'The Scarlet Letter, The Companion Edition' Presents Hawthorne's Complete 1850 First-Edition Text, Including 'The Custom-House,' with Discussion Questions Fenced Around the Secrets the Novel Withholds

NEW YORK, Oct. 31, 2026

In March 1850, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields of Boston published a romance that opened, improbably, in an office: a dismissed Salem customs surveyor, sorting the paperwork of a dead port, announced that he had found a rag of scarlet cloth and a manuscript in an upstairs room, and that the story of Hester Prynne was not his invention but his inheritance. Nathaniel Hawthorne's *The Scarlet Letter* sold out its first printing in days. A new Companion Classics edition, The Scarlet Letter, The Companion Edition, presents the complete book, 82,784 words: "The Custom-House" introductory sketch (14,774 words) and all twenty-four chapters of the romance (68,010 words), unabridged, in the text of the 1850 first edition, taken from Project Gutenberg eBook #33 and collated against an Internet Archive scan of the 1850 Ticknor, Reed, and Fields printing (cleanly bounded chapters agree at 0.954-0.973 token-for-token; a 150-probe test across the Custom-House and all twenty-four chapters matched at 89.3%, every miss resolving to scan noise). "The Custom-House" is printed in full, exactly as Hawthorne published it in 1850: it is part of the first edition, not an optional extra.

The story itself is America's most famous study of a public shame and a private one. Hester Prynne stands on Boston's scaffold with her infant daughter and a scarlet letter embroidered in gold upon her breast, and will not name the child's father, not to the magistrates, not to the crowd, not ever, on any terms the town can offer. Around her refusal Hawthorne sets a young minister wasting under an unnamed weight, a stranger who settles in Boston as a physician under a name not his own, and a child, Pearl, who asks from childhood the questions the whole town asks and no adult will answer. What the novel withholds, this edition withholds: its discussion questions and all of its copy are spoiler-fenced, so the secrets at the book's heart are disclosed only in their chapters.

Companion Material

Around the novel, the companion material, all of it original to this edition, includes an introduction on the book's found-manuscript frame and its double subject, guilt borne in public against guilt kept hidden; a Who's Who of seven entries, the Custom-House narrator honestly among them; four explainers, covering "The Custom-House" itself and the new preface Hawthorne added to the second edition later in 1850 (documented honestly in the companion; the printed text follows the first edition), Puritan Boston in the 1640s, its law, its scaffold, its public punishments, the scarlet letter as a symbol whose meanings multiply across the chapters, and Hawthorne's Salem ancestors, including the witch-trial judge who never repented; a short life of Nathaniel Hawthorne; a reading schedule in four meetings; and thirty discussion questions, spoiler-fenced by meeting.

Book Club Kit

Alongside the book, The Scarlet Letter, Book Club Kit offers the edition's discussion material as a printable PDF (27 pages, US Letter) for book clubs: the four-meeting plan, the Who's Who and explainers in full, all thirty discussion questions arranged by meeting, and the Symbol Tracker, a worksheet that follows the letter through the chapters, recording at each sighting who is reading it and what they make it mean, in the book's own order so the tracker can never spoil a later chapter. The kit is available for $7 through the editor's Payhip store.

Availability

The Scarlet Letter, The Companion Edition is available now as an eBook ($9.99) through Payhip, and in The Classics and Companions Shop on the editor's Linktree. Print editions follow on Amazon (paperback, $14.99; hardcover, $24.99). The text is public domain in the United States and in life+70 countries (Nathaniel Hawthorne died in 1864). The 1850 first edition carried no plate programme and no illustrations are reproduced or claimed in this edition; its cover is an original painting made for this edition.

About the Editor

Horace Harriott Jr. is a New York-based author and editor of more than two dozen books, including The Side Hustle Handbook, Master Playbook and The Ultimate Commissary Cookbook. This edition is part of his Companion Classics series of reading-together editions of public-domain classics.

About the Book

The Scarlet Letter, The Companion Edition, Nathaniel Hawthorne (author), Horace Harriott Jr. (editor). Companion Classics, independently published, October 2026. Text: the first edition (Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, Boston, 1850), via Project Gutenberg eBook #33, collated against an IA scan of the 1850 Ticknor, Reed, and Fields printing; "The Custom-House" + 24 chapters; 82,784 words; no illustrations reproduced (see note above); interior proof 327 pages, 6 x 9 in.