Phoebe vs. Hepzibah.
Compare Hawthorne on Patrician vs. Plebian with the rather less assertively modern French Lieutenant's Woman of John Fowles on Aristocracy vs. Bourgeoisie.
The House of the Seven Gables.
Fowles is notably more open to the aristocratic liberty of those who are free from toil because, being rich, they live by the toil of others.
Or at least more superficially understanding.
Hawthorne is out of sympathy even with the coupon-clippers, those bourgeois aristos of the capitalist age who live on the labor of others as surely as any Duke or Earl.
An attitude equally forthright in Mark Twain, in Huckleberry Finn and elsewhere.
In The Scarlet Letter, we saw in the introductory "The Customs House" his contempt for government employees whose charges were essentially sinecures.
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