With two pages of accounts preceding the journal entries.
Hawthorne kept this notebook from September 1841 to after May 30, 1852: the earliest entry (p. 1) is dated September 26th 1841, and the final entry notes that Hawthorne "wrote the last page ... of the Blithedale Romance, April 30th, 1852." Entries through November, 1841, were written while Hawthorne was living at Brook Farm, the Transcendentalist community near West Roxbury.
Some portions of text fully canceled with dark brown or black ink. Pages numbered 1-168 by Hawthorne; leaves numbered 1a-85a in pencil on the rectos. About half of the leaf numbered 31 (p. 61-62) excised. A note on the back flyleaf (numbered in pencil 85a) dated April 1865 indicates that the portion excised was "cut out for the Chicago fair." The note goes on to copy the text now missing.
Part of the collection of Hawthorne's "American notebooks," which are described in four individual records.
Describing excursions and travels. Recording observations and ideas for future stories, including The Scarlet Letter, which he records on p. 86: "the life of a woman, who, by the old colony law, was condemned always to wear the letter A, sewed on her garment, in token of her having committed adultery."