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The House of the Seven Gables and “The Daughters of Dr. Byles“: A Probable Source

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

John R. Byers Jr.
John R. Byers Jr.*
Affiliation:
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
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Abstract

The House of the Seven Gables may owe a considerable debt to Eliza Leslie's “The Daughters of Dr. Byles,” a sketch of the two spinster great-granddaughters of Increase Mather in Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine (Jan., Feb., 1842). Both Hepzibah Pyncheon and the Misses Mary and Catherine Byles reside in black ancestral homes shaded by giant trees and furnished with portraits, chairs, and tables from another age. Hepzibah, who physically resembles Catherine, lives, like the aged sisters, under the imprint of the past, seldom venturing into the world; she simply awaits the return of her brother, whose miniature she cherishes and whose prison sentence has kept him away for thirty years, as the Misses Byles await the return of their nephew, whose portrait hangs prominently in the parlor and whose self-imposed exile has lasted forty years. Hawthorne closes his romance as Leslie closes her essay, with the exchange of a temporal home for one of eternity.

Type
Notes, Documents, and Critical Comment
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 1 , January 1974 , pp. 174 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 177 Introd., The House of the Secen Gables (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1965), pp. xxii-xxiii. The CEAA text will be abbreviated hereinafter SG.

Note 2 in page 177 Randall Stewart, Introd., The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1932), pp. lxviii-lxxxix.

Note 3 in page 177 'Lorenzo Sabine (Boston: Little, 1847), pp. 190–92.

Note 4 in page 177 Marion L. Kesselring, Hawthorne's Reading: 1828–1850 (New York: New York Public Library, 1949), p. 60.

Note 5 in page 177 The son of Josiah Byles and Elizabeth Mather Greenough Byles, widow of William Greenough and daughter of Increase Mather, Mather Byles, because of his father's early death, was reared by his mother with the help of Increase and Cotton Mather. Kenneth B. Murdock, “Byles, Mather,” Dictionary of American Biography, m (New York: Scribners, 1929), 381–82.

Note 6 in page 177 Mary died 1 Oct. 1832; Catherine died 19 July 1837. A. W. H. Eaton, The Famous Mather Byles (Boston: Butterfield, 1914), p. 217. Catherine is chiefly remembered as the friend and literary adviser of William Hill Brown, the author of The Power of Sympathy. She was sister to Gawen Brown's second wife; William Hill Brown was of Gawen's third marriage. Milton Ellis, “The Author of the First American Novel,” American Literalure, 4 (Jan. 1933), 356–68.

Note 7 in page 177 Hawthorne's use of the name “Pyncheon,” however, brought down unexpectedly the wrath of Pynchon descendants. See, e.g., Norman Holmes Pearson, “The Pynchons and Judge Pyncheon,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 100 (Oct. 1964), 235–55.

Note 8 in page 177 Mather Brown, the painter, was half brother to William Hill Brown.

Note 9 in page 177 Charvat, pp. xxii-xxiii. The sisters Byles, however, do keep in a square box “four commissions, each bearing the signature of a different British sovereign,” the first commission being “the appointment of their grandfather to the government of” Massachusetts by Queen Anne (D, p. 64).