Mapped
The Bostonians
Henry James
A novel of reform-era Boston, mapped to real ground. Olive Chancellor's house stands on the water side of Charles Street, on the flat of Beacon Hill, looking over the new-made Back Bay; the reformer Miss Birdseye holds her meeting out in the South End; Verena crosses to Cambridge and the great Memorial Hall at Harvard; and the climax comes at the Music Hall, the concert hall where she is to give her big address. Summer takes them to "Marmion" on the southern cape, James's name for the real village of Marion, Massachusetts. A run of scenes moves the fight to New York.
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The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Puritan Boston in the 1640s, most of it long gone: the scaffold in the market-place, the jail on Prison Lane, Governor Bellingham's glittering hall, and the forest at the edge of the peninsula. Almost every pin here is inferred to its documented site, which is exactly what the certainty labels are for. The frame, The Custom-House, is a real excursion north to Salem, where Hawthorne worked and where the building still stands.
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