Hawthorne’s father died when Nathaniel was four years old, and from that time his uncle Robert Manning took charge of his education, sending him to the best schools and afterwards to college.  When the lad was about nine years old, while playing bat and ball at school, he lamed his foot so badly that he used two crutches for more than a year.  His foot ceased to grow like the other, and the doctors of the town were called in to examine the little lame boy.  He was not perfectly restored till he was twelve years old.  His kind-hearted schoolmaster, Joseph Worcester, the author of the Dictionary, came every day to the house to hear the boy’s lessons, so that he did not fall behind in his studies. [There is a tradition in the Manning family that Mr. Worcester was very much interested in Maria Manning (a sister of Mrs. Hawthorne), who died in 1814, and that this was one reason of his attention to Nathaniel.] The boy used to lie flat upon the carpet, and read and study the long days through.  Some time after he had recovered from this lameness he had an illness causing him to lose the use of his limbs, and he was obliged to seek again the aid of his old crutches, which were then pieced out at the ends to make them longer.  While a little child, and as soon almost as he began to read, the authors he most delighted in were Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Thomson.  The “Castle of Indolence” was an especial favorite with him during boyhood.  The first book he bought with his own money was a copy of Spenser’s “Faery Queen.”

One who watched him during his childhood tells me, that “when he was six years old his favorite book was Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’:  and that whenever he went to visit his Grandmother Hawthorne, he used to take the old family copy to a large chair in a corner of the room near a window, and read it by the hour, without once speaking.  No one ever thought of asking how much of it he understood.  I think it one of the happiest circumstances of his training, that nothing was ever explained to him, and that there was no professedly intellectual person in the family to usurp the place of Providence and supplement its shortcomings, in order to make him what he was never intended to be.  His mind developed itself; intentional cultivation might have spoiled it....  He used to invent long stories, wild and fanciful, and tell where he was going when he grew up, and of the wonderful adventures he was to meet with, always ending with, ‘And I’m never coming back again,’ in quite a solemn tone, that enjoined upon us the advice to value him the more while he stayed with us.”

When he could scarcely speak plain, it is recalled by members of the family that the little fellow would go about the house, repeating with vehement emphasis and gestures certain stagy lines from Shakespeare’s Richard III., which he had overheard from older persons about him.  One line, in particular, made a great impression upon him, and he would start up on the most unexpected occasions and fire off in his loudest tone,