# Mr. Harrington — Ashenden character guide

> Mr. Harrington in Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham.

**Role:** supporting

**Also known as:** Mr. John Quincy Harrington, XVI Mr. Harrington

**First appearance:** 0017-xvi-mr-harrington-s-washing

## Snapshot

An American traveler whose relentless, precise monologue about his family, his ancestry, and his laundry follows Ashenden across revolutionary Russia like a force of nature.

## Who they are

Mr. Harrington talks without pause or inflection, a stream of lava that overwhelms everything in its path, and Ashenden learns more about him than he ever wished to know. Proud of his English ancestry yet suspicious of newer immigrants, devoted to his delicate wife, he is a comic and faintly pathetic specimen of a vanished order. His obsession with clean linen in a country without bread becomes the book's sharpest emblem of the collision between bourgeois comfort and revolution.

## In the story

### [XIV: A Chance Acquaintance](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/ashenden_se/chapters/xiv-a-chance-acquaintance)

American travelling companion from Philadelphia; a highbrow bore who recites speeches incessantly; extremely polite, modest, and helpful, but drives Ashenden to distraction.

### [Love and Russian Literature](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/ashenden_se/chapters/xv-love-and-russian-literature)

Mentioned as needing an interpreter for his business proposition and letters to Ministers of State.

### [XVI: Mr. Harrington’s Washing](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/ashenden_se/chapters/xvi-mr-harrington-s-washing)

Obsessed with retrieving his laundry despite the danger; forms a friendship with Anastasia; goes missing after the outing.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/ashenden_se/characters/mr_harrington
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/ashenden_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/ashenden_se/characters