Complete Project Gutenberg William Dean Howells Literature Essays — Reading Notes

A Journey as Literary Method

The stagecoach ride from Lowell to Concord is not merely a prelude but a structural device. Howells contrasts the “hideous mills” and “work-worn factory-girls” of Lowell with the pastoral sweetness of the countryside, noting that the landscape struck him as “quaint and strange” as Old England would the following year. He admits his own indifference to the laborers’ plight, confessing he watched them “with no concern for them but to see which was pretty and which was plain.” This frank self-portrait—a young man more absorbed in literary fantasy than social reality—sets the tone for the essays that follow. The journey becomes a metaphor for his movement between worlds: from the Western Reserve to New England, from provincial observer to insider among the Boston literati.

Encountering Hawthorne Through Anticipation

Howells’s approach to Hawthorne is mediated entirely by fiction. He writes that he was “to see Hawthorne, and in a manner to meet Priscilla and Zenobia, and Hester Prynne and little Pearl”—characters from The Blithedale Romance, The Scarlet Letter, and The Marble Faun. The real Hawthorne is almost secondary to the imagined one. Howells dismisses a fellow passenger, a young girl who sang during the ride, as a “poor little reality” who “could not have been got into any story that one could respect.” This hierarchy—literary creation over living person—reveals Howells’s own romanticism, even as he later championed realism. The excerpt breaks off before the actual meeting, leaving the encounter itself untold, which underscores how the essays often promise more than they deliver in terms of critical substance.

Catalog Subjects vs. Textual Evidence

The Project Gutenberg record classifies this work under “Literature – History and criticism” and “American literature – 19th century – History and criticism,” with a secondary topic of “general-literature.” Yet the excerpts contain little systematic criticism. Howells does not analyze texts or argue a thesis; he narrates his own education as a reader and writer. The catalog also includes “Authors, American – 19th century – Biography,” which is more accurate: the essays are biographical sketches of Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and others, filtered through personal acquaintance. However, the excerpts do not reach those portraits. The reader should expect a hybrid form—part literary reminiscence, part travelogue—rather than a conventional critical study. The catalog’s emphasis on “criticism” may mislead those seeking argumentative analysis.

Readers approaching this collection should set aside expectations of systematic literary theory. Howells’s strength lies in the anecdotal: the texture of a summer morning, the self-deprecating confession of youthful snobbery, the vivid contrast between industrial Lowell and literary Concord. The essays reward those interested in the social world of nineteenth-century American letters and the formation of a realist sensibility. For critical arguments, one must look to Howells’s later works; here, the journey itself is the point.