The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter

History of Collins

In 1819, Millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Life & Times

About the Author

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804, with the surname Hathorne. It is widely thought that the reason for the spelling change was that he hailed from the town of Salem, where a number of his relatives had been involved with the infamous witch trials that took place in the closing decade of the 1600s. In fact, his great grandfather, John, had been an executioner. Nathaniel did publish some early material using his original surname however, so it seems more likely that he changed it to save confusion over spelling as it was pronounced in a similar way to ‘Hawthorne’ anyway.

Hawthorne was unsure of his abilities as a writer initially, publishing his first novel Fanshawe anonymously in 1828. In addition, there was no established market for novels so he remained only locally known as a writer until he published The Scarlet Letter in 1850. By then it was possible to mass produce books and this title was one of the first in American literary history. The book also sold well and enabled Hawthorne to become a professional author at a time when one could count them all on one hand.

In a more competitive environment Hawthorne may not have done so well, but as it was he had a ready market waiting to buy his books. Despite their morbidity and intensity they sold well because people had developed a taste for reading fiction. In part this was due to the establishment of stable and polite society in America since the dust had settled from the revolution. It became fashionable to be seen to have the time to read and it gave like-minded people a talking point over dinner and during other social occasions.

Hawthorne was undoubtedly skilled at his craft. He wrote well, had an eye for literary detail and understood that allegory was a useful devise in ensuring that readers got more from his books than just a good story. In this regard he was at odds with Edgar Allan Poe, who was more freeform with his words, indulging in prose that explored the recesses of his imagination without being moralistic or allegorical. One might say that Poe used writing as an art form, while Hawthorne used it as a craft. He took a pragmatic approach by being more mindful of what his readership would wish to read. Poe worked with creative abandon, coming up with ever more challenging visions.

Hawthorne took a wife, Sophia Peabody, with whom he had three children. Sophia moved to England with her children following Hawthorne’s death in 1864. She was an accomplished artist and a member of the American transcendentalist movement, which promoted the idea of individualistic spiritualism as a means of attaining a heightened state of mind, as opposed to indoctrination by organized religion. This was not something that her husband particularly concurred with and he used his later writing to criticize its principles.

The Themes of the Novel

Nathaniel Hawthorne was given to writing extremely intense and dark prose. The Scarlet Letter is rather like the recollection of a feverish nightmare. It doesn’t so much invite the reader in, as pull them in, and then attempt to suffocate them with depressing allegory about what can happen to people when they break the moral and ethical codes of civilized society.

This is an American novel, yet it is more puritanical than most Victorian novels, of which it was contemporaneous, being published in 1850. Hawthorne seems not to have been overly religious himself, but he explores themes of strict doctrine by setting the book in a 17th-century Boston, where Puritanism is in its heyday. So, this book is a period novel of its day, harking back to an era when misbehaviour could have dire consequences

The Puritans were, in essence, very conservative Protestants with intransigent beliefs about good and bad behaviour. This censorious moral view was especially stern when it came to matters of pleasure, including sex. The Protestant church had risen in reaction to the lax excesses of the Catholic Church, which either drew a blind eye to behavioural weakness or allowed people to confess their sins. The Puritans took things as far as they could the other way, so that punishment and penance were the outcome for anyone who broke the rules. Of course, one had to share the same belief system in order to understand and agree to such measures. This seems to be the central theme that Hawthorne is addressing and exploring in The Scarlet Letter.

Some literary scholars have interpreted the book as an expression of Hawthorne’s own view that 19th-society was sliding into a moral and ethical morass, and therefore in need of reform. Others have taken it the other way, by suggesting that Hawthorne was fundamentally a liberal thinker and was actually celebrating a more open-minded modernity by reminding society of how repressive things used to be. Either way, The Scarlet Letter is not a book to be taken lightly, which is why Hawthorne’s genre is often described as ‘dark romanticism’.

Unlike in England, professional novel writing was not well established in America during the first half of the 19th century. The agenda for early American writers was somehow different, perhaps because of the relative lack of historical context and a ubiquitously defined cultural identity. American Independence had only been declared in 1776 and the nation was a melting pot of old and new settlers. This meant that certain themes for novels would have specific readerships. To write something that captured the ‘American’ imagination more generally was a tall order.

As a consequence of this, Hawthorne retreated into an imagined world of extremes with his literature. Other American writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, were doing similar things in their attempts to emerge as novelists. The Scarlet Letter is set in pre-independent America, so that it carries a sense of history and legacy, as well as it being an allegorical tale about the moral fortitude of American founders.

In fact, it also criticizes the enemy, the English, as the central characters plan to escape their tormentors by travelling across the Atlantic to a new life free from persecution. This is clearly a statement suggesting that England is a place of refuge because it is relatively iniquitous. As it goes, that was quite true by definition, for the majority of early American settlers had travelled to the New World precisely because they wished to establish colonies run by firm religious regime, away from those who lacked the suitable fibre. What they hadn’t reckoned on was that society naturally comprises a spectrum of personality types whatever the intended societal ethos, as a result of nature and nurture. So, there will always be subversive individuals, who cannot and will not adhere to mores, conventions and orthodoxies imposed upon them by others.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

History of Collins

Life & Times

The Custom-House: Introductory to ‘The Scarlet Letter’

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Custom-House: Introductory to ‘The Scarlet Letter’

It is a little remarkable, that – though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends – an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public. The first time was three or four years since, when I favoured the reader – inexcusably, and for no earthly reason that either the indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine – with a description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an Old Manse. And now – because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion – I again seize the public by the button, and talk of my three years’ experience in a Custom-House. The example of the famous ‘P.P., Clerk of this Parish,’ was never more faithfully followed. The truth seems to be, however, that when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him better than most of his school-mates or life-mates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed only and exclusively to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer’s own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent, and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader’s rights or his own.

It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a certain propriety, of a kind always recognised in literature, as explaining how a large portion of the following pages came into my possession, and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein contained. This, in fact – a desire to put myself in my true position as editor, or very little more, of the most prolix among the tales that make up my volume – this, and no other, is my true reason for assuming a personal relation with the public. In accomplishing the main purpose, it has appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint representation of a mode of life not heretofore described, together with some of the characters that move in it, among whom the author happened to make one.

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf – but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life: except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood – at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass – here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the Republic; but with the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military, post of Uncle Sam’s Government is here established. Its front is ornamented with a portico of half a dozen wooden pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite steps descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterises this unhappy fowl, she appears, by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general trucu-lency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens careful of their safety against intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking at this very moment to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle: imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eiderdown pillow. But she has no great tenderness even in her best moods, and, sooner or later – oftener soon than late – is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.

The pavement round about the above-described edifice – which we may as well name at once as the Custom-House of the port – has grass enough growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn by any multitudinous resort of business. In some months of the year, however, there often chances a forenoon when affairs move onward with a livelier tread. Such occasions might remind the elderly citizen of that period, before the last war with England, when Salem was a port by itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own merchants and ship-owners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin while their ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or four vessels happen to have arrived at once – usually from Africa or South America – or to be on the verge of their departure thitherward, there is a sound of frequent feet passing briskly up and down the granite steps. Here, before his own wife has greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed shipmaster, just in port, with his vessel’s papers under his arm in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his owner, cheerful or sombre, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme of the now accomplished voyage has been realised in merchandise that will readily be turned to gold, or has buried him under a bulk of incommodities such as nobody will care to rid him of. Here, likewise – the germ of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, careworn merchant – we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste of traffic as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his master’s ships, when he had better be sailing mimic boats upon a mill-pond. Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor, in quest of a protection or the recently arrived one, pale and feeble, seeking a passport to the hospital. Nor must we forget the captains of the rusty little schooners that bring firewood from the British provinces: a rough-looking set of tarpaulins, without the alertness of the Yankee aspect, but contributing an item of no slight importance to our decaying trade.

Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were, with other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for the time being, it made the Custom-House a stirring scene. More frequently, however, on ascending the steps, you would discern – in the entry if it were summertime, or in their appropriate rooms if wintry or inclement weather – a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between a speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of almshouses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolised labour, or anything else but their own independent exertions. These old gentlemen – seated, like Matthew at the receipt of customs, but not very liable to be summoned thence, like him, for apostolic errands – were Custom-House officers.

Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door is a certain room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty height, with two of its arched windows commanding a view of the aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across a narrow lane, and along a portion of Derby Street. All three give glimpses of the shops of grocers, block-makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers, around the doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping, clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is strewed with gray sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a stove with a voluminous funnel; an old pine desk, with a three-legged stool beside it; two or three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and infirm; and – not to forget the library – on some shelves, a score or two of volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the Revenue Laws. A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms a medium of vocal communication with other parts of the edifice. And here, some six months ago – pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged stool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eyes wandering up and down the columns of the morning newspaper – you might have recognised, honoured reader, the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery little study, where the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the willow branches on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go thither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The besom of reform has swept him out of office, and a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his emoluments.

This old town of Salem – my native place, though I have dwelt much away from it both in boyhood and maturer years – possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I had never realised during my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty – its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame – its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other – such being the features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged checker-board. And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has struck into the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settlement which has since become a city. And here his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthy substance with the soil, until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to know.

But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor – who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man of war and peace – a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their sect, which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his dry old bones, in the Charter Street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust! I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them – as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist – may be now and henceforth removed.