House of Seven Gables by Nathanial Hawthorne

Read this while visiting Salem, MA and, although we did not pay the outrageous fee to go through the HofSG, it was inspiration to revisit a book I'm sure I hated reading in high school. Verbose as it is, I ended up liking it. A little gothic, a little history, a little vocabulary challenge. This was considered popular romantic literature at the time. What does that say about the intellectual level of the common folk then compared to today?