"The Celestial Rail-road" is one of the best-known and widely circulated of the group of sketches that Hawthorne wrote soon after his marriage in 1842 to Sophia Peabody. A satirical allegory drawing on Pilgrim's Progress, it was immediately popular and reprinted from the United States Magazine and Democratic Review by at least nine other periodicals before its appearance in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) ... In establishing the text of the piece for the Centenary Edition (1974) of Mosses from an Old Manse, the editors used the Howe manuscript as copy-text; they provide a description of it at X, 575-76.

NH MS 1

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