Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850, prefacing it with "The Custom-House," a long autobiographical essay about working as a surveyor in Salem. Set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston, the story begins after a sentence has already been passed: Hester Prynne stands on a scaffold wearing a scarlet letter A, having borne an illegitimate child whose father she refuses to identify. Her estranged husband Roger Chillingworth arrives in Boston just in time to witness her humiliation and immediately undertakes a secret project to identify and destroy the man responsible. That man is Arthur Dimmesdale, the most respected minister in the community, who maintains his public piety while privately destroyed by guilt he lacks the courage to make public.
The novel's central structural irony is that public shame proves, over the course of the narrative, to be less corrosive than private concealment. Hester lives openly with her punishment and, through her labor and service to the community, reconstructs a life of practical meaning. Dimmesdale, unpunished and celebrated, deteriorates physically and morally until his final confession on the scaffold. Chillingworth, whose revenge is nominally justified, is the novel's most deliberately repulsive figure, a man whose obsessive scrutiny of another person's secret has consumed and hollowed him out. Hawthorne does not distribute these outcomes through a simple moral schema; Hester's relative flourishing is constrained by her continued exclusion, and whether the community's judgment was ever legitimate haunts the novel throughout.
The novel works as a precise study of the different social effects of public and private accountability. Dimmesdale's situation, admired for virtues he privately knows he does not possess, unable to confess because the consequences would be immediate and total, is a recognizable psychological trap. Hawthorne gives him seven years of it. The slow deterioration, and the community's continued admiring incomprehension, illuminate something about the gap between public reputation and private reality that remains recognizable regardless of the specifically Puritan setting.
Charles Dickens walked up to 20 miles a night through London streets gathering material for his novels.
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