Editing Nathaniel Hawthorne (section)

===Marriage and family===
[[File:Sophia Peabody by Chester Harding (PEM 2016.59.1A) - crop.jpg|thumb|upright=.9|left|Portrait of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne by [[Chester Harding (painter)|Chester Harding]], 1830 (Peabody Essex Museum)]]
While at Bowdoin, Hawthorne wagered a bottle of [[Madeira wine]] with his friend Jonathan Cilley that Cilley would get married before Hawthorne did.<ref>Manning Hawthorne, "Nathaniel Hawthorne at Bowdoin", ''The New England Quarterly'', Vol. 13, No. 2 (June 1940): 246–279.</ref> By 1836, he had won the bet, but he did not remain a bachelor for life. He had public flirtations with Mary Silsbee and [[Elizabeth Peabody]],<ref>Cheever, 102</ref> then he began pursuing Peabody's sister, the [[illustrator]] and [[transcendentalism|transcendentalist]] [[Sophia Hawthorne|Sophia Peabody]]. He joined the transcendentalist [[Utopia]]n community at [[Brook Farm (Boston, Massachusetts)|Brook Farm]] in 1841, not because he agreed with the experiment but because it helped him save money to marry Sophia.<ref>McFarland, 83</ref> He paid a $1,000 deposit and was put in charge of shoveling the hill of manure referred to as "the Gold Mine".<ref>Cheever, 104</ref> He left later that year, though his Brook Farm adventure became an inspiration for his novel ''[[The Blithedale Romance]]''.<ref name="McFarland, 149">McFarland, 149</ref> Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody on July 9, 1842, at a ceremony in the Peabody parlor on West Street in Boston.<ref>Wineapple, 160</ref> The couple moved to [[The Old Manse]] in [[Concord, Massachusetts]],<ref>McFarland, 25</ref> where they lived for three years. His neighbor [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]] invited him into his social circle, but Hawthorne was almost pathologically shy and stayed silent at gatherings.<ref>Schreiner, 123</ref> At the Old Manse, Hawthorne wrote most of the tales collected in ''[[Mosses from an Old Manse]]''.<ref>Miller, 246–247</ref>
[[File:Hawthorne children mmd368 l.jpg|thumb|right|Una, Julian, and Rose c. 1862]]
Like Hawthorne, Sophia was a reclusive person. Throughout her early life, she had frequent [[migraine]]s and underwent several experimental medical treatments.<ref>Mellow, 6–7</ref> She was mostly bedridden until her sister introduced her to Hawthorne, after which her headaches seem to have abated. The Hawthornes enjoyed a long and happy marriage. He referred to her as his "Dove" and wrote that she "is, in the strictest sense, my sole companion; and I need no other—there is no vacancy in my mind, any more than in my heart ... Thank God that I suffice for her boundless heart!"<ref>McFarland, 87</ref> Sophia greatly admired her husband's work. She wrote in one of her journals:
<blockquote>I am always so dazzled and bewildered with the richness, the depth, the&nbsp;... jewels of beauty in his productions that I am always looking forward to a second reading where I can ponder and muse and fully take in the miraculous wealth of thoughts.<ref>January 14, 1851, Journal of Sophia Hawthorne. Berg Collection NY Public Library.</ref></blockquote>

Poet [[William Ellery Channing (poet)|Ellery Channing]] came to the Old Manse for help on the first anniversary of the Hawthornes' marriage. A local teenager named Martha Hunt had drowned herself in the river and Hawthorne's boat ''Pond Lily'' was needed to find her body. Hawthorne helped recover the corpse, which he described as "a spectacle of such perfect horror&nbsp;... She was the very image of death-agony".<ref>Schreiner, 116–117</ref> The incident later inspired a scene in his novel ''The Blithedale Romance''.

The Hawthornes had three children. Their first was daughter Una, born March 3, 1844; her name was a reference to ''[[The Faerie Queene]]'', to the displeasure of family members.<ref>McFarland, 97</ref> Hawthorne wrote to a friend, "I find it a very sober and serious kind of happiness that springs from the birth of a child&nbsp;... There is no escaping it any longer. I have business on earth now, and must look about me for the means of doing it."<ref>Schreiner, 119</ref> In October 1845, the Hawthornes moved to Salem.<ref name="Reynolds, 10">Reynolds, 10</ref> In 1846, their son [[Julian Hawthorne|Julian]] was born. Hawthorne wrote to his sister Louisa on June 22, 1846: "A small troglodyte made his appearance here at ten minutes to six o'clock this morning, who claimed to be your nephew."<ref>Mellow, 273</ref> Daughter [[Rose Hawthorne Lathrop|Rose]] was born in May 1851, and Hawthorne called her his "autumnal flower".<ref>Miller, 343–344</ref>