The Note-Books show that the plan of an English romance, turning upon the
fact that an emigrant to America had carried away a family secret which
should give his descendant the power to ruin the family in the mother
country, had occurred to Hawthorne as early as April, 1855. In August of
the same year he visited Smithell's Hall, in Bolton le Moors, concerning
which he had already heard its legend of "The Bloody Footstep," and from
that time on, the idea of this footprint on the threshold-stone of the
ancestral mansion seems to have associated itself inextricably with the
dreamy substance of his yet unshaped romance. Indeed, it leaves its mark
broadly upon Sibyl Dacy's wild legend in "Septimius Felton," and
reappears in the last paragraph of that story. But, so far as we can
know at this day, nothing definite was done until after his departure for
Italy. It was then, while staying in Rome, that he began to put upon
paper that plot which had first occupied his thoughts three years before,
in the scant leisure allowed him by his duties at the Liverpool
consulate. Of leisure there was not a great deal at Rome, either; for,
as the "French and Italian Note-Books" show, sight-seeing and social
intercourse took up a good deal of his time, and the daily record in his
journal likewise had to be kept up.
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