‘The Flitting Phantoms of Iniquity’: A Spenserian Source for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Fancy’s Show Box: A Morality’ in the Ninth Canto of Book Two of The Faerie Queene

Abstract

The influence of Edmund Spenser’s romance epic upon Nathaniel Hawthorne’s life, tales, sketches, and novels is well attested. We know that The Faerie Queene was the first book that the boy Hawthorne purchased with his own money and that the adult Hawthorne would read Spenser aloud to his wife, Sophia Peabody, and to his children. ¹ Hawthorne called his daughter Una, the name of Spenser’s allegorical figure of Truth and the heroine of Book One of Spenser’s poem. ² Moreover, Hawthorne was not only good friends with the lawyer George Stillman Hillard, who prepared the first American edition of Spenser’s epic, but may also have written an approbatory literary review of Hillard’s...