The Whole History Of Grandfather's Chair

Book excerpt: This is the annotated edition including both volumes of the book, a rare and extensive biographical essay on the author, a special introductory to the book, as well as an essay by Edgar Allan Poe on Hawthorne's tale-writing. About 1840 the first part of "Grandfather's Chair" was written, and published in Boston and New York; the second part not being brought out till 1842. This is a series of stories for children, in which some of the striking and picturesque events in early American history are connected by association with an old chair, originally given by the Earl of Lincoln to his daughter, Lady Arabella Johnson, from whom it passed in succession to a long series of colonial worthies down to the time of the Revolution, -- Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Sir Henry Vane, President Dunster of Harvard, several governors of Massachusetts, Eliot, the Indian apostle, Cotton Mather, and others. "The Pine-Tree Shillings," which has been so widely copied in books for children, is one of the stories of "Grandfather's Chair." '