The House of the Seven Gables

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.

Hepzibah Pyncheon

The House of the Seven Gables (Turner-Ingersoll Mansion)

I. The Old Pyncheon Family · 3% through the novel

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.

explicit The 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.

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