How did Nathaniel Hawthorne create the tone, how did he introduce the characters and how did he introduce the setting for chapter one in the house of the seven gables?

What Hawthorne cares about, and it comes up constantly throughout the book, is the inheritance that accompanies the Pyncheons and lead them down to a bitter path: "weakness, defects, dark passions, the tendency to do the evil and the moral weaknesses that lead to crime pass from one generation to another".