In the second volume of his English notebooks, Nathaniel Hawthorne records his experiences as a sojourner in mid-Victorian Britain, blending the eye of a novelist with the duties of a consul. The entries move from a dinner at the Milton Club—a gathering of dissenters and nonconformists—to a grand banquet where he is the honored guest, and then to the quiet rhythms of Southport's seaside life. Throughout, Hawthorne is a keen observer of social rituals, noting the precise details of setting, speech, and gesture that reveal the tensions between public performance and private feeling.

Social Encounters and Uneasy Recognition

Hawthorne's account of the Milton Club dinner is marked by a series of careful social maneuvers. He arrives early, is shown into a reading-room, and observes a tall, white-haired gentleman who turns out to be Mr. Hall. When Mr. Tupper enters and begins to speak, Hawthorne steps forward to avoid overhearing a possibly awkward remark. This small incident captures his acute awareness of social boundaries and his desire to control how he is perceived. At the dinner table, he notes the presence of authors and press men, but confesses he knew little of their work except Tom Taylor's. His description of Taylor—'tall, slender, dark young man, not English-looking, and wearing colored spectacles'—reveals a tendency to read foreignness into fellow writers. Later, at the banquet, he cannot hear Monckton Milnes's speech and must improvise his response, yet he feels 'self-possession and clear-sightedness.' The episode underscores Hawthorne's fascination with the gap between public reputation and private reality, a theme that runs throughout the notebook.

Landscape and the Weight of Season

Hawthorne's observations of the English spring are precise and often melancholy. He notes that the winter is over but spring has not truly arrived: 'nothing but cold east-winds, accompanied with sunshine.' The grass has been green for a month, and the trees are only beginning to leaf. He watches daisies bloom and sees in them the truth of Burns's epithet, 'wee, modest, crimson-nipped flower,' observing how the crimson fringe fades to white as the flower opens. This attention to botanical detail is typical of Hawthorne's method: he uses the natural world to test literary description against lived experience. He also remarks on fruit trees 'stretched out flat against stone walls, reminding me of a dead bird nailed against the side of a barn.' The simile is jarring, linking cultivation to death, and suggests a persistent unease beneath the surface of English pastoral. Southport, he concludes, offers little difference between winter and summer in its 'mere material aspect,' a waste of sand that resists seasonal change.

The Performance of Public Life

Hawthorne's entries repeatedly dwell on the theatricality of public events. At the banquet, he describes the chairman's speech, the toast, and the audience's clamor with a novelist's eye for staging. He notes that he 'had uprisen, too, to commence my speech; but had to sit down again till matters grew more quiet.' The physical choreography of rising and sitting becomes a metaphor for the speaker's loss of control. Afterward, he talks with Lord ——— about their oratorical performances, and reflects that if a nobleman has 'any true friend out of his own class, it ought to be a republican.' This remark, placed without comment, reveals Hawthorne's awareness of the social distances that persist even in convivial settings. The next morning, newspapers misreport his speech, attributing to him 'a variety of forms of ragged nonsense.' The gap between his actual words and the printed version becomes a final irony, underscoring the unreliability of public record.

Readers approaching this volume will find not a travelogue but a writer's workshop, where Hawthorne tests his perceptions against the English scene. The notebooks reward attention to his shifting tone—from dry observation to lyrical description to wry self-deprecation. Because the excerpts are incomplete, the full arc of his residence remains partially hidden, but the patterns of unease and curiosity are already clear. Hawthorne's England is a place of social performance, where even the daisies carry a literary echo.