Michael Davitt Bell also suggests one of the similarities between "Old Esther Dudley" and The House of the Seven Gables.

"In 'Old Esther Dudley' characters come to represent not only opposed historical forces but also the opposed aesthetic forces of past reverie and present reality. . . . The opposition between Hancock and Old Esther Dudley is the essential opposition of Hawthorne's later historical fiction--the opposition between Maule and Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables, or the opposition between America and England in the unfinished English romance" (206-07). (courtesy Princeton University Press)