid thoughts to ponder and reflect upon. Certainly the morose and macabre nature of the building and its surrounds helped to ferment and inspire some of Hawthorne 's marvelous creativity. Alas, the building still stands (behind the Essex Museum ) in most perfunctory dishevel reflecting most accurately the lost souls it has encountered over its lifetime. This particular proof is a first generation one, a significantly more handsome one is available that includes an aquatint which further accentuates the mood and tone of the structure in its present day terms. The plate size is 9.5"x13.75". 

Source:  http://www.geocities.com/rremrich/grmshw.html

As noted, Grimshawe House is located in Salem at 53 Charter Street (Figure 6). The house is not far from the setting of the novel "House of Seven Gables" (The Turner-Ingersoll House at 54 Turner St) and the "Witch House" (Jonathan Corwin house, 310 ½ Essex St at North St), where witches were purportedly examined during the witch trials of 1692 - in which 19 people were hanged.

Figure 6. Maps showing the location of Salem, Massachusetts about 20 miles northeast of Boston and the location of Grimshawe House in Salem (red stars)

The first chapter of Hawthorne's book is presented above. Two additional chapters are provided below for further exposition of his style of writing and portrayal of the character Doctor Grimshawe.

CHAPTER II.

Considering that Doctor Grimshawe, when we first look upon him, had dwelt only a very few years in the house by the grave-yard, it is wonderful what an appearance he and his furniture, and his cobwebs, and their unweariable spinners, and crusty old Hannah, all had, of having permanently attached themselves to the locality. For a century, at least, it might be fancied that the study in particular had existed just as it was now, with those dusky festoons of spider silk hanging along the walls, those book-cases with volumes, turning their parchment or black leather backs upon you, those machines and engines, that table, and at it the Doctor, in a very faded and shabby dressing gown, smoking a long clay pipe, the powerful fumes of which dwelt continually in his reddish and grisly beard, and made him fragrant wherever he went. This sense of fixedness - stony intractability - seems to belong to people who, instead of hope, which exalts everything into an airy, gaseous exhilaration, have a fixed and dogged purpose, around which everything congeals and crystallizes. Even the sunshine, dim through the dustiness of the two casements that looked upon the graves, and the smoke, as it came warm out of Doctor Grimshawe's mouth, seemed already stale. But if the two children, or either of them, happened to be in the study, - if they ran to open the door at the knock, if they came scampering and peeped down over the banisters – the sordid and rusty gloom was apt to vanish quite away. The sunbeam itself looked like a golden rule that had been flung down long ago, and had lain there till it was dusty and tarnished. They were cheery little imps, who sucked up fragrance and pleasantness out of their surroundings, dreary as these looked, even as a flower can find its proper fragrance in any soil where its seed happens to fall. The great spider, hanging by his cordage over the Doctor's head, and waving slowly, like a pendulum, in a blast from the crack of the door, must have made millions and millions of precisely such vibrations as these; but the children were new, and made over every day, with yesterday’s wearness left out. They were new, and made over every moment, with yesterday's weariness left out.

The little girl, however, was the merrier of the two. It was quite unintelligible, in view of the little care that crusty Hannah took of her, and, moreover, that she was none of your prim, children, how daintily she kept herself amid all this dust; how the spider's webs never clung to her; and how - when without being solicited - she clambered into the Doctor's arms and kissed him, she bore away no smoky reminiscences of the pipe that he kissed continually. She had a free, mellow, natural laughter, that seemed the ripened fruit of the smile that was generally on her little face, and to be shaken off and scattered abroad by any breeze that came along. Little Elsie made playthings of everything, even of the grim Doctor, though against his will, and though, moreover, there were tokens now and then, that the sight of this bright little creature was not a pleasure to him, but, on the contrary a positive pain; a pain, nevertheless, indicating a profound interest, hardly less deep than if Elsie had been his daughter.

Elsie did not play with the great spider, but she moved among the whole host of spiders as if she saw them not, and being endowed with other senses than those allied to these things, might coexist with them and not be sensible of their presence. Yet the child, I suppose, had her crying fits, and her pouting fits, and naughtiness enough to entitle her to live on earth; at least, crusty Hannah often said so, and often made grievous complaint of disobedience, mischief, breakage, attributable to little Elsie; to which the grim Doctor seldom responded by anything more intelligible than a puff of tobacco smoke, and sometimes an imprecation; which, however, hit crusty Hannah instead of the child. Where the child got the tenderness which a child needs to live upon is a mystery to me; perhaps from some aged or dead mother, or in her dreams; perhaps from some small modicum of it, such as boys have, from the little boy; or perhaps it was from a Persian kitten, which had grown to be a cat in her arms, and slept in her little bed, and now assumed grave and protective airs towards her former playmate.

The boy, as we have said, was two or three years Elsie's elder, and might now be about six years old He was a healthy and cheerful child, yet of a graver mood than the little girl, appearing to lay a more forcible grasp on the circumstances about him, and to tread with a heavier footstep on the solid earth; yet perhaps not more so than was the necessary difference between a man-blossom, dimly conscious of coming things, and a mere baby, with whom there was neither past nor future. Ned, as he was named, was subject very early to fits of musing, the subject of which - if they had any definite object, or were more than vague reveries - it was impossible to guess. They were of those states of mind, probably, which are beyond the sphere of human language, and would necessarily lose their essence in the attempt to communicate or record them. The little girl, perhaps, had some mode of sympathy with these unuttered thoughts or reveries, which grown people had ceased to have; at all events, she early. learned to respect them, and, at other times as free and playful as her Persian kitten, she never in such circumstances ventured on any greater freedom, in such circumstances, than to sit down quietly beside him, and endeavor to look as thoughtful as the boy himself.

Once, slowly emerging from one of these waking dreams, little Ned gazed about him, and saw Elsie sitting with this pretty pretence of thoughtfulness and dreaminess, in her little chair, close beside him; now and then peeping under her eyelashes to note what changes might come over his face. After looking at her a moment or two, he quietly arose and taking her willing and warm little hand in his own, led her up to the Doctor.

This group, methinks, was a picturesque one, made up of several apparently discordant elements, each of which happened to be so combined as to make a more effective whole. The beautiful, grave boy, with a little sword by his side and a feather in his hat, of a brown complexion, slender, with his white brow, and dark, thoughtful eyes, so earnest upon some mysterious theme; the prettier little girl, a blonde, round, rosy, so truly sympathetic with her companion's mood, yet unconsciously turning all into sport by her attempt to assume one similar - these two, standing at the grim Doctor's footstool; he, meanwhile, black, wild-bearded, heavy-browed, red-eyed, wrapped in his faded dressing gown, puffing out volumes of vapor from his long pipe, and making, just at that instant, application to a tumbler, which, we regret to say, was generally at his elbow, with some dark-colored potation in it, which required to be frequently replenished from a neighboring black bottle. Half, at least, of the fluids in the grim Doctor's system must have derived from that same black bottle, so constant was his familiarity with its contents; and yet his eyes were never redder at one time than another, nor his utterance thicker, nor his wits less available, nor his mood perceptibly the brighter or the darker for all his conviviality. It is true, when, once the bottle happened to be empty for a whole day together, Doctor Grimshawe was observed by crusty Hannah and by the children, to be considerably fiercer than usual: so that probably, by some maladjustment of consequences, his intemperance was only to be found in refraining from brandy.

Nor must we forget - in attempting to conceive the effect of these two beautiful children in such a sombre room, looking on the graveyard, and contrasted with the grim Doctor's aspect of heavy and smouldering fierceness - that over his head, at this very moment, dangled the portentous spider, who seemed to have come down from his web aloft for the very purpose of hearing what the two young people could have to say to his patron, and what reference it might have to certain myserious documents which the Doctor kept locked up in a secret cupboard behnd the door.

"Grim Doctor," said Ned, after looking up into the Doctor's face, as a sensitive child inevitably does, to see whether the occasion was favorable, yet determined to proceed with his purpose, whether so or not, - "Grim Doctor, I want you to answer me a question."

"He