A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the Vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison. But on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him. (Chapter 1, The Prison-Door)

Basic set up:

This is the beginning of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, set in the early days of settlement of Boston. People are gathering outside a prison in which the adulteress, Hester Prynne, is being kept. Way to rubberneck, guys.

Hawthorne's novel is set in the early days of America—when settlers were first beginning to make their homes in Boston. The book, in other words, is very much concerned with exploring American identity. What does it mean to be an American? What are American values and how did they develop? What sets the New World apart from the Old?

Hawthorne's preoccupation with the early days of America, in other words, sets American identity and values right at the heart of the book. They're crawling all over the pages of this thing.

We mentioned, of course, that American Romantic writers were really into exploring the themes of democracy and freedom. These themes are definitely central to Hawthorne's novel. And we see it in the first couple of paragraphs of the book, which dwell on the prison house. You don't get much freedom in a prison, right? Or, for that matter, in Puritan society. You do get nifty white bonnets when you hang with the Puritans, though.

The Scarlet Letter is one of the big blockbusters of American Romanticism. Notice that it's a novel. American Romantics like Hawthorne made the novel a huge part of the American Romantic tradition. In British Romanticism, poetry dominated.

What's also interesting about Hawthorne's work is that it's a historical novel: it's set in the early days of Puritan settlement of America. Hawthorne not only played a big part in developing the novel genre within the Romantic tradition, he also played a big part in developing the genre of the historical novel.