The young Nathaniel Hawthorne. He aged quickly.
Empires are obsessed with money.
Their colonies are obsessed with sex.
The greatest author of the British Empire, Charles Dickens, invented Scrooge.
The first great prose writer in America, Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote a famous book about adultery, The Scarlet Letter.
Religion handles the problem of sexual misconduct—the poor, with their suffering, often find their only real pleasure in sex; the rich have many pleasures, and sex might be one of them: money buys all.
Dickens was immensely popular in England, (the first serialized fiction writer; like TV before TV) but due to international copyright laws, his works were published at no cost in the United States—Edgar Poe complained vociferously of this, because U.S. authors were slighted, since American publishers would rather print British works for free than take a chance on an American author. Poe, gentleman that he was, cared for money, fame, and country (he did not write about sex). Dickens agreed with Poe, and on a tour of America in 1842, Dickens collected and delivered to the U.S. Congress signatures of American authors who were against the international copyright laws which hurt both Dickens and Poe.
Hawthorne was a strange, reclusive man, whose ancestor was a Salem witch trial judge, and he married an artistic, reclusive woman. They did have three children, and Hawthorne was certainly a man of the world, but his fiction deals with madness and secret desires.
Dickens wrote from the Christian, domestic center of an expanding worldwide empire and his morals were sunny and simple—despite London nearly ruling the world, London was full of the wretchedly poor, and Dickens wrote for them.
And this line sums up Dickens quite well:
A loving heart is the truest wisdom
When Hawthorne was a boy living in Salem, two events darkened his life: first, his sailor father died of yellow fever at sea, and second, president Thomas Jefferson imposed a shipping boycott—a response to Great Britain’s piratical belligerence in the early 19th century—which crushed maritime Salem’s economy.
Hawthorne died when the American Civil War was still raging. Pictures of him in his 50s (he died at 59) show a very old man. He was first recognized as a great author by Poe, with some reservations, since Hawthorne belonged to the Transcendentalist clique Poe disliked; Poe theorized brilliantly on the short story while reviewing Hawthorne’s tales—the Scarlet Letter was published after Poe’s death, and there’s whispers Hawthorne’s most famous work was based on the rumored affair of Poe and Fanny Osgood.
Hawthorne wrote, not for an Empire, but for an incestuous, puritan village.
Dickens’ characters had funny names. Hawthorne’s characters had funny souls.
Here is Hawthorne’s line in the March Madness contest:
She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.
Who is the greater genius?
The soaring, sentimental Dickens?
Or the burrowing, burning Hawthorne?
Purgatory puffing a pipe?
Or hell awake under a stone?
