INTRODUCTORY NOTE THE SCARLET LETTER. "THE Scarlet Letter" was the first sustained work of fiction completed by Hawthorne after he had be come known to the public through the "Twice-Told Tales ;" and was the first among his books which attained popularity. He had meanwhile published "Grandfather's Chair," for children, and his "Mosses from an Old Manse." But it was not until he once more took up his residence in Salem, while occupying the post of surveyor at the Custom House of that port, that he began to hear as he expressed it to a friend—“a romance growling in his mind." This romance was the now world-famous one, which is again offered to readers in the present volume. It was begun some time in the winter of 1849-50, after the author had been deprived of his official situation. He completed the book February 3, 1850, and on the fol lowing day wrote to Horatio Bridge: "I finished my book only yesterday, one end being in the press in Boston, while the other was in my head here in Salem; so that, as you see, the story is at least fourteen miles long. . . . Some portions of the book are powerfully written; but my writings do not, nor ever will, appeal to the broadest class of sympa thies, and therefore will not attain a very wide popu larity. Some like them very much; others care noth ing for them and see nothing in them. There is al introduction to this book, giving a sketch of my Cus tom House life, with an imaginative touch here and there, which will perhaps be more attractive than th main narrative. The latter lacks sunshine." So much, indeed, did the gravity and gloom of the situation in which he had placed Hester and Dimines dale weigh upon him, that he described himself as hav.. ing had “a knot of sorrow" in his forehead all winLike Balzac, he secluded himself while writing a romance, and, in fact, saw scarcely any one. It was noticed that he grew perceptibly thinner at such times; and how strongly the fortunes of his imaginary progeny affected him is well shown by a reminiscence in the "English Note-Books " (September 14, 1855): "Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at his coolness in respect to his own pathos, and compare it with my emotions when I read the last scene of 'The Scarlet Letter' to my wife, just after writing it - tried to read it, rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if i were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm." Nor was it only while in the act of composition with the pen that his fictions thus occupied all his faculties. During the time that he was engaged with "The Scarlet Letter," he would often become oblivious of his surroundings and absorbed in reverie. One day while in this mood he took from his wife's work-basket a piece of sewing and clipped it into minute fragments, without being aware of what he had done. This habit of unconscious destruction dated from his youth. The writer of these notes has in his possession a rockingchair use by Hawthorne, from which he whittled away the arms while occupied in study or in musings, at college. He is likewise said to have consumed an entire table in that manner during the same period. Finished in February, "The Scarlet Letter" was issued the next month. Although the publisher, Mr. Fields, formed a high estimate of its merit as a work of art, his confidence in its immediate commercial value appears not to have been great, if we may judge from the following circumstance. The first edition printed numbered five thousand copies in itself a sufficiently large instalment but the type from which these impressions had been taken was immediately distributed; showing that no very extensive demand was looked for. But this edition was exhausted in ten days, and the entire work had then to be re-set and stereotyped, to meet the continued call for copies. An illustration of Hawthorne's literary methods, and the extreme deliberation with which he matured his romances from the first slight germ of fancy or fact, is offered in the story of "Endicott and The Red Cross," written and published before 1845. Mention is there made of "a young woman with no mean share of beauty, whose doom it was to wear the letter A on the breast of her gown, in the eyes of all the world and her own children. And even her own children knew what that initial signified. Sporting with her infamy, the lost and desperate creature had embroidered the fatal token in scarlet cloth, with golden thread and the nicest art of needle-work; so that the capital A might have been thought to mean Admirable, or anything rather than Adulteress." When this story appeared, Miss E. P. Peabody remarked to a friend: "We shall hear of that letter by and by, for it evidently has made a profound impression on Hawthorne's mind." |