When Tom begins hanging around the Lapham home, everybody believes he’s interested in Irene, the younger and prettier of the two daughters. The Coreys have a handsome son named Tom. He would like to be like the Coreys if only he had more “class.” He believes that any association with the Corey family would benefit him professionally and socially. The Coreys are a snooty, blue-blood Boston family of Silas Lapham’s acquaintance. To solidity his family’s status in Boston society, he has his heart set on building a showy, expensive ($100,000 in 1875) mansion in one of the most fashionable sections of Boston. Soon he is at the forefront of the American paint market and has all the heartache and responsibilities of a titan of industry. When his father discovers a “mineral paint mine” on their property in Vermont, Silas is able to turn the enterprise into a successful money-making venture. Penelope is the older of the two she’s serious, clever and not so pretty as Irene.Īs you might expect, Silas came from humble beginnings. He also has two deb daughters, Penelope and Irene, of marriageable age. He has a matter-of-fact (she nags) wife named Persis who speaks her mind and doesn’t mind telling Silas exactly what she thinks of him and his business dealings.
His grammar borders on the atrocious and he tends to be a bit of a blowhard. Despite his fortune and his station in the business world, “Corporal” Lapham (he fought at the Battle of Gettysburg) is a little rough around the edges and doesn’t quite fit in with Boston crème de la crème. The fictional Silas Lapham is an American “type,” a self-made millionaire, one of Boston’s nouveau riche in the decades after the Civil War.
He was at the forefront of a new wave of American writing and has been called the “Dean of American Letters.” Of the thirty-five novels he wrote, The Rise of Silas Lapham is the most popular and most enduring. After the “romanticist” writers of the nineteenth century such as Hawthorne and Poe, Howells was an advocate of “realism” in fiction realism, that is, that’s not sordid. The Rise of Silas Lapham ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen KoppĪmerican writer William Dean Howells lived from 1837 to 1920.
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