St. Peter's Church

St. Peter's Church in Salem, Massachusetts, serves as the burial ground of Jonathan Pue, a former Surveyor of His Majesty's Customs for the Port of Salem, whose exhumation during the church's renovation in the early nineteenth century yields the physical and documentary evidence that inspires Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter." The church's graveyard becomes the site where the material remnants of Pue's existence—an imperfect skeleton, fragments of apparel, and a remarkably well-preserved wig of majestic frizzle—are unearthed, while the discovery of his private papers and the scarlet letter itself within the Custom-House archives provides the authenticating core of Hawthorne's narrative.

Discovery and Exhumation

The renovation of St. Peter's Church leads to the digging up of Jonathan Pue's remains in the little graveyard adjoining the edifice. Nothing is left of the respected predecessor save an imperfect skeleton, some fragments of apparel, and a wig of majestic frizzle that, unlike the head it once adorned, is in very satisfactory preservation. This exhumation occurs about fourscore years after Pue's death, and Hawthorne recalls reading an account of it in a newspaper of recent times. The physical state of Pue's remains—the skeleton incomplete, the clothing in tatters, but the wig intact—creates a striking contrast between the decay of the body and the survival of the artificial, suggesting the persistence of official identity beyond mortal dissolution.

Connection to the Scarlet Letter Manuscript

The exhumation of Pue's remains is directly linked to the discovery of the scarlet letter and its accompanying manuscript within the Custom-House. Hawthorne, while poking and burrowing into the heaped-up rubbish in the unfinished second-storey room of the Custom-House, chances upon a small package carefully done up in a piece of ancient yellow parchment. This envelope, bearing the air of an official record from some period long past, contains a commission under the hand and seal of Governor Shirley in favour of Jonathan Pue as Surveyor of His Majesty's Customs for the Port of Salem. Within this commission are found documents of a private nature, written in Pue's own hand, which include a reasonably complete explanation of the whole affair of Hester Prynne. The scarlet letter itself—a rag of fine red cloth, much worn and faded, with traces of gold embroidery, wrought with wonderful skill of needlework in a now forgotten art—is twisted around a small roll of dingy paper containing Pue's narrative. The discovery of these materials in the Custom-House, rather than in the church graveyard, completes the chain of evidence: Pue's death happened suddenly, and his papers, probably kept in his official desk, never came to the knowledge of his heirs, remaining unopened in the archives for decades.

Narrative Significance

St. Peter's Church functions as the geographical and symbolic anchor for the authenticity of Hawthorne's tale. The exhumation of Pue's remains and the recovery of his wig provide a tangible, almost grotesque, link to the historical past, while the survival of his mental part—the documents and the scarlet letter—offers the evidential foundation for the story. Hawthorne presents himself as the inheritor of Pue's legacy, receiving the scarlet symbol and the explanatory manuscript from the ghostly hand of the ancient Surveyor, who exhorts him on the sacred consideration of filial duty and reverence to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public. The church graveyard thus becomes the threshold between the dead past and the living narrative, the place where the material traces of a forgotten official are unearthed and transformed into the imaginative substance of literature.