> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rebindclassics.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Letter - URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/the-scarlet-letter-the-letter/ - Published: 2026-01-02T00:01:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-02T18:28:37.000Z - Description: Marshall traces Hester's scarlet A to a 1680 incest trial in Hawthorne's own family and a 1694 colonial law he almost surely read. - Author: Andrew Wessels - Tags: Megan Marshall on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, #video Marshall's question is blunt: did Nathaniel Hawthorne really find the tattered letter A of *The Scarlet Letter* in the Salem Custom House? She answers with a paper trail. In 1833 the politician Rufus Choate lectured Salem on the need for New England romances like Walter Scott's, and Hawthorne turned instead to conflicts inside a Puritan community. Then she goes to the Salem Athenaeum, where she believes he read a 1680 trial record accusing his great-great grandfather's brother of incest with his own two sisters. The brother ran; the sisters were whipped and made to sit in the meeting house with capital letters pinned over their heads. Marshall reads Hawthorne's apology for his witch-trial ancestors as cover for this, and pairs it with a 1694 colonial law that put a capital A on adulterers. She admits it shocked her. It leaves you at the prison door with Hester, asking whether Emerson's self-reliance, a term he reserved for men, might be her saving grace. ## Transcript Well, what do you think? Did Nathaniel Hawthorne really find a tattered scarlet letter "A" in a pile of forgotten documents in a dusty corner of Salem's Custom House wrapped around a rolled up manuscript that tells the story we're reading, or at least gives its authentic outline? We know that Surveyor Pue, Hawthorne's long ago predecessor, really did exist. So how about the letter? In 1833, while Hawthorne was up in his bedroom working at becoming a writer, the politician Rufus Choate gave a lecture in Salem called "The Importance of Illustrating New England History by a Series of Romances Like the Waverley Novels." Ever since the American Revolution separated the colonies from England to form a new nation, there had been calls for the American people to prove their independence in writing, not just in a declaration or a constitution, but in a uniquely American literature. Rufus Choate was suggesting that New England had the history to support works of fiction like the phenomenally popular novels of Sir Walter Scott set in the British Isles. During a period of insurrection, Choate was probably hoping someone would write a novel about the Revolutionary War, but if Hawthorne heard Choate's speech or read about it in the Salem newspapers, his imagination turned to an earlier period of American history and to internal interpersonal conflicts. These conflicts had ramifications for the Puritan community, as we've seen in the opening chapters, but they're also timeless. "The past was not dead," Hawthorne wrote so memorably in lines you've just read. The past Hawthorne summons up in *The Scarlet Letter* is so alive that few people think of the book as historical fiction, and I have to ask, who's reading the Waverley novels now? My point is, Hawthorne knew history could sell, and he knew his history even if he almost literally embroidered it. Back to that letter "A": what a fabulous invention, but not entirely made up and not without a connection to Hawthorne's own family history. In the Custom House introduction, he tells us about his Puritan ancestors, one of whom persecuted Quakers and another, the hanging judge John Hawthorne, a leader in Salem's infamous witch trials. Nathaniel Hawthorne even writes that he "will take shame upon myself for their sakes" and offer the apologies they never did. But I share the opinion of several Hawthorne experts who believe that with this apology the novelist was covering for an even more disturbing bit of family history he'd run across in the documents he scoured for sources of his fiction, not documents he found in the Custom House while working there, but in Salem's excellent lending library, the Salem Athenaeum, which like the Custom House still stands today. We don't know what Hester Prynne's "A" stands for. Hawthorne tells us there is some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation. Thinking of the lone woman with babe in arms emerging from prison, we might guess adultery, but we're not told. In the past, Hawthorne uncovered something personal. We find clues. Perhaps it was family lore, but more likely Nathaniel Hawthorne read the trial transcript from the year 1680 when his great-great grandfather's brother was accused of committing incest with his own two sisters. These were members of the first generation of Hawthorne's mother's family, the Mannings, to immigrate from England to America. The accused brother ran away before the trial, but the two sisters, one of whom had married and was pregnant with her first child, could not leave. Both sisters were found guilty and spent a night in prison. Their sentences required, in words Hawthorne almost certainly read, that they "be whipped upon the naked body" and at the next church service "stand or sit upon a high stool in the open middle alley of the meeting house with a paper upon each of their heads written in capital letters: THIS IS FOR UNCLEAN CARRIAGE WITH MY NATURAL BROTHER." Such punishments revolt us today. More than that, we question the blame placed on the sisters who may have been victims of rape or coercion. Hawthorne, who admired his own two sisters and had married into a family of impressive women, was likely no less revolted. Hawthorne also almost surely read the early laws of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which in 1694 stated that persons convicted of committing adultery "will be publicly whipped and shall forever after wear a capital A sewed upon their upper garments." Hawthorne set *The Scarlet Letter* a few decades before both the Manning incest trial and the 1694 law. But what's a few decades when you're writing 200 years in the future? This is disturbing information. I know. I was shocked when I learned about the Manning case, and I imagined Hawthorne coming across the account for the first time too. Maybe we just need to sit with this and then move forward with our reading of the next four chapters, as Hester moved forward with her life after her shocking treatment by the men who decreed her punishment and the men who, could it be, betrayed her privately. The novel provokes us to ask: Is Hester Prynne a sinner, a martyr, or even a saint? We see her step from the prison house door, as if by her own free will, Hawthorne tells us, to confront what he calls her "realities," which enclose her in "a sphere by herself." Hester's self-reliance, a term that Ralph Waldo Emerson enshrined in the American vocabulary but applied only to men in his time, may prove to be her saving grace. Read on and find out.