Nathaniel Hawthorne is the first of the writers we have been examining to have had direct access to John Winthrop's text of “A Modell of Christian Charity.” Two years after the appearance of Emerson's Nature, in 1838, the Massachusetts Historical Society printed Winthrop's speech in its Collections from an eighteenth-century manuscript copy held by the New York Historical Society. It is hardly likely that Hawthorne, with his well-documented commitment to research in colonial history as the groundwork of his writing, would have overlooked the appearance of so pivotal a work by a figure in whom he had displayed his own artistic interest as early as 1830. By 1838, however, Hawthorne had already established the importance he placed upon the domestic images that Winthrop had drawn upon as the model for communal life in 1630. A careful reading of Winthrop's text may well have confirmed that importance and contributed to Hawthorne's decision to place key events in The Scarlet Letter on the night of Winthrop's death and to unite in Hester Prynne the distinct dramatic powers that Winthrop found readily available in the typological significance of Eve. But “A Modell of Christian Charity” is clearly more an impetus than an influence on Hawthorne's artistic course. As such it can help clarify both his relations with his contemporaries and the repeated concerns of his fiction.

Hawthorne's exploitation of the themes touched upon in Winthrop's address to the Arbella emigrants is far more pervasive and wide-ranging than that of his Concord neighbors.