The gabled house is real. It still stands on Turner Street by Salem harbour, the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion that Hawthorne knew and that is preserved today as the House of the Seven Gables museum. Around it the novel keeps its bearings in Salem: the little shop cut into the front gable, the garden and Maule's Well behind, the arched window over the by-street Hawthorne renames Pyncheon Street, and the railway on which Hepzibah and Clifford flee the town. The interiors are inferred to the real house, and Pyncheon Street is Hawthorne's name for a real Salem street, which is what the certainty labels are for.
The House of the Seven Gables (Turner-Ingersoll Mansion)
I. The Old Pyncheon Family · 3% through the novel
Salem today
Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.
The novel opens on the house itself, black in the east wind, its seven peaks pointing every way. Hawthorne makes the mansion a character before any person appears in it, carrying two centuries of Pyncheon guilt in its weather-stained timbers. The real house still stands on Turner Street.
explicitThe rusty, seven-gabled house is the real Turner-Ingersoll Mansion (1668) at 115 Derby Street on the Turner Street corner, by Salem harbour. Hawthorne knew it through his cousin Susanna Ingersoll, and it is preserved today as the House of the Seven Gables museum. The pin marks the mansion itself.
II. The Little Shop-Window · 13% through the novel
Salem today
After a moment's pause on the threshold, peering towards the window with her near-sighted scowl, as if frowning down some bitter enemy, she suddenly projected herself into the shop. The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic impulse of the movement, were really quite startling. Nervously—in a sort of frenzy, we might almost say—she began to busy herself in arranging some children's playthings, and other little wares, on the shelves and at the shop-window.
Ruined and proud, the old gentlewoman Hepzibah must at last open a penny shop in the gable to keep from starving. She sets out gingerbread animals and marbles with a trembling hand, the final throe of what called itself old gentility. The shop is a real feature of the house, its little window still shown to visitors.
inferredThe little shop is cut into the front gable of the house, facing the street; an ancestor added the shop-door a century before. The pin sits at the Turner Street frontage of the real mansion, where such a gable shop-window would have opened.
There was one other object in the garden which Nature might fairly claim as her inalienable property, in spite of whatever man could do to render it his own. This was a fountain, set round with a rim of old mossy stones, and paved, in its bed, with what appeared to be a sort of mosaic-work of variously colored pebbles.
Phoebe finds the neglected garden behind the house, and at its centre the old spring, Maule's Well, its bewitched water shifting quaint figures over the coloured pebbles. The well carries the wizard Maule's curse into the Pyncheons' own ground; the garden and well are kept behind the real house today.
inferredThe garden and its spring lie behind the house, toward the harbour. Maule's Well is the natural spring that drew the first settler to the spot and that turned brackish after Colonel Pyncheon seized the land; the museum keeps a garden and well on the seaward side. The pin marks that ground behind the real mansion.
If once he were fairly seated at the window, even Pyncheon Street would hardly be so dull and lonely but that, somewhere or other along its extent, Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye, and titillate, if not engross, his observation.
Broken by thirty years' unjust imprisonment, Clifford sits at the arched window and watches the life of the street go by, a scissor-grinder, a water-cart, an organ-grinder's monkey, a passing train. The window looks out on the by-street Hawthorne renames Pyncheon Street, the real Turner Street in Salem.
inspired byPyncheon Street is Hawthorne's name for the real by-street the house stands on, today's Turner Street in Salem. The arched window is the great second-storey window from which Clifford watches the street; the pin marks the Turner Street frontage of the house.
XVII. The Flight of Two Owls · 80% through the novel
Salem today
A train of cars was just ready for a start; the locomotive was fretting and fuming, like a steed impatient for a headlong rush; and the bell rang out its hasty peal, so well expressing the brief summons which life vouchsafes to us in its hurried career.
For once seized by reckless energy, Clifford pulls Hepzibah out of the house and onto a departing train, and the two shut-in Pyncheons are swept into the great current of human life. The novel's one journey beyond the house begins at Salem's railway station.
inferredFleeing Judge Pyncheon's dead body in the house, Hepzibah and Clifford board a train at the town's railway station, a large structure of gray stone. Salem's depot stood off Washington Street, roughly a kilometre from the house; the pin marks that historic station area, within the book's Salem setting.
