Worth Keeping: Selected from The Congregationalist and Boston Recorder, 1870–1879.

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Title

Worth Keeping: Selected from The Congregationalist and Boston Recorder, 1870–1879.

Coverage

Boston

Publisher

W. L. Greene & Co.

Date

1880

Description

I discovered that a critical source for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) was the novel The Salem Belle (1842)—and I also found, through archival work, that the author of this latter book was Ebenezer Wheelwright. I discussed these finds in my book, The Threads of The Scarlet Letter (2003). Wheelwright’s name is not printed in The Salem Belle or in his later novel Traditions of Palestine (1863). However, I recently discovered, with the help of the online catalog of The Congregationalist Library & Archives, that his name, “Eben Wheelwright,” is printed in one book, the posthumous collection Worth Keeping. He had contributed “A Solemn Scene in the Ministry of Mr. Finney,” with his authorship disclosed in The Congregationalist and Boston Recorder of October 4, 1876; that piece, slightly revised and retitled “Mr. Finney in a Moment of Peril,” appears in this 1880 collection. Finally, the anonymous author emerges from his anonymity.

A new edition of The Salem Belle—properly credited to Ebenezer Wheelwright—will be published by Penn State University Press in 2016, with my introduction and annotations.

Source

Richard Kopley