The Scarlet Letter

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.

Hester Prynne

The Custom-House, Salem

The Custom-House · 1% through the novel

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.

Hawthorne frames the novel as a manuscript he claims to have found in the disused upper storey of the Salem Custom-House, wrapped around a faded scrap of gold-embroidered scarlet cloth. The wharf-side building is real and still stands; the found manuscript is the fiction that lets the tale begin.

explicit The Salem Custom-House where Hawthorne worked as Surveyor is a real building, still standing at Derby Street on Salem's waterfront, some 25 km north of Boston, so it is flagged as an excursion beyond the book's setting.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗