I love looking at the names of the characters in The Scarlet Letter. They are almost laughably over-the-top romantic. The poor reverend is not a character you would expect to be gloomy and dim if you judged him solely on his profession; that however, is exactly what he is. Dimsdale is a brooding, cheerless man who nearly buckles daily under the weight of his own inability to deal with the guilt of his sin. When paired alongside Hester, the reader can so who the real "man" is. Hester owns up to her guilt, Dimsdale doesn't.
Dimsdale is portrayed as a gentleman and a scholar, one that the entire town seems to be ready to bow down and worship. Yet he is exactly the kind of man that the townspeople love to hate. His fear of their judgement mark him as a significantly weaker character then Hester, for example.
Depicted as frail and and tiny, the reverend is a walking contradiction. One would imagine the reverend being more like Chillingsworth, tall and proud rather then meek and mild and scared. It is these sort of ironies that makes The Scarlet Letter such an interesting read.
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