Our Old Home

Hawthorne spent the years 1853 to 1857 in England as the American Consul in Liverpool and kept voluminous journals from which he fashioned the essays that constitute the present volume. After spending two years in Italy he returned to the United States and completed his final novel, The Marble Faun, and Our Old Home, his collection of essays on England. Hawthorne's son Julian once remarked that his father preferred living in England but returned to America only because of his wish to see his children educated at home rather than abroad.