Character guide

Julian West

major

Also known as Mr. Julian West, Mr. West

Julian West belongs to the coach-riding class of 1887, engaged to Edith Bartlett and insulated by money from the misery he half-acknowledges. His hypnotic sleep drops him into Dr. Leete's Boston, where every assumption he carried about labor, class, and progress is patiently dismantled. His shame at his own former indifference, and his growing hunger to believe the new order is real, drive the book's central argument.

Dr. Leete

major

Also known as VI Dr. Leete, Dr.

Dr. Leete is Julian's host, instructor, and chief apologist for the Boston of 2000, answering each incredulous question with patient, cheerful logic. Where Julian expects defensiveness, Leete offers the confidence of a man who has never known poverty or strikes, discussing women's industrial service and the nation as a fatherland with the same mild reasonableness. His function is to make utopia legible, and his unruffled tone is itself part of the argument.

Edith Leete

major

Also known as Edith

Edith Leete strikes Julian at once with a directness he calls more like a noble boy's than any girl's he knew, a quality he suspects may belong to her century rather than her alone. She reads his embarrassment at Mr. Barton's sermon and quietly offers to spare him it, showing the tact that smooths his entry into the household. Her presence gives the novel its warmth, and Julian's curiosity about her becomes entangled with his curiosity about the age that produced her.

Edith Bartlett

supporting

Also known as Edith

Edith Bartlett is the woman Julian was to marry once his house was finished, a match of money and beauty among Boston's coach-riding class. The strikes that stalled the builders kept postponing the wedding, a small domestic frustration that quietly exposes the labor system Julian never questioned. She embodies the vanished nineteenth century he mourns, and her name's echo in the Leete household unsettles him as he adjusts to the year 2000.

Mrs. Leete

supporting

Also known as Leete

Mrs. Leete presides over the Leete home as a companion and equal rather than a domestic drudge, her manner embodying the cooperative arrangements her husband describes. She and Edith treat Julian's nineteenth-century assumptions with amused patience, and their unforced happiness is a living rebuttal to his nostalgia. Her presence keeps the utopian argument from staying abstract, grounding it in the texture of an ordinary, contented family.

Mr. Barton

minor

A preacher who delivers a sermon on the moral state of the 20th century.

Sawyer

minor

Julian West's servant in the 19th century who assists with his hypnotic sleep.

Dr. Pillsbury

minor

A physician who attends to Julian West in the 19th century.

Berrian

minor

A friend of Julian West from the 19th century, mentioned in conversation.

Mrs. Bartlett

minor

Edith Bartlett's mother, a minor figure in Julian's past life.