Character guide

Martin Eden

major

Also known as Martin, Mart, Mart Eden

Martin Eden comes up from ships and laundries into Ruth Morse's parlor, where he discovers beauty, intellect, and love all at once and vows to purge the 'ignoble' from himself. His hunger is enormous and undisciplined: he studies metre and construction beneath the beauty he loves, seeing for the first time the tie-ribs of poetry. That same virility of desire that makes him learn so fast also makes him worship Ruth as a symbol of a class he has only imagined, and the gap between the real woman and the world he has ennobled in his mind drives the book's early and middle arc.

Ruth Morse

major

Also known as Ruth

Ruth Morse is the educated, innocent center of the world Martin wants to enter, and she takes him on as a kind of project, correcting his English and starting him on arithmetic. Yet she confesses to her mother that his trembling hands and shining eyes make her feel 'grown-up' and 'really and truly a woman' — she is stirred by being loved more than by loving. Her mother's cool arithmetic of position, salary, and clean heritage presses against her daughter's dawning feeling, and that friction between romantic awakening and social calculation shapes the whole middle of the book.

Russ Brissenden

supporting

Also known as Brissenden

Brissenden arrives as the one person in Martin's new world who takes his writing seriously — and the one who refuses to take the world seriously. He tells Martin to leave fame and coin alone, to go back to his ships and sea, insisting that joy lies in the doing, not the success. His contempt for bourgeois cities and magazine editors is total, and his flash of divination about the 'pale, shrivelled, female thing' behind the Love-cycle nearly gets him throttled. He matters because he offers Martin an alternative to Ruth's respectability: art for its own sake, at whatever cost.

Joe Dawson

supporting

Also known as Dawson, Joe

Joe Dawson sweats beside Martin in the laundry and drinks because the work demands it — 'cooks drink like hell, an' bakers, too,' he says, 'it's the work.' When Martin wires his own resignation, Joe insists on making it two laundrymen, choosing hobo life over slavery and stamping on the hotel manager's shirt with glorious, drunken freedom. He is the human face of the class Martin is trying to leave behind, and his parting handshake — 'I like you like hell' — quietly measures what Martin's ascent will cost.

Lizzie Connolly

supporting

Also known as Lizzie

Lizzie Connolly belongs to the world Martin came from — the world of working women and harsh voices he is trying to purge himself of. She loves him simply and without theory, offering a devotion that asks nothing of his grammar or his manuscripts, and she stands as the living alternative to Ruth's pale, cultivated ideal. Her presence in the story quietly indicts Martin's belief that beauty, intellect, and love all dwell 'up above' in society, and her fate shadows the cost of his ascent.

Mrs. Morse

supporting

Also known as Mr. and Mrs. Morse

Mrs. Morse receives Ruth's confession of Martin's worship with sympathy and quiet calculation, calling him 'ineligible in every way' and warning that sailors' lives are not clean. She is not a villain but an accountant of respectability: she notes his age, his lack of position, his impractical dreams, and concludes he will never be a money-earner. Her calm guidance — 'wait for them,' she tells Ruth of noble men — is the social machinery of the novel made intimate, and it shapes the pressure under which Ruth's feelings for Martin must either grow or break.

Mr. Morse

supporting

A wealthy businessman whose household sets the social ceiling Martin Eden strains against, Mr. Morse judges men by heritage and prospects rather than hunger or talent. His quiet verdict that Martin is 'not clean' hardens into the family's position, feeding Mrs. Morse's warnings and Ruth's wavering. He never argues with Martin directly; he simply represents the respectable world whose approval Martin both craves and, in time, learns to despise.

Gertrude

supporting

Gertrude lives inside Bernard Higginbotham's cramped, respectable world of ledgers and respectability, where an unsteady brother is an embarrassment and a few dollars pressed into a satchel are the most love she can afford. She arrives sobbing at Martin's door, certain disaster has struck, and begs him to take a steady job because Bernard 'does like to see a man at honest work.' Her divided loyalty—blood against marriage—quietly measures how far Martin has drifted from the class he was born into.

Bernard Higginbotham

supporting

Also known as Higginbotham, Mr. Higginbotham

Bernard Higginbotham presides over a small shop and a smaller sense of possibility, resenting every hour Martin spends at books instead of earning. The newspaper publicity around Martin's stories enrages him—Gertrude reports she never saw him so mad—because it threatens the tidy respectability he has scraped together. He is the novel's first and most intimate portrait of the philistinism Martin must escape, and the reason Martin avoids his sister's house even when he needs her.

Maria Silva

supporting

Also known as Maria, Minnie, Poor Maria

Maria Silva scrubs other people's laundry and dreams no dreams, yet she shelters Martin through the lean years when manuscripts come back and rent goes unpaid. Her hard head and harder hands hide a fierce fondness for the young sailor who talks of books; she is the only person who takes him in without asking what he is worth. When his fortune finally turns, he repays her with a dairy and a bank account—one of the few unambiguously good transactions in a story otherwise full of betrayals.

Herbert Spencer

minor

Also known as Spencer

A philosopher whose works deeply influence Martin's thinking and writing.

Arthur

minor

Ruth's brother who introduces Martin to the Morse family.

Norman

minor

Also known as Norrie

Another of Ruth's brothers, dismissive of Martin's background.

Will Olney

minor

Also known as Billy, Bill, Olney, Willie

A friend from Martin's sailor days who reappears later.

Hermann von Schmidt

minor

Also known as Hermann

A German tailor who marries Marian and criticizes Martin.

Marian

minor

Also known as Mary

Martin's other sister, who marries Hermann von Schmidt.

Mr. Butler

minor

A successful lawyer Martin meets, representing bourgeois success.

Professor Caldwell

minor

Also known as Caldwell

A university professor who discusses philosophy with Martin.

Judge Blount

minor

A judge who appears at a social gathering and debates with Martin.

Norton

minor

A young man in Ruth's social circle who courts her after Martin.

Jim

minor

Also known as James Grant

A sailor acquaintance from Martin's past.

Mr. Ford

minor

Also known as Ford

A publisher who eventually accepts Martin's work.

Kreis

minor

A socialist acquaintance of Brissenden who debates with Martin.

Cheese-Face

minor

A sailor Martin fights in a brawl early in the story.

Mrs. Higginbotham

minor

Bernard Higginbotham's mother, who lives with the family.

Mr. Ends

minor

A minor character mentioned in Martin's social circles.

Margey

minor

A young girl Martin briefly encounters.

Tom

minor

A minor character in Martin's boarding house.

Mr. Cartwright Bruce

minor

Also known as Bruce, Cartwright Bruce

A literary critic who reviews Martin's work.

Mr. Vanderwater

minor

Also known as Vanderwater

A magazine editor who rejects Martin's early submissions.

Hamilton

minor

Also known as Strawn-Hamilton

Another socialist who argues with Martin about philosophy.

Henry Vaughn Marlow

minor

Also known as Marlow, Vaughn Marlow, Harry

A poet Martin meets through Brissenden.

Madame Tetralani

minor

Also known as Tetralani

An opera singer mentioned in Martin's social observations.

Helen Della Delmar

minor

Also known as Miss Delmar

A society woman who attends the same parties as Ruth.

Professor Hilton

minor

A professor at the university Martin briefly attends.

Teresa Silva

minor

Also known as Teresa

Maria Silva's daughter, who helps with the boarding house.

Charles Hapgood

minor

Also known as Charley Hapgood

A minor character in Martin's social circle.

Mr. Praps

minor

Also known as Praps

A minor acquaintance of Martin's.

Barillo

minor

Also known as little Barillo

A minor character mentioned in passing.

Moti

minor

A minor character in Martin's boarding house.

Miss Smith

minor

A minor character at a social gathering.

Charles Butler

minor

A minor character mentioned in relation to Mr. Butler.

Sir John Value

minor

A minor character at a social event.

Julia

minor

A minor character in Martin's past.