This scene of a grown man entering the public sphere hand in hand with a young child is repeated throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction. Most often it serves as an introductory scene, as in the evening stroll of Peter Hovenden and his daughter Annie that begins “The Artist of the Beautiful,” but sometimes too, as when Dimmesdale takes Pearl's hand in the marketplace, it can suggest a kind of resolution. Hawthorne's self-presentation as a writer who wishes to make public on the streets of the town or the pages of a book his connection with childhood, provides important insights into his conception of authorship: much of Hawthorne's authorial persona and cultural legacy are rooted in the “pride” and “delight”with which he claims for himself a mind that goes “hand in hand with the mind of a sinless child.” This chapter is concerned with how for Hawthorne childhood enables not only publicity but authorship itself.

Hawthorne wrote more pieces directly aimed at a juvenile audience than any other canonical male author of the antebellum period. In this way, as in so many others, his literary work is strikingly similar to that of the “scribbling women” he so famously damned. Thus his role as a writer of children’s books does much to illuminate the gender politics of his authorship.