This is a first edition of “The Gentle Boy,” a short story that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once lauded as “the finest thing [Hawthorne] ever wrote.”  It is open to an original illustration by Sophia Peabody, Hawthorne’s fiancée at the time. Although Hawthorne did not intend this story for children, Ibrahim—the young, abandoned Quaker boy—has such an important role in the lives of the other characters and in the overall thematic direction that the story cannot but offer a commentary on the nature of children. Ibrahim has not—as the Puritan settler who finds him originally thinks—“[sprung] from an evil root,” neither is he “in darkness till the light doth shine upon [him].” On the contrary, he is a source of purity and goodness to be nurtured by society.

Boston Public Library, Rare Books & Manuscripts