In "The Intelligence Office," Hawthorne constructs a metaphysical bureau where a grave figure with "mysterious spectacles" records the world's lost and wanted items. The office itself is a shadowy space, its walls plastered with advertisements for everything from tenements to lost bloom, presided over by a clerk who seems "the spirit of a record." The story's structure is a procession of seekers—a mechanic, an Irish girl, a faded beauty—each requesting something missing from their lives. Yet the catalog subjects of "Short stories" and "New England — Social life and customs" only partially capture this work's scope. The excerpts reveal a narrative less concerned with regional customs than with a universal inventory of human lack, where the office becomes a stage for existential want rather than local color.

The Office as a Catalog of Human Want

The story's central conceit—an intelligence office that handles both tangible and intangible losses—mirrors the catalog's own function of classification. Hawthorne lists applicants with precise, almost bureaucratic detail: a "thriving mechanic" seeking a tenement, a "ruddy Irish girl" wandering from kitchen to kitchen, a "faded beauty inquiring for her lost bloom." These entries read like catalog entries themselves, each a miniature case study of desire. The office's advertisements cover "nearly all the Conveniences, or otherwise, that the imagination of man has contrived," suggesting that the catalog of human wants is exhaustive yet incomplete. The clerk's ledger, a "folio volume of ledger-like size," becomes a meta-catalog, recording wishes that range from wealth to a child's desire for stars. This framing invites readers to consider how any catalog—including the one classifying this story—imposes order on the messy reality of human longing.

The Book of Wishes: A Deeper Inventory

Within the office lies a "Book of Wishes," a volume that records desires with unsettling honesty. Hawthorne notes that "the most ordinary wish, that was written down with wearisome recurrence, was, of course, for wealth, wealth, wealth," but quickly complicates this by observing that wealth "covered as many different desires." The book contains wishes for power, youth, a fashionable coat, a new novel, even "a libertine, for his neighbor's wife." Crucially, Hawthorne distinguishes between the wish and the deed: "The holy and generous wish... often lavishes its sweet perfume on the blast of evil times," while foul wishes may never materialize. This volume, he argues, is "probably truer, as a representation of the human heart, than is the living drama of action." The catalog of wishes thus becomes a more honest record than any external biography, a point that resonates with the story's own status as a fictional catalog of human nature.

The Limits of Classification

Despite the office's systematic appearance, Hawthorne repeatedly suggests that its categories fail to contain the complexity of human experience. The applicant who enters "with his hat awry" and "a certain odd unsuitableness pervading his whole figure" asks for "a place"—a request so vague it defies the office's neat classifications. The clerk, the "Man of Intelligence," can only respond by consulting his ledger, but the story implies that some losses—like "yesterday's sunshine" or a lost shadow—resist cataloging. Hawthorne's own catalog subjects ("Short stories; New England -- Social life and customs") similarly impose a regional and generic frame on a tale that reaches toward the metaphysical. The story's setting in a "metropolitan office" rather than a specifically New England locale further underscores this tension. Readers should attend to how the narrative's allegorical drift strains against the concrete, catalog-like details that anchor it.

Hawthorne's "The Intelligence Office" rewards attention to its layered structure: the procession of seekers, the clerk's ledger, and the Book of Wishes each offer a different lens on desire and loss. Rather than reading for plot, consider how the story functions as a series of nested catalogs, each revealing more about the gap between what people seek and what they find. The office itself becomes a figure for the act of reading—a place where lost things are named but rarely recovered.