The Bad Boy
Nathaniel Hawthorne is perhaps the most famous alumnus of Bowdoin College. The namesake of our library, his legacy is intertwined with that of our school. Yet, the story of Hawthorne’s time at Bowdoin is more complex and humorous than what you find on the college website.
Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804. On his paternal side he came from a long line of seaman and his father, Nathaniel Hathorne, Sr., died on a voyage to Cuba when his son was just four. His mother, Elizabeth Manning, was described as, “a woman of great beauty and extreme sensibility.” Hawthorne spent his early days in Salem and attended school sporadically. Because of poor health and a dismal social life Hawthorne was sent to live with relatives in Raymond, Maine, along the shores of Sebago Lake. He enjoyed his time in Maine and only begrudgingly went back to Salem for high school. Though many Salem boys went to Harvard, Hawthorne’s family decided to send him to Bowdoin at the age of seventeen. This was partially because his impoverished mother could not afford Harvard’s fees. Indeed, Hawthorne’s uncle would finance most of his education.
In September of 1821, Hawthorne began his journey to Bowdoin. He shared a carriage with Franklin Pierce, Jonathan Cilley and Horatio Bridge, who became his best friends at college. Also in the carriage was Alfred Mason, with whom Hawthorne would room for his first two years at Bowdoin. The boys had a tumultuous first year of housing. After living with a professor for the first semester, they tried to move to Maine Hall. However, the building caught fire in February of 1822. Mason and Hawthorne had to then relocate to Ms. Adams’. Sophomore year the roommates returned to their on-campus room. Though always genial, Mason and Hawthorne drifted apart at Bowdoin. Hawthorne joined the Athenean Society and Mason was a part of the rival Peucinian Society. But more, Horatio Bridge recalled a “dissimilarity in their tastes and habits.” While Mason was effortlessly affluent, Hawthorne was continually anxious about his financial standing in regard to his peers. Junior and senior years, Hawthorne boarded alone at Mr. A. Dunning’s.
At Bowdoin, Hawthorne’s natural talents and complete lack of interest in college were eternally in conflict. Hawthorne excelled at English and Latin, subjects he loved, continually impressing professors with his compositions. However, he refused to study any subject he disliked, especially math and metaphysics. Hawthorne also found public speaking loathsome and went out of his way to avoid it. The records of the Executive Government are littered with Hawthorne’s fines for missing recitations and declamations. No wonder when one reads Hawthorne’s October 28, 1821 letter to his sister, sent only weeks after arriving at Bowdoin the first time: “The Lessons are so short that I want employment the Greatest part of the time. Yet I generally make the time pass very tolerably, by dint of playing Cards, at which all the Students are great adepts, and other unlawful occupations, which are made more pleasant by the fines attached to them if discovered. The Laws of the College are not very strict, and they are not half of them obeyed. Some of them are peculiarly repugnant to my feelings, such as, to get up at sunrise every morning to attend prayers, which law the Students make it a custom to break twice a week. But the worst of all is to be compelled to go to meeting every Sunday, and to hear a red hot Calvinist Sermon from the President, or some other dealer in fire and brimstone.”
Still, nearly everyone at Bowdoin recognized the scholar’s innate brilliance. His peers considered him an “experts in Belles Lettres” and accepted that his academic apathy did not speak to his intelligence. Hawthorne was actually ranked eighteenth in the class, but because of his constant refusal to work, he was not given a commencement speech.
Hawthorne chafed at the strict rules of the college, which essentially forbade anything that was not studying or picking blueberries. At the end of his first year, the college wrote to his mother after catching him playing cards, fearing that other students were corrupting him. Hawthorne, however was quite happy to corrupt himself. Various sources describe him as a “card-playing addict.” Other notable offenses against the college included drinking in a tavern and walking on the Sabbath. However, these acts of misconduct were only the tip of the iceberg. Hawthorne had a penchant for making social societies with his friends through which he could subvert Bowdoin’s rules. The Androscoggin Club was founded to give Hawthorne, Bridge, Cilley and James Ware Bradbury an excuse to get blackout drunk in the Bowdoin Commons every weekend. The Navy Club consisted of Class of 1825 seniors who did not get a speaking part at commencement. Their activities consisted of giving each other nautical codenames and throwing parties whenever their academically successful classmates had to rehearse. Most noteworthy was the Pot-8-O Club. Hawthorne, Cilley, Mason, Jeremiah Dummer, George Washington Pierce, and David Shepley founded this group their sophomore year for the purpose of eating potatoes. Seriously. Each week the members would gather to butter potatoes, but one suspects their true purpose dealt more with the “ardent spirits” served with the tubers.
Hawthorne was a rebel in all respects. According to Horatio Bridge, Hawthorne refused to get his silhouette cut his senior year, referring to the whole enterprise as the “Class Golgotha.” Hawthorne also kept his distance from the sports that the rest of the boys played. Still, Hawthorne’s apathy only extended so far. He legitimately loved the nature surrounding Bowdoin. In his later years, Bridge waxed poetic about his time with Hawthorne “gathering blueberries in study hours under those tall, academic pines, or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin.” And though he wouldn’t study, Hawthorne read widely and voraciously in his free time. His senior year, he even took an interest in the lectures at the Maine Medical School. So, in August of 1825, Hawthorne emerged from Bowdoin as a college graduate. He had no plans for the future except for the pages that comprised the novel he’d secretly started writing.
What happened to Hawthorne after college is relatively well known. He spent a few years aimlessly trying to figure out his life, before seriously starting to publish his writing. He quickly developed a reputation for brilliance that was to transcend his life. He married Sophia Peabody in 1842, and they had three children, Una, Julian and Rose. Until the end of his life, Hawthorne remained close to members of his class such as George Barrell Cheever, Jonathan Cilley and Horatio Bridge. He died in 1864, while on a trip with classmate and former President Franklin W. Pierce.