The Salem Belle

In compliance with your request, I now send you a manuscript which contains all the material circumstances of a remarkable legend, founded on the singular events of 1692. The original chronicle is lost, but its general features were strongly impressed on my memory, and I committed them to writing, some years since, and very soon after the discovery that the first manuscript was missing. I hope you will be able to make such use of these materials, as shall expose the danger of popular delusions, and guard the public mind against their recurrence. It is too late to revive the folly of witchcraft, but other follies are pressing on the community,-fanaticism in various ways is moulding the public feeling into unnatural shapes, and shadowing forth a train of undefined evils, whose forms of mischief are yet to be developed. In this state of things, our true wisdom is to take counsel of the past, and not suffer ourselves to be led astray by bold and startling theories, which can only waste the mental energies, and make shipwreck of the mind itself on some fatal rock of superstition or infidelity.

Samuel Chase Coale,Wheaton College

“Richard Kopley’s discovery that Ebenezer Wheelwright’s The Salem Belle (1842) was a precursor to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) is substantiated by his careful and perceptive attention to detail. The novel itself is fun and quirky and explores the kinds of historical and cultural issues that also motivated Hawthorne. Kopley’s argument is sound, clear, and persuasive, and the connections he makes are right on target.”

Leland S. Person,University of Cincinnati

“Hawthorne scholars will be intrigued by Richard Kopley’s claim that several passages toward the end of The Salem Belle inspired passages in the forest and New England holiday sections of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Reprinting The Salem Belle also contributes an additional text to conversations about the witchcraft hysteria that many people, especially students, probably know from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. The novel provides another fictional window onto seventeenth-century Boston and Salem society―especially the social and religious scenes. It is an easy read, and when the plot thickens with the vengeance-inspired accusations that Mary Lyford is a witch, it is compelling.”

Joel Myerson,University of South Carolina

“Richard Kopley has provided a valuable service by making available this historical work about Salem, which served as one of the sources for The Scarlet Letter. Not only is it interesting to look for intertextualities between the two books, but this work stands on its own as a fascinating portrait of the turbulent times it describes.”

David S. Reynolds,author of Beneath the American Renaissance and Walt Whitman's America

“It is wonderful to have The Salem Belle back in print, edited expertly by Richard Kopley. Published eight years before The Scarlet Letter, Ebenezer Wheelwright’s novel was an important part of the cultural mix behind Hawthorne's masterpiece, as Kopley demonstrates in his perceptive introduction. The Salem Belle also stands on its own as a thought-provoking novel about Puritan times written from the perspective of nineteenth-century America.”

About the Author

Richard Kopley is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Penn State DuBois.Ebenezer Wheelwright was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1800. He spent most of his professional life as a West Indies merchant in Boston.

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