The House of the Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables
Hawthorne's next novel, written the following year, about a Salem family living with a curse from the witch trials.
Read our takeThe Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
A woman in Puritan Boston is sentenced to wear a red letter A for life, and refuses to name her child's father.
- 1850
- Melancholy
- Atmospheric
- dark
- lyrical
- challenging
About Nathaniel Hawthorne
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeThe Scarlet Letter is Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel of Puritan Boston, published in March 1850. Hester Prynne has a baby while her husband is missing, and she will not say who the father is. The magistrates sentence her to stand on the pillory platform for three hours and to wear a mark of shame on her dress for the rest of her life. The mark is a scarlet letter A, embroidered in gold. The father is the town's admired young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, who keeps silent for seven years. Hester's husband arrives in Boston under the false name Roger Chillingworth and sets out to find the guilty man. Hawthorne wrote the book in Salem in the months after he lost his job at the Custom House. The first printing sold quickly, and the novel made him famous.
The story, in more detail
Nathaniel Hawthorne lost his post as Surveyor of the port of Salem in 1849, after a change of government in Washington. His publisher, James T. Fields, later described visiting him that winter in a small house in Salem. Hawthorne was ill, low and sure that nobody wanted his books. Fields guessed he had a manuscript hidden in a chest of drawers. As Fields was leaving, Hawthorne called him back and handed over a roll of pages. He said it was either very good or very bad, and he did not know which.[1]
Hawthorne had planned a book of several stories with this one as the longest. Fields persuaded him to publish it alone. In a letter Fields later printed, Hawthorne worried that one long, dark story would weary many readers. He also suggested printing the title in red ink.[1] He finished the novel in February 1850 and read the ending aloud to his wife, Sophia. He told his friend Horatio Bridge that it broke her heart and sent her to bed with a headache.[2]
Ticknor, Reed and Fields of Boston published the book on 16 March 1850 in a first printing of 2,500 copies. A second printing of 2,500 followed on 22 April. By 1854 the American printings came to 10,300 copies in all, according to the University of Virginia's special collections library.[3] The Library of Congress chose it for its exhibition Books That Shaped America.[4]
The book opens with a long essay called "The Custom-House", about Hawthorne's own years at the Salem customs office. The narrator says he found a faded red letter A in the building's attic, with papers telling Hester Prynne's story. Salem was furious. In the preface to the second edition, dated 30 March 1850, Hawthorne wrote that the town could hardly have been angrier if he had burned the Custom House down. He reprinted the essay without changing a word.[5][6]
The full plot
A crowd waits outside the prison in Boston, in the 1640s. Hester Prynne comes out carrying her three-month-old daughter. On the breast of her gown is a scarlet A, embroidered with gold thread so richly that it looks like a decoration. She stands on the pillory platform in the market-place for three hours. The Reverend John Wilson and the young minister Arthur Dimmesdale urge her to name the father. She refuses.[6]
A stranger in the crowd is Hester's husband, an older English scholar. He sent her ahead to Boston two years earlier and has not been heard of since. In prison he makes her promise to keep his identity secret. He takes the name Roger Chillingworth and sets up in Boston as a physician. He swears to find the child's father.[6]
Hester lives with her daughter, Pearl, in a cottage at the edge of town and earns her keep with her needle. Pearl is a quick, wild child who fixes on the letter. Dimmesdale's health fails, and Chillingworth moves in with him as his doctor. He comes to suspect the minister and torments him in secret. Dimmesdale fasts, whips himself and stands one night on the empty scaffold. Hester and Pearl join him there, and a meteor lights up the sky.[6]
Seven years pass. Hester's good works among the sick and poor change how the town sees her, and some people say the A means Able. She sees what Chillingworth is doing to the minister, and meets Dimmesdale in the forest to tell him who the doctor really is. They agree to escape to Europe with Pearl on a ship leaving for Bristol. Then Hester learns that Chillingworth has booked a passage on the same ship.[6]
How it ends — spoilers ahead
On Election Day Dimmesdale preaches the best sermon of his life. Afterwards, in front of the whole town, he climbs the scaffold with Hester and Pearl and confesses that he is the father. He opens his shirt to show something on his chest, which the narrator does not describe, and dies in Hester's arms.
Chillingworth withers and dies within the year, leaving his fortune to Pearl. Hester and Pearl leave for Europe. Years later Hester comes back alone to her old cottage and puts the scarlet letter on again of her own free will. Letters with foreign seals suggest Pearl is married and happy abroad. Hester spends her last years counselling unhappy women. She is buried near Dimmesdale in the graveyard beside King's Chapel, under a single stone marked with an A.
Themes and analysis
What the letter means
The novel never uses the word adultery. The court's sentence speaks only of a mark of shame, and readers are left to work out what the A stands for. The meaning also shifts as the book goes on. Seven years into her sentence, after Hester has nursed the sick and helped the poor, some townspeople say the letter means Able.
Hester controls the letter from the first scene. She has embroidered it herself in scarlet cloth and gold thread, and the narrator says it is so fine that it looks like the last touch to her dress. The Puritan rules on plain clothing did not allow that kind of splendour. At the end she chooses to wear the letter again, though no magistrate could have made her.
Hawthorne had used the image before. His earlier story "Endicott and the Red Cross", later collected in Twice-Told Tales, describes a young woman in early Massachusetts made to wear the letter A on her gown. She has embroidered it in scarlet cloth with golden thread, so that it might have been taken to mean "Admirable".
The hidden sinner and the open one
Hester's shame is public, and she survives it. Dimmesdale's is hidden, and it destroys him. The narrator states the lesson in Chapter XX: nobody can wear one face in private and another in public for long without losing track of which is true. The last chapter repeats it as the one moral the narrator will draw: "Be true! Be true! Be true!"
Dimmesdale himself names Chillingworth as the worst sinner in the story. In the forest he tells Hester that the old man's revenge has been blacker than their sin, because he violated the sanctity of a human heart. Hester answers that what they did had a consecration of its own. The narrator does not settle which of them is right.
Henry James wrote the first book-length study of Hawthorne in 1879. He called the novel the finest piece of imaginative writing yet produced in America. He also thought it the most consistently gloomy of the great English-language novels, dark all through with a single spot of vivid colour.
The Scarlet Letter in Paris
French readers met the novel through Émile Daurand Forgues, a Paris journalist and translator. In 1852 he wrote a long essay on Hawthorne for the Revue des Deux Mondes, a Paris literary review. He said the novel went to the heart of the great problem of marriage. He added that it treated the subject with a freedom of thought rarely found among Anglo-American writers.
A French translation followed in 1853 as La Lettre rouge A, published in Paris by Gabriel de Gonet. The translator signed himself Old Nick, a pen name the Bibliothèque nationale de France identifies as Forgues. Hachette reissued his translation in 1865 as La Lettre rouge, this time under the name E.-D. Forgues.
Hawthorne himself saw Paris only briefly. He spent a freezing week at the Hôtel du Louvre in January 1858, on his way from England to Rome, and walked across the street to the Musée du Louvre. His notebook of the week admits he had no sympathy for the French, and ends with him quite tired of Paris.
Quotes from The Scarlet Letter
On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other.
Why we recommend it
The book that made Hawthorne
He was a little-known writer of magazine stories until March 1850. The first printing of 2,500 copies sold quickly, and a second printing followed five weeks later.
A short classic
The novel is about 200 pages in most editions, and the main story has only four characters: Hester, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth and Pearl.
A heroine who wins
Hester is punished in the first chapter and spends the rest of the book outlasting the punishment. The man who hid his guilt is the one it destroys.
An early Paris success
Émile Daurand Forgues wrote about the novel in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1852, and his French translation appeared in Paris in 1853.
What this book explores
The people in its pages
Hester Prynne
A young wife sent ahead to Boston by her husband, who has a child in his absence. She will not name the father, wears the scarlet A for life, and earns the town's respect through her work with the sick and poor.
Arthur Dimmesdale
The admired young minister who is Pearl's father. He keeps the secret for seven years, and it wrecks his health. He confesses on the scaffold on Election Day and dies there.
Roger Chillingworth
The false name taken by Hester's husband, an older scholar thought lost at sea. He poses as a physician, finds out the father and torments him in secret.
Pearl
Hester's daughter, a quick and wild child who is fascinated by the letter. Chillingworth leaves her his fortune, and she ends the book married and living abroad.
Also in the book
Mistress Hibbins
Governor Bellingham's sister, whom the town suspects of witchcraft. She invites Hester to meetings in the forest.
Bring it to book club
- The word adultery never appears in the novel. Why might Hawthorne have left it out?
- Hester embroiders her own letter in gold. Is that defiance, pride, or something else?
- Dimmesdale says Chillingworth's sin is worse than his own. Do you agree?
- What is Pearl for in the story? Is she a real child or mainly a symbol?
- Why does Hester come back to Boston and put the letter on again at the end?
- Does "The Custom-House" change how you read the story that follows it?
Timeline
1849
Hawthorne loses his post as Surveyor of the port of Salem after a change of government. During the winter he gives James T. Fields the unfinished manuscript.
1850
He finishes the novel in February and reads the ending to his wife, Sophia.
1850
Ticknor, Reed and Fields publish the book in Boston on 16 March, in 2,500 copies.
1850
A second printing of 2,500 appears on 22 April, with a new preface replying to Salem's anger at "The Custom-House".
1852
Émile Daurand Forgues discusses the novel in a long essay on Hawthorne in the Revue des Deux Mondes in Paris.
1853
La Lettre rouge A, the first French translation, is published in Paris by G. de Gonet.
1879
Henry James calls it the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in America.
Book editions
- Paperback
- Penguin Classics
- 2003
- 9780142437261
- Paperback
- Oxford University Press
- 9780199537808
- Paperback
- Bantam Classics
- 1986
- 9780553210095
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, Boston
- 1850
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
Twice-Told Tales
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Twice-Told Tales
His first collection of stories. "Endicott and the Red Cross" already shows a woman forced to wear the letter A.
Read our takeMosses from an Old Manse
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Mosses from an Old Manse
His second collection, including "Young Goodman Brown", another story about secret sin in Puritan Massachusetts.
Read our take
The Crucible
Arthur Miller's play about the Salem witch trials of 1692, where Hawthorne's ancestor John Hathorne sat as a judge.
Read our takeUncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncle Tom's Cabin
The American bestseller published two years later, which Paris also read in translation within months.
Read our takeThe Scarlet Letter: frequently asked questions
What is The Scarlet Letter about?
A young woman in Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne, has a baby while her husband is missing and refuses to name the father. She is sentenced to wear a scarlet A on her dress for life. The father is the town's minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, who hides his guilt for seven years while her husband, disguised as a doctor, torments him.
What does the A stand for?
Adultery, though the novel never uses the word. The court calls it a mark of shame, and readers are left to understand it. Later in the book, after years of Hester's work among the sick and poor, some townspeople say the A means Able.
Who is Pearl's father?
The Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, the young minister who is one of the first to urge Hester to name the father. He confesses in public at the end of the novel and dies on the scaffold.
Who is Roger Chillingworth?
Hester's husband, an older English scholar who was thought lost on his way to Boston. He arrives on the day of her punishment, hides his identity, and poses as a physician so that he can find and torture her lover.
How does The Scarlet Letter end?
Dimmesdale confesses on the scaffold and dies in Hester's arms. Chillingworth dies within the year and leaves his money to Pearl. Hester later comes back to Boston alone, wears the letter again by choice, and is buried near Dimmesdale under one gravestone.
Do I have to read "The Custom-House" first?
No. The essay is Hawthorne's account of his own job in the Salem customs office, and the story proper begins at Chapter I. Many readers come back to the essay afterwards. The essay explains how the narrator claims to have found the letter and Hester's story.
When was The Scarlet Letter published, and did it sell?
On 16 March 1850, by Ticknor, Reed and Fields of Boston. The first printing of 2,500 copies sold quickly, and a second printing of 2,500 followed on 22 April.
Is there a Paris connection?
Yes. The Paris critic Émile Daurand Forgues wrote about the novel in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1852, and his French translation, La Lettre rouge A, was published in Paris in 1853. Hawthorne himself spent one week in Paris in January 1858.
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References
References
The sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document The Scarlet Letter, its publication, and its place in literary history.
2↑Hawthorne (English Men of Letters series)
BiographyMacmillan and Co., 1879Used forHenry James on the novel, and his quotation of Hawthorne's February 1850 letter to Horatio Bridge.
3↑This Just In: Scarlet Letters from the Backlog
WebsiteUniversity of Virginia Library, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library (Notes from Under Grounds blog), 2013Used forThe University of Virginia's special collections library on the dates and sizes of the first printings.
4↑Books That Shaped America, 1850 to 1900 (exhibition)
ArchiveLibrary of CongressUsed forThe Library of Congress exhibition entry, with its first-edition copy from the Rosenwald Collection.
5↑The Scarlet Letter (Project Gutenberg etext of the 1878 James R. Osgood edition, with the Preface to the Second Edition)
NovelProject Gutenberg, eBook #25344, 1878Used forThe 1878 Osgood edition, which prints Hawthorne's reply to Salem's anger at "The Custom-House".
7Twice-Told Tales (Project Gutenberg etext of the 1889 David McKay reprint)
NovelProject Gutenberg, eBook #13707, 1837Used forThe earlier story with a woman wearing the letter A.
8Romanciers américains: Nathaniel Hawthorne (Revue des Deux Mondes, nouvelle période, tome 14, 1852, pages 337 to 365; Wikisource transcription)
PeriodicalRevue des Deux Mondes (Paris); Wikisource, 1852Used forÉmile Daurand Forgues's 1852 essay on Hawthorne in the Revue des Deux Mondes, as transcribed on French Wikisource.
9La Lettre rouge-A-: roman américain / par Nathaniel Hawthorne ; traduit par Old Nick, Paris: G. de Gonet, 1853 — catalogue record
Official recordBibliothèque nationale de France, 1853Used forThe Bibliothèque nationale de France record for the 1853 Paris translation.
10La lettre rouge: roman américain / Nathaniel Hawthorne ; traduit par E.-D. Forgues, Paris: L. Hachette, 1865 — catalogue record
Official recordBibliothèque nationale de France, 1865Used forThe BnF record for Hachette's 1865 edition under Forgues's own name.
11Forgues, Émile Daurand (1813-1883) — authority record, listing the pseudonym Old Nick
Official recordBibliothèque nationale de FranceUsed forThe BnF authority record identifying Old Nick as Forgues's pen name.
12Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books, Volume 1 (Project Gutenberg etext)
MemoirProject Gutenberg, eBook #7879, 1871Used forHawthorne's notebook of his January 1858 week in Paris.
13Open Library — The Scarlet Letter editions
WebsiteOpen LibraryUsed forLibrary catalogue records for every modern ISBN listed.
14The Scarlet Letter
NovelNathaniel Hawthorne, 1850Used forThe primary text represented by this page, used for descriptions of the work’s contents and for any quoted passages shown here.
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Why these sources are here
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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