Novel
The Rise of Silas Lapham
William Dean Howells · 1885
Opening lines
WHEN Bartley Hubbard went to interview Silas Lapham for the "Solid Men of Boston" series, which he undertook to finish up in The Events, after he replaced their original projector on that newspaper, Lapham received him in his private office by previous appointment.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
A manufacturer of mineral paint, who started out on a farm in Vermont, has made his fortune and has lived for years in Boston with his wife and two daughters. He is having a new house built on Beacon Street, on the water side, and would like to marry into an old family of the city whose son is courting his daughters; there is a misunderstanding about which of the two. At the same time his business falters, and English buyers come forward for mills left to him by his former partner, without knowing what they are really worth.
Context
The novel appears serially in The Century in 1884 and 1885, the same season as novels by Henry James and Mark Twain, then in volume in Boston, from Ticknor, in 1885. Its author, who himself lives on Beacon Street, applies in it the programme he would later defend in his column in Harper's: making the novel a matter of ordinary people and denying the narrative any dramatic twists. He grafts onto it a sentimental plot from which a pastor draws the lesson of the economy of suffering. The title plays on a double meaning, social or moral ascent, and the critics of the time were divided over it.
Who it is for
A fairly long novel, in twenty-seven chapters, whose driving force is moral rather than dramatic. There is only one French translation, from 1890.
Prizes and reception
Its author's best-known novel, regarded as one of the major texts of American realism.
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