Yesterdays with Authors

James Fields (1817-1881) at age 14 became a clerk in a bookstore in Boston, and in a few years became a partner in the bookselling firm of Ticknor, Reed and Fields.

Fields's firm became the publisher for most of the great American writers of the Nineteenth Century. In this book, Fields tells how he persuaded a jobless, despondent Nathaniel Hawthorne to let him print "The Scarlet Letter."

Fields made frequent visits to England to land the American publishing rights to the works of important British writers, including the great superstar of the time, Charles Dickens. Dickens accepted Fields as a personal friend, entertained him at his retreat, Gad's Hill, and wrote him many amusing notes that are included here. Fields also socialized with the cream of London literary society, and the book includes his personal anecdotes of meeting Wordsworth, Thackeray, and others. He formed a friendship with Mary Russell Mitford (a successful dramatist and novelist of the day; two of her works are available in Project Gutenberg editions) and she wrote him long, gossipy letters, reproduced here.

The firm of Ticknor and Fields, after many mergers and acquisitions, continues to exist today as Houghton Mifflin Books. The firm's original store, the Old Corner Bookstore, still exists as a bookstore at the corner of School and Washington streets in Boston.

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CONTENTS.

I. INTRODUCTORY

II. THACKERAY

III. HAWTHORNE

IV. DICKENS

V. WORDSWORTH

VI. MISS MITFORD

VII. "BARRY CORNWALL" AND SOME OF HIS FRIENDS

INTRODUCTORY.

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"Some there are, By their good works exalted, lofty minds And meditative, authors of delight And happiness, which to the end of time Will live, and spread, and kindle." WORDSWORTH.

I. INTRODUCTORY.

Surrounded by the portraits of those I have long counted my friends, I like to chat with the people about me concerning these pictures, my companions on the wall, and the men and women they represent. These are my assembled guests, who dropped in years ago and stayed with me, without the form of invitation or demand on my time or thought. They are my eloquent silent partners for life, and I trust they will dwell here as long as I do. Some of them I have known intimately; several of them lived in other times; but they are all my friends and associates in a certain sense.

To converse with them and of them--

"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past"--

is one of the delights of existence, and I am never tired of answering questions about them, or gossiping of my own free will as to their every-day life and manners.

If I were to call the little collection in this diminutive house a Gallery of Pictures, in the usual sense of that title, many would smile and remind me of what Foote said with his characteristic sharpness of David Garrick, when he joined his brother Peter in the wine trade: "Davy lived with three quarts of vinegar in the cellar, calling himself a wine merchant."

My friends have often heard me in my "garrulous old age" discourse of things past and gone, and know what they bring down on their heads when they request me "to run over," as they call it, the faces looking out upon us from these plain unvarnished frames.