political guillotine, the whole may be considered as the "Posthumous Papers of a Decapitated Surveyor"; and the sketch which I am now bringing to a close, if too autobiographical for a modest person to publish in his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman who writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world! My blessing on my friends! My forgiveness to my enemies! For I am in the realm of quiet! The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me. The old Inspector,-who, by the by, I regret to say, was overthrown and killed by a horse, some time ago; else he would certainly have lived for ever,-he, and all those other venerable personages who sat with him at the receipt of custom, are but shadows in my view; white-headed and wrinkled images, which my fancy used to sport with, and has now flung aside for ever. The merchants,-Pingree, Phillips, Shepard, Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt,—these, and many other names, which had such a classic familiarity for my ear six months ago,-these men of traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position in the world,-how little time has it required to disconnect me from them all, not merely in act, but recollection! It is with an effort that I recall the figures and appellations of these few. Soon, likewise, my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloudland, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth, it ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me; for-though it has been as dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some importance in their eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in this abode and burial-place of so many of my forefathers-there has never been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a literary man requires, in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind. I shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do just as well without me. It may be, however,-O, transporting and triumphant thought! -that the great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to come, among the sites memorable in the town's history, shall point out the locality of THE TOWN-PUMP!? 7. "A Rill from the Town Pump," in Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1837), is a monologue describing the life of Salem during one day, as viewed from a central vantage point. The Scarlet Letter I. The Prison-Door A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopias of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prisonhouse, somewhere in the vicinity of Corn-hill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old church-yard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the new world. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with 8. Sir Thomas More's Utopia (translated "nowhere"), written in Latin in 1515, was, in various translations, long familiar to the early settlers as a satiric contrast of England with an ideal society. 9. Johnson died in the year of his arrival with the first settlers of Boston (1630); his land provided the site for prison, graveyard, and church, epitomizing the Puritan drama of sin, death, and salvation. Although Hawthorne suggests that the novel starts "some fifteen or twenty years" later than 1630, it actually begins in 1642 and ends in 1649, as established by other internal evidence. The best-established historical date is March 26, 1649, the date of Governor Winthrop's death, in Chapter XII, although Hawthorne changes it to "early May"; he further says that this is "seven long years later" than the opening scene, which therefore must have occurred in the spring of 1642. Also Richard Bellingham addresses Hester on the pillory in his capacity as governor, and his term ended in 1642. In Chapters VII and VIII Pearl's age is three, hence the date is 1645. The final scene of the novel, portrayed in Chapters XXI to XXIII, occurred on a single day still "seven years" after the opening scene, or in 1649, and by internal evidence in the late spring or early summer. its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.1 This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,—or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson,2 as she entered the prison-door,—we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow. II. The Market-Place The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston; all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom the white man's fire-water had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, 1. The contrast between the prison, "the black flower of civilized society," and the "wild rose-bush," betokening the pity and kindness in "the deep heart of Nature," here foreshadows a theme which persists, in rising crescendo and a variety of figures. 2. Mrs. Ann (e) Hutchinson (1591 1643) preached Antinominianism. This, like the later transcendentalism, which influenced Hawthorne, rejected "salvation by works" and extolled salvation by faith, the intuitive revelation of God's indwelling "grace," a concept resembling the transcendentalists' "oversoul." the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on the part of the spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such bystanders at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself. It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when our story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her own. The women, who were now standing about the prison-door, stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen; and the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone. "Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty, "I'll tell ye a piece of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women, being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester 3. The forest image, of natural love and freedom, is overshadowed by the mention of witch Hibbins. Throughout the novel, this evil witch figure reap pears at Hester's darkest moments. Prynne. What think ye, gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates have awarded? Marry, I trow not!" "People say," said another, "that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have come upon his congregation." "The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch,—that is a truth," added a third autumnal matron. “At the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's forehead. Madam Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me. But she, the naughty baggage,-little will she care what they put upon the bodice of her gown! Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever!" "Ah, but," interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by the hand, "let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart." "What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown, or the flesh of her forehead?" cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. "This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there no law for it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray!" "Mercy on us, goodwife," exclaimed a man in the crowd, "is there no virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows? That is the hardest word yet! Hush, now, gossips; for the lock is turning in the prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself." The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into the 5. Friends, acquaintances (usually used of women). 6. The acceptance of such cruel punishments as whipping, branding, and execution was the Puritan response to "the Scripture": "Thou shalt not commit adultery" (Exodus xx: 14). The "old colony" (Plymouth) law merely called for exposure of the cloth A on the gown. This statute was dated 1694. Earlier, during the period of this novel, public whipping was universal; at some towns, e.g., Duxbury, the adulteress was condemned "to be whipt at a cart's tayle through the town's streets." Salem's earliest statute decreed death for fornication but never enforced it; but John Winthrop's Journals of 1644 record the execution of Mary Latham for adultery. In the records of the Salem Quarterly Court for the 1688 term the punishment of a girl named Hester (but not Prynne) is set down; Hawthorne probably knew about her, since he had combed through records of this nature and because his first American ancestor is named executioner: "Hester Craford, for fornication with John Wadg, as she confessed, to be severely whipped * * * a month or six weeks after the birth of the child *** and the Worshipful Major William Hathorne to see it executed on a lecture day" (the "lecture" would draw a maximum crowd). See Charles Boewe and Murray Murphey, "Hester Prynne in History," American Literature, May, 1960. |