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The Scarlet Letter

A
Romance

By Nathaniel Hawthorne

Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1850

 

 


The Scarlet Letter Table of Contents

[page numbers as in Centenary Edition, see below]

Note: the new web page may appear in a new web browser window, perhaps directly on top of this window. We do this to keep track of links back and forth between windows and to make the jumps more quickly. You can just resize the new window and move the windows around the screen as you like so you can see them, then dismiss all but one when you are finished.

  1. Chapter I   The Prison-Door...47-48
  2. Chapter II   The Market-Place...49-59
  3. Chapter III   The Recognition...60-69
  4. Chapter IV   The Interview...70-77
  5. Chapter V   Hester at Her Needle...78-88
  6. Chapter VI   Pearl...89-99
  7. Chapter VII   The Governor's Hall...100-107
  8. Chapter VIII   The Elf-Child and the Minister...108-117
  9. Chapter IX   The Leech...118-128
  10. Chapter X   The Leech and His Patient...129-138
  11. Chapter XI   The Interior of a Heart ...139-146
  12. Chapter XII   The Minister's Vigil...147-158
  13. Chapter XIII   Another View of Hester...159-167
  14. Chapter XIV   Hester and the Physician...168-174
  15. Chapter XV   Hester and Pearl...175-181
  16. Chapter XVI   A Forest Walk...182-188
  17. Chapter XVII   The Pastor and His Parishioner...189-198
  18. Chapter XVIII   A Flood of Sunshine...199-205
  19. Chapter XIX   The Child at the Brook-Side...206-213
  20. Chapter XX   The Minister in a Maze...214-225
  21. Chapter XXI   The New England Holiday...226-235
  22. Chapter XXII   The Procession...236-247
  23. Chapter XXIII   The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter...248-257
  24. Chapter XXIV   Conclusion...258-264

A note on the text

We use the first edition as copy-text. The first American edition of The Scarlet Letter was published in Boston by Ticknor and Fields in 1850 and is thus now in the public domain. (See the legal notice if you plan to use these pages in any way other than as you would a copyrighted book from a library). We checked our OCR against the Norton Critical Edition text [Brad78]. The manuscript of the book has been lost, probably burned by Hawthorne after it was used to set the type. The second American version, set from new type, introduced many new errors, and was not proofread by Hawthorne, so cannot be used as copy-text (except the added preface). Another online edition, at Project Gutenberg (sl10), is an ASCII version, scanned at Dartmouth College from the first (pirated) English edition, and therefore has Anglicised spelling and punctuation (and also subtle as well as obvious errors)-- scrlt11.txt has a very short introduction and some corrections. The New Bartleby Library edition is quite attractive and has paragraphs numbered in the right margin.

There are minor differences between our text and the now-standard text. The authoritative text of The Scarlet Letter is the edition published by (and newly copyrighted by) the Ohio State University Press in 1962 as volume I of the 23-volume Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne [Ce0162] (and as corrected in 1963 and any later editions). It is approved for teaching purposes by the Modern Language Association. The $60 cloth edition has definitive notes on the text and the methodology of bibliography used. (The Library of America ISBN 0-949450-08-9 as well as several paperback editions license the Centenary Edition text.) In our notes to each chapter we note differences between our online edition and the Centenary Edition. Specifically: we have supplied the missing verb "form" in paragraph 52 of "The Custom-House", in accordance with the Centenary Edition page 279 (others have agreed with that reasonable guess); but we have not regularized the spelling of "die" or "elfish", nor changed the "sobre-hued" adjective in Chapter 24, though we agree it should be "sombre-hued" [Ce0162p275].

How to refer to page numbers. For advanced users we have added in the HTML source some elements, similar to the Text Encoding Initiative pagebreak SGML elements, corresponding to the Centenary Edition pagination, since that is likely to be the one used most for scholarly reference. If you want to use a Centenary Edition page reference to look up something online, you can type in your browser Location window something like this: "sl02.html#p50" to go to page 50 in Chapter 2. The book is divided into chapter files. You can determine by the Table of Contents above which chapter a particular page is in.

How to link to paragraph numbers. Since HTML pages don't have a fixed page length, for usual online references you should use links to each paragraph. The first line of each paragraph has an anchor named "gNN", where NN is the serial number for each paragraph, beginning with 01 in each chapter. So, for example, "sl24.html#g13" takes you to the last chapter, last paragraph. You can determine the paragraph number by hovering the mouse over, or clicking on, the second or first word in each online paragraph. We've added some blank lines at the bottom of the page, so that the line you jump to always appears at the top of the window.

Spelling and punctuation are not modernized. We have reproduced the text here without regard to the original layout or pagination. Em dashes are rendered as "--" (two hyphens or minus signs) without spaces on either side. The text is not justified to the right margin the same way as in the original. An appendix in the Centenary Edition notes decisions about how to render the original end-of-line hyphenation--we have made our own decisions, and HTML does not use hyphenated justification. Chapter numbers have been made Arabic instead of Roman. Spelling, capitalization, and punctuation have been neither modernized nor regularized. One author's footnote is included in the text, in the introduction. The text is divided into chapter files for convenient access. Since we have not modernized the text, we suggest you be careful before reusing some of Hawthorne's archaic words. You can look up synonyms in the online glossary as you read.

We have tried to make the text easy to read. And so we have turned off underlining and colors for links, but you can still find them by hovering your mouse over the words. You can refer to the Notes from each chapter as you read it (keep that window open as well as the Glossary window if you plan to select links to them--it will save time in reopening the windows if you do). Don't be alarmed if a new window opens when you go to the next page--we use that to keep track of the windows when linking back and forth. See the student and ?Help? files for more usage hints. And please feed back your suggestions on how our experiments are going for you!


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