As you can tell from the notes, some people thought (and some still think)
that Hawthorne was bitter at having lost his job at the Custom-House, and
that he used this introduction as revenge. Hawthorne, on the other hand,
insists in the preface to the second edition that he wrote it in a spirit
of “genuine
good-humor.” What do you think? What is Hawthorne’s tone here?
Other than his descriptions of his fellow officials (and partly in those as
well), much of “The
Custom-House” concerns the past and people long-dead: Hawthorne’s ancestors,
Surveyor Pue, and Hester Prynne. Of course, The Scarlet Letter takes place two hundred years before Hawthorne is writing, yet as we have discussed, that connection was meaningful to him. What does
the past mean to Hawthorne? How does Hawthorne’s sense of history compare to Emerson’s?
People used to question whether “The Custom-House” — or at least everything before
Hawthorne’s description of finding the faded scarlet A — should be considered part of The Scarlet Letter. The assumption was that Hawthorne added it simply because The Scarlet Letter was too short to publish on its own as a book; it’s more a novella than a novel. (Hawthorne himself never called it a novel, preferring the label a romance, which does not imply a certain length.) More recently, however, critics have
argued that it is, in fact, integral to the larger work. Even if you
have never read The Scarlet Letter before, can you see any way that
this might be so?