Prison and Cemetery

The first chapter of The Scarlet Letter (1850) is two pages long, and it contains one of the driest sentences in American fiction. "The founders of a new colony," Nathaniel Hawthorne writes, "whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison." Megan Marshall, in her Rebind commentary on The Scarlet Letter, keeps returning to it:

"Any community, Hawthorne tells us, that seems to be the first thing they do is set up a graveyard and a prison, you know. Much utopia is this going to be."

Then there is the date. Hawthorne set his novel in the 1640s, the decade in which the Puritans in England cut off a king's head, and he opened it with a preface in which he jokes about his own firing from the Salem Custom-House as a decapitation. "So decapitation and decapitation," Marshall says. "He's playing with serious stuff, let's put it that way. Yeah, he's playing with fire."

Margaret Atwood, in her Rebind commentary on A Tale of Two Cities (1859), chose Charles Dickens for a related reason. She thinks the present is a revolution's first year, and what frightens her is the sequel. Neither commentator mentions the other's book, and Marshall never says the words Terror or Thermidor. But read together, the two commentaries divide the subject between them: Dickens shows the revolution that eats itself, and Hawthorne shows the one that won.