The House of the Seven Gables, the old house

Nathaniel Hawthorne published 1851 412 characters medium

Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.

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About this text

Hawthorne published The House of the Seven Gables in 1851, a year after The Scarlet Letter. He wrote it in Lenox, Massachusetts, in a small red farmhouse. A gabled house in Salem connected with his own family is usually named as the model, and it still stands. The full text is on Project Gutenberg.

Where this text comes fromThe house is introduced the way a person would be. It is rusty, it has a face made of gables, it stands rather than sits, and by the end of the passage it has more presence than anyone who lives in it, which is exactly the intention: the building is the antagonist of the novel. Hawthorne applies the word rusty to wood rather than to metal, and the choice is deliberate enough that readers have argued about it. The house has a real model in Salem and it is still standing.

What you might not noticeThe compound by-street survives here with its hyphen intact, a form now almost entirely lost from English, where the word would either close up or split apart. Source

What it trainsTen capital letters in 412 characters, eight of them inside sentences, which is a heavy Shift load for prose and comes from the second sentence, where the family name Pyncheon arrives three times. Two sentences average thirty-five words each, held together by seven commas and two semicolons. Three hyphens appear in compounds that modern English would write differently. The longest word is circumference, thirteen letters, and it arrives late in the second sentence where concentration is already thinning.

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Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg