The Rise of Silas Lapham
by William Dean Howells
Summary
Silas Lapham has built a genuine fortune out of a mineral paint business he started from nothing, and the novel opens with him newly rich, newly conscious of his own lack of social polish, and building an ostentatious new house in Boston meant to announce that he and his family, wife Persis and daughters Penelope and Irene, have arrived among the city's old money. Tom Corey, from precisely the kind of established Boston family the Laphams are trying to join, begins courting Irene, though it becomes clear over time that his real feelings run toward her sharper, less conventionally pretty sister Penelope, and Penelope's own hesitation, weighed down by the era's romantic conventions about a sister's prior claim, delays what both of them actually want. Silas's fortunes turn just as his social standing seems assured: his unfinished new house burns down uninsured, and his former business partner, Milton K. Rogers, returns pressing him for financial help that steadily drains what money Silas has left. Faced with a chance to save himself by unloading a nearly worthless property on unsuspecting buyers, precisely the kind of shady maneuver that would restore his fortune at someone else's expense, Silas refuses outright and lets his business collapse instead, ending the novel poorer but with his integrity fully intact, back in the modest home he started from. Tom and Penelope marry despite it all, and Silas Lapham's material rise ends, by the novel's own irony, in exactly the failure that constitutes his real, moral rise.
Howells writes with a dry, exact humor about the small comedies of Silas's social discomfort, most memorably his prolonged agony over whether to wear gloves to a dinner party, and refuses the sentimental uplift that novels about self made men typically supplied at the time. It moves at an unhurried, socially observant pace, closer to a study of manners and money than to melodrama, and its ending earns its quiet dignity by refusing to reward Silas with anything except his own self respect.
Historical Context & Significance
The Century Magazine began serializing the novel in November 1884, and it appeared as a complete book in 1885, published the same year Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn reached American readers. The historian Francis Parkman praised it as an admirable portraiture, realistic in the best sense, and credited it with teaching the much needed lesson that money cannot do everything.
Howells, who had already shaped American letters for years as editor of The Atlantic Monthly, wrote the novel as a deliberate rejection of the sentimental conventions still common in American fiction, and it is now counted as a founding text of American literary realism, its plain, exact prose and its refusal of easy moral reward setting the terms later realist novelists worked within.