Nathaniel Hawthorne: Consul at Liverpool
The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote Charlotte Lindgren, found much to criticize both in Great Britain and in his own country.
When Nathaniel Hawthorne assumed office in 1853, the United States Consulate in Liverpool consisted of two dreary rooms on the first floor of the Washington Buildings on the lower corner of Brunswick Street near the old docks. Quiet and introspective, the forty-nine-year-old novelist seemed an unlikely choice for the most lucrative consulate post in England, but he did his job conscientiously for the full four-year term.
He left to history a detailed journal which served as a basis for his own later creative works, and is also a perceptive revelation of an American’s view of English society and the responsibilities of a consul in the mid-nineteenth century.
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