Introduction

Netley Abbey, Hampshire

During the period Nathaniel Hawthorne was US Consul to Liverpool, between August 1853 and October 1857, he found a lot of time to visit the cathedrals and abbeys of Britain. (For more of his writing about his time in Britain visit nathanielhawthornes.blogspot.com.) 

While Hawthorne was a deeply spiritual man, he seldom went to church services when he was in Britain. His friend Henry Bright joked:

Do you ask me, " Tell me further 

Of this Consul, of this Hawthorne " 

 I would say, he is a sinner, — 

Reprobate and churchless sinner, — 

Never goes inside a chapel, 

Only sees outsides of chapels. 

Says his prayers without a chapel!

But he visited dozens of churches, chapels, abbeys, priories and cathedrals. In this blog you will find his record of them from Edinburgh and Glasgow in the north to Salisbury and Netley in the south. He was searching for the England he imagined from Massachusetts, and he found it in the old places of worship. He wrote in Our Old Home:

Almost always, in visiting such scenes as I have been attempting to describe, I had a singular sense of having been there before. The ivy-grown English churches (even that of Bebbington, the first that I beheld) were quite as familiar to me, when fresh from home, as the old wooden meeting-house in Salem, which used, on wintry Sabbaths, to be the frozen purgatory of my childhood.

This was a bewildering, yet very delightful emotion fluttering about me like a faint summer wind, and filling my imagination with a thousand half-remembrances, which looked as vivid as sunshine, at a side-glance, but faded quite away whenever I attempted to grasp and define them.

Of course, the explanation of the mystery was, that history, poetry, and fiction, books of travel, and the talk of tourists, had given me pretty accurate preconceptions of the common objects of English scenery, and these, being long ago vivified by a youthful fancy, had insensibly taken their places among the images of things actually seen.

Yet the illusion was often so powerful, that I almost doubted whether such airy remembrances might not be a sort of innate idea, the print of a recollection in some ancestral mind, transmitted, with fainter and fainter impress through several descents, to my own.

I felt, indeed, like the stalwart progenitor in person, returning to the hereditary haunts after more than two hundred years, and finding the church, the hall, the farm-house, the cottage, hardly changed during his long absence,—the same shady by-paths and hedge-lanes, the same veiled sky, and green lustre of the lawns and fields,—while his own affinities for these things, a little obscured by disuse, were reviving at every step.

The first cathedral he visited was Chester, in 1853, but at that time he didn't have a lot to say about it. The only cathedral he visited in 1854 was St Asaph, in North Wales, but that's no bigger than a city church. In 1855 he visits St Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey for the first time, two places he makes several return trips to. In that year he also visited Furness Abbey and Worcester Cathedral.

Gloucester Cathedral

From October 1855 until June 1856 his wife and daughters were in Lisbon, so he had time for some holidays, one in the South East of England where he visited Battle Abbey (and returned to St Paul's and Westminster Abbey) and a trip to Scotland where he visited Glasgow Cathedral, Holyrood at Edinburgh, Melrose and Dryburgh Abbey ruins, and York and Manchester on the way back. In June '56 he travelled to Southampton to pick up his wife and before returning to Liverpool they visited Salisbury and Gloucester Cathedrals and Netley Abbey ruins. When Herman Melville came visiting in November they went to see Chester Cathedral.

1857 - Bolton Priory, St Mary's Abbey, York, York Minster, Manchester, Lincoln, Peterborough, Newstead Abbey, Notts, Carlisle, Glasgow, St Giles, Edinburgh (which he did not describe), Melrose, Durham and York.

All that, and a score of churches.

In Our Old Home he writes 

In short, I fall straightway to talking nonsense, when I try to express my inner sense of this and other cathedrals. 

and goes on to describe the archetypal English Cathedral  

Unless a writer intends a professedly architectural description, there is but one set of phrases in which to talk of all the cathedrals in England and elsewhere. They are alike in their great features: an acre or two of stone flags for a pavement; rows of vast columns supporting a vaulted roof at a dusky height; great windows, sometimes richly bedimmed with ancient or modern stained glass; and an elaborately carved screen between the nave and chancel, breaking the vista that might else be of such glorious length, and which is further choked up by a massive organ.— in spite of which obstructions, you catch the broad, variegated glimmer of the painted east window, where a hundred saints wear their robes of transfiguration.

Behind the screen are the carved oaken stalls of the Chapter and Prebendaries, the Bishop's throne, the pulpit, the altar, and whatever else may furnish out the Holy of Holies. Nor must we forget the range of chapels (once dedicated to Catholic saints, but which have now lost their individual consecration), nor the old monuments of kings, warriors, and prelates, in the side-aisles of the chancel.

Sums it up pretty well. Read on MacDuff.

Netley Abbey, Hampshire