This chapter examines how Hawthorne's writing of the early 1850s – a period in which his long-time preoccupation with sympathy intersects with a new attention to (a new) philanthropy – reveals an effort to redefine his own aesthetic orthodoxies as he casts about for a more viable means of representing social difference. Hawthorne's contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic recognised this effort and sought to identify it with a broader shift in artistic values commensurate with an emerging national consciousness. I would like to feature two such critics at the outset in order to establish some of the ways in which Hawthorne's writing came to be viewed as a site of contestation over key cultural and aesthetic categories.

In his 1854 Illustrations of Genius, Henry Giles offers a spirited defence of what he terms ‘the philanthropic sentiment’ against those who would deny the existence of this ‘love to man in general’. Giles, a prominent Boston minister, tellingly waves ‘all metaphysical argument’ in favour of observations regarding individual moral psychology and collective institutional action in his attempt to demonstrate the instinctive nature of this particular form of feeling.