The romance, however, describes the Maules as possessing some
of the traits known to have been characteristic of the Hawthornes: for
example, "so long as any of the race were to be found, they had been
marked out from other men--not strikingly, nor as with a sharp line,
but with an effect that was felt rather than spoken of--by an
hereditary characteristic of reserve." Thus, while the general
suggestion of the Hawthorne line and its fortunes was followed in the
romance, the Pyncheons taking the place of the author's family, certain
distinguishing marks of the Hawthornes were assigned to the imaginary
Maule posterity.
There are one or two other points which indicate Hawthorne's method of
basing his compositions, the result in the main of pure invention, on
the solid ground of particular facts. Allusion is made, in the first
chapter of the "Seven Gables," to a grant of lands in Waldo County,
Maine, owned by the Pyncheon family. In the "American Note-Books"
there is an entry, dated August 12, 1837, which speaks of the
Revolutionary general, Knox, and his land-grant in Waldo County, by
virtue of which the owner had hoped to establish an estate on the
English plan, with a tenantry to make it profitable for him. An
incident of much greater importance in the story is the supposed murder
of one of the Pyncheons by his nephew, to whom we are introduced as
Clifford Pyncheon. In all probability Hawthorne connected with this,
in his mind, the murder of Mr. White, a wealthy gentleman of Salem,
killed by a man whom his nephew had hired. This took place a few years
after Hawthorne's graduation from college, and was one of the
celebrated cases of the day, Daniel Webster taking part prominently in
the trial. But it should be observed here that such resemblances as
these between sundry elements in the work of Hawthorne's fancy and
details of reality are only fragmentary, and are rearranged to suit the
author's purposes.
In the same way he has made his description of Hepzibah Pyncheon's
seven-gabled mansion conform so nearly to several old dwellings
formerly or still extant in Salem, that strenuous efforts have been
made to fix upon some one of them as the veritable edifice of the
romance. A paragraph in the opening chapter has perhaps assisted this
delusion that there must have been a single original House of the Seven
Gables, framed by flesh-and-blood carpenters; for it runs thus:-"Familiar as it stands in the writer's recollection--for it has been an
object of curiosity with him from boyhood, both as a specimen of the
best and stateliest architecture of a long-past epoch, and as the scene
of events more full of interest perhaps than those of a gray feudal
castle--familiar as it stands, in its rusty old age, it is therefore
only the more difficult to imagine the bright novelty with which it
first caught the sunshine."