Marriage and family
A wedding was scheduled for June 27, 1842, but was postponed when Sophia fell ill. On July 9, 1842, five years after first meeting, she and Nathaniel were married at 13 West Street in Boston, the Peabody bookstore where Margaret Fuller held some of her "conversations". The day before, Nathaniel wrote to James Freeman Clarke asking him to oversee the ceremony. "I am to be married to Miss Sophia Peabody tomorrow; and it is our mutual desire that you should perform the ceremony", he wrote. Both were considered relatively old for marriage (she was 32 and he was five days past his 38th birthday), but the coupling proved happy for both of them. Immediately after their wedding, they rented and moved into The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts. The next day, Hawthorne wrote to his sister, Louisa: "We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous, and might be even happier; but, as a matter of taste, we choose to stop short at this point." Together the couple etched their impressions of their new married life in the glass of a window in the study using Sophia's diamond ring:
Man's accidents are God's purposes. Sophia A. Hawthorne 1843
Nath Hawthorne This is his study
The smallest twig leans clear against the sky
Composed by my wife and written with her diamond
Inscribed by my husband at sunset, April 3, 1843. In the Gold light.
SAH
On their first wedding anniversary, Nathaniel wrote to Sophia: "We were never so happy as now—never such wide capacity for happiness, yet overflowing with all that the day and every moment brings to us. Methinks this birth-day of our married life is like a cape, which we have now doubled and find a more infinite ocean of love stretching out before us."
The Hawthornes' first child was born March 3, 1844, after a difficult 10-hour delivery. They named her Una, a reference to The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, to the disapproval of many family members. Sophia wrote in her journal, "It was a great happiness to be able to put her to my breast immediately and I thanked Heaven I was able to have the privilege of nursing her." John L. O'Sullivan served as her godfather and gave her a Newfoundland dog named Leo when she was two months old. Nathaniel wrote that fatherhood brought "a very sober and serious kind of happiness", and the family began to worry about money. Sophia also had a recurrence of her migraines after Una's birth.
The family was soon kicked out of the Old Manse, left with only 10 dollars. They moved in with family on Herbert Street in Salem while Nathaniel awaited a government job appointment. In March, 1846, Sophia moved to 77 Carver Street in Boston to be closer to family and Dr. William Wesselhœft while pregnant with her second child. The couple's son Julian was born in Boston on May 22, 1846. His father wrote of the news to a sister, "A small troglodyte made his appearance here at ten minutes to six o'clock this morning, who claims to be your nephew".
The family moved to Lenox, Massachusetts, and it was there, in a red farmhouse they rented, that Sophia gave birth to her third child, Rose. Two months prior to giving birth, Sophia claimed she instinctively knew it would be a girl and chose the name Rose. She was born on May 20, 1851, about a month after the publication of The House of the Seven Gables. Sophia went into labor early, before the midwife could arrive; Rose was delivered with the help of Sophia's father.
Few of Sophia's letters from her courtship and early marriage survive. In June 1853, Nathaniel alludes to the destruction of his letters in his journal: "I burned great heaps of old letters and other papers, a little while ago, preparatory to going to England. Among them were hundreds of Sophia's maiden letters".
The Hawthornes raised their children in a positive environment and did not believe in harsh discipline or physical punishment. Hawthorne in 1862 praised his wife: "She is the most sensible woman I ever knew in my life, much superior to me in general talent, and of fine cultivation." Sophia had a close friendship with Annie Adams Fields, wife of the publisher James T. Fields. In 1863, Sophia wrote to her, "You embellish my life."
Nathaniel Hawthorne died in May 1864, and Sophia was given the news by her sister, Elizabeth Peabody, who had been informed by Franklin Pierce. Pierce, a close friend of Hawthorne, had been at the author's side when he died in his sleep. Sophia wrote about her husband's death to Annie Fields: "My darling has gone over that Sapphire sea, and these grand soft waves are messages from his Eternal Rest." She moved to England four years later in 1868 with her three children.
