In "The Custom-House," the introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne fabricates a story in which he explains that he stumbled upon a worn piece of red cloth in the shape of an A while working in Salem's Custom-House, where taxes were collected on imported goods. Accompanying the cloth, he continues, was an old manuscript about a certain Hester Prynne, who, two centuries earlier, had been forced to wear the now-faded A in public as punishment for committing the sin of adultery. While in reality Hawthorne found no such document, his novel was influenced by historical manuscripts about Puritan New England and his own ancestors. Hawthorne's family history harked back to the Massachusetts of the 1600s, where Puritan justice could reasonably have passed down such a punishment for adultery.
The Puritans in Massachusetts. In 1630 a wave of Puritans arrived in New England to populate the Massachusetts Bay Colony founded by John Winthrop. These Puritans came to Massachusetts in an effort to avoid the corruption that they thought had been plaguing the Church of England. Yet despite their objections to what was happening in the English church, they did not come to New England simply to escape that state of affairs but rather, as devoted reformers, to provide England with evidence of a model religious society.
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