Truth in Fiction 

Although the main characters and the details of the events in "The Scarlet Letter" are fictional, it is a fiction set against a very real setting. Hawthorne read constantly, and was able to reconstruct colonial Massachusetts in his novel. Characters such as Mrs. Hibbins were real people, the punishment Hester's endured was a real punishment, even the descriptions of houses were taken from history books. 

Hawthorne's Sources

Hawthorne was a vivacious reader, and according to his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody, "made himself thoroughly acquainted with the ancient history of Salem, and especially with the witchcraft era." His son said that Hawthorne poured over the daily records of the past, from newspapers to journals. 

Dr. Caleb H. Snow's, "History of Boston"(1828) 

Hawthorne's main source for naming the buildings and layout of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. 

Snow goes into details not present in other histories of early Boston, such as the jailor's name and a description of the interior of the governor's house. 

From "The New England Sources of The Scarlet Letter," by Charles Ryskamp (1959): 

Map by Professor W. F. Shellman, Jr., of the School of Architecture, Princeton University.

His explicitly stated aim in The Scarlet Letter was that "the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other" (p. 55). His audience should recognize "the authenticity of the outline" (p. 52) of the novel, and this would help them to accept the actuality of the passion and guilt which it contained. 

Hawthorne's picture of Boston is done with precise authenticity. A detailed street-by-street and house-by-house description of the city in I65o is given by Snow in his History of Boston. It is certainly the most complete history of the early days in any work available to Hawthorne. Whether he had an early map of Boston cannot be known, but it is doubtful that any existed from the year I650. 

The characters named in The Scarlet Letter-other than Hester, Pearl, Chillingworth, and Dimmesdale, for whom we can find no real historical bases-were actual figures in history. The fictional protagonists of the action move and gain their being in part through their realistic meetings with well-known people of colonial Boston. 

In Snow's book there is this account of Mrs. Ann Hibbins: The most remarkable occurrence in the colony in the year I655 was the trial and condemnation of Mrs. Ann Hibbins of Boston for witchcraft. 

"Her husband, who died July 23, I654, was an agent for the colony in  England, several years one of the assistants, and a merchant of note in the town; but losses in the latter part of his life had reduced his estate, and increased the natural crabbedness of his wife's temper, which made her turbulent and quarrelsome, and brought her under church censures, and at length rendered her so odious to her neighbours as to cause some of them to accuse her of witchcraft. The jury brought her in guilty, but the magistrates refused to accept the verdict; so the cause came to the general court, where the popular clamour prevailed against her, and the miserable old lady was condemned and executed in June I656. (p. I40)" 

Ryskamp's Timeline of the Novel: 

Act One 
i. Chapters i-iii. The Market-Place, Boston. A June morning, 1642. 
ii. Chapter iv. The Prison, Boston. Afternoon of the same day. 
Act Two 
Chapters vii-viii. The home of Richard Bellingham, Boston. Late 
summer, 1645. 
Act Three 
i. Chapter xii. The Market-Place. Saturday night, early May, I649. 
ii. Chapters xiv-xv. The sea coast, "a retired part of the peninsula" 
(p. 202). Several days later. 
iii. Chapters xvi-xix. The forest. Several days later. 
Act Four 
Chapters xxi-xxiii. The Market-Place. Three days later