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"The life of the Custom House lies like a dream behind me . . . Soon, likewise, my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street . . . It may be, however, — oh, transporting and triumphant thought! — that the great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of the scribbler of bygone days . . ."
In the mid-1800s when Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote these words in the Custom House preface to The Scarlet Letter, he could not have imagined the millions of readers a century later who would "think kindly of the scribbler of bygone days" and continue to make his novel a best-seller. The mist of imagination that falls over Salem, Massachusetts, in his description is the same aura that permeates the setting of his novel. Look for the Boston of 1640 in history books, and you will not find the magical and Gothic elements that abound in Hawthorne's story. For the mind of genius has created a Boston that is shrouded in darkness and mystery and surrounded by a forest of sunshine and shadow. In writing The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne was creating a form of fiction he called the psychological romance, and woven throughout his novel are elements of Gothic literature. What he created would later be followed by other romances, but never would they attain the number of readers or the critical acclaim of The Scarlet Letter.
