Twice-Told Tales

Twice-Told Tales Review

Nathaniel Hawthorne published Twice-Told Tales in 1837 after more than a decade of anonymous magazine publication, and the title was both modest and precise: these were stories that had already been told once, in the magazines, and were being told again in a collected form that would allow readers to see their coherence. The coherence was real. The stories share a preoccupation so consistent that reading them together makes clear that Hawthorne had, from the beginning of his career, a single subject: the relationship between the hidden self and the public face, the secret sin and the social performance that conceals it, the Puritan conscience and the Puritan suppression of what the conscience reveals.

“The Minister’s Black Veil” is the collection’s masterpiece, and one of the greatest short stories in the American tradition. Reverend Hooper appears one Sunday morning wearing a black veil that covers his face from the eyes down, and never removes it — not to his dying day, not for the wedding he performs that same afternoon, not for the funeral he attends, not for the woman he loves, who breaks off their engagement rather than live with the veil’s implication. He never explains it. He continues to perform his ministerial functions with undiminished skill, and becomes, as the story notes with gentle irony, a considerably more effective preacher under the veil than he was without it: his parishioners now believe that he knows their hidden sins, that he sees them as they truly are. He is dying at the story’s end, attended by a minister who urges him to remove the veil before he meets his maker. He refuses. The veil, he explains, is a symbol of what every human face conceals — the secret sin, the hidden self — and he will not remove it because to do so would be to pretend that he is different from anyone else. He dies with the veil on.

“Wakefield” takes a simpler premise and develops it with the patience of a long story in miniature: a man leaves his London house one evening and does not return. He rents a room around the corner, watches his household from a distance, observes his wife’s grief and gradual adjustment, and stays away for twenty years. Then one rainy evening he simply walks back in and resumes his life. Hawthorne is interested not in the psychology of Wakefield’s departure — he declines to explain it, which is the story’s method — but in the philosophical implications of voluntary exile: the man who removes himself one step from ordinary human life and finds, from that distance, that he cannot close the step again.

Edgar Allan Poe reviewed Twice-Told Tales in Graham’s Magazine in 1842 and produced what remains its most famous assessment — praising Hawthorne’s “pure style” and “beautiful imagination” while identifying the single effect of the tale as the proper aim of the short story form. Hawthorne’s effect, in these stories, is consistently the same: the recognition that the self one presents to the world and the self one conceals from it are both real, and that the effort to keep them separate is the defining activity of human social life.

The Other Modes of the Collection

Hawthorne’s reputation for grimness obscures how varied Twice-Told Tales actually is. “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” is something close to a dark comedy: an aged physician offers four elderly friends water from the legendary Fountain of Youth, and the four immediately squander their restored vigour on the same vanities and quarrels that wasted their first youth, so that the moral lands as wry rather than thunderous. “The Gray Champion” works in an entirely different register, a patriotic legend in which a spectral Puritan elder materialises to defy a colonial tyrant — Hawthorne’s image of the New England conscience that surfaces in moments of oppression and then withdraws again into history. Several pieces are barely stories at all but sketches and meditations, prose pictures of a Sunday, a town pump, the sea-shore, in which Hawthorne practises the controlled, allusive style that would later carry The Scarlet Letter. The collection is best understood as the workshop in which a major American imagination tried out the full range of its instruments.

This breadth matters for how the book is read today. It is not a unified cycle to be consumed front to back so much as a gathering of separate experiments, and the experience improves when a reader treats it that way — pausing on the masterpieces, skimming the slighter sketches, and noticing how often a minor piece anticipates a theme the longer fiction would later develop at full scale.

Hawthorne’s Career and the Tales’ Legacy

When Twice-Told Tales appeared in 1837, Hawthorne was a near-anonymous figure who had spent years in a self-described “haunted chamber” in Salem, writing and publishing in magazines and annuals without acclaim. His college friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s warm review helped bring the book attention, and the collection’s modest success gave Hawthorne his first foothold as a recognised author. The themes it introduced — inherited guilt, the secret sin that marks its bearer, the isolated self cut off from the human community, the danger of the cold intellect that experiments upon other lives — would organise everything that followed, from the expanded Mosses from an Old Manse to The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Herman Melville, who later became Hawthorne’s friend and dedicated Moby-Dick to him, recognised in these tales the “great power of blackness” that he prized above the era’s sunnier optimism. For readers approaching Hawthorne for the first time, the collection is the ideal point of entry: shorter and more various than the novels, it shows the writer assembling, story by story, the moral universe that made him the first major artist of American fiction.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — The collection that established the moral-allegorical short story as an American form, and that introduced, in miniature, every theme Hawthorne would develop in his longer fiction.