Ghost Story Review: "The Ghost of Dr. Harris" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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The narrator, an American, is recalling a story he told verbally to gathering of English under candlelight. He admits it loses something once it’s committed to paper. Having only forgiven Hawthorne for The Scarlet Letter after some thirty years, I tend to look askance at anything he writes to begin with. Some fifteen years earlier, in the reading room of the Athenaeum, a public library in Boston, where retired merchants and such literary society as Boston has tended to gather, the elderly Dr. Harris, a Unitarian clergyman, used to retire to read the latest news from home and abroad. He had a favorite chair and, like many of the older patrons, tended to snooze “ever and anon.” The Boston Post, a major paper of the Democratic Party in the North, was his habitual read. (One shudders at the thought of what his ghost must be thinking about his party these days, but I digress…) After the narrator is told of Dr. Harris’s death, he arrives at the Athenaeum reading room, thinking he’ll never see the old man again, only to see him in his favorite chair, reading, of course, The Boston Post, where his own death might be announced. Not being personally acquainted with Dr. Harris, the narrator doesn’t speak to him, but doesn’t recall being particularly overcome with emotion. As he reads, the narrator may have lifted his eyes from the page to look again at the “venerable Doctor, who ought then to have been lying in his coffin dressed out for the grave, but who felt such interest in the Boston Post as to come back from the other world to read it the morning after his death. One might have supposed that he would have cared more about the novelties of the sphere to which he had just been introduced than about the politics he had left behind him!” As for this being a “real” ghost story, of course it’s hooey, but it makes the point of people’s lives lingering on long after the person is gone. And it’s told in typical 19th century prose that takes forever and a day to get to the point. The text of the story is available here: _____ Title: “The Ghost of Dr. Harris” Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne First published: Written 1856, first published Nineteenth Century January 1900 Source: ISFDB