Alcott's
conversation about books and literature was often very fine, but even
this could not have given Hawthorne much entertainment. His own library,
as he states himself somewhere, was of a miscellaneous character, and
contained the works of scarcely any author of repute except Shakespeare.
Alcott's sense of humor and keen knowledge of human nature may have been
a sort of common ground between them.
Meanwhile Hawthorne, as afterwards appeared, was making a study of
Alcott to see whether he would serve his purpose as the mainspring for a
new work of fiction. The manuscript plot of a romance was found among
Hawthorne's papers in which he describes a personage in general outline
like his neighbor Alcott, but without his ideality and good-humor. This
imaginary character was supposed to live in a retired manner, together
with an old housekeeper, a boy of whom he is the legal guardian, and a
huge spider in which his interest and solicitude are more especially
centred. What the catastrophe of this strange story was to have been, we
are not informed, but it naturally would have arisen from the unhealthy
and oppressive social position in which the boy must have found himself
as he advanced towards manhood. At the close of his memoranda Hawthorne
says, "In person and figure Mr. Alcott--". To be selected as the
mainspring of a romance is properly a compliment.
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