# Pollyanna Grows Up — Character guide

> Key figures in Pollyanna Grows Up by Eleanor H. Porter.

- [Pollyanna Whittier](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pollyanna_grows_up_se/characters/pollyanna_whittier.md): Pollyanna arrives in Boston practically cured of the injury that once left her unable to walk, but her famous optimism meets its strangest test yet in Mrs. Carew's gloomy mansion. She writes stories that keep coming back
- [Aunt Polly](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pollyanna_grows_up_se/characters/aunt_polly.md): Once the stern woman who took in an orphan out of duty, Aunt Polly now depends on Pollyanna far more than she admits, fretting over rainy days, leaking roofs, and letters that arrive too late. She is methodical to the ti
- [Jimmy Pendleton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pollyanna_grows_up_se/characters/jimmy_pendleton.md): Jimmy has grown from the spirited orphan boy into an anxious young man whose visions of wonderful spans have been replaced by the fear of losing Pollyanna. He resents the unknown Jamie with the too-similar name before ev
- [Jamie Kent](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pollyanna_grows_up_se/characters/jamie_kent.md): Jamie turns to Pollyanna with a relief he shows no one else, because she alone once knew what it was to be unable to walk. Beneath his gaiety Pollyanna detects a new bitterness, and he avoids the others, sighing with rel
- [Mrs. Carew](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pollyanna_grows_up_se/characters/mrs_carew.md): Mrs. Carew has walled herself off from society and charity alike since losing Jamie, refusing her nurse sister's pleas to get interested in something outside her own life. She takes in Pollyanna and finds the child's con
- [John Pendleton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pollyanna_grows_up_se/characters/john_pendleton.md): John Pendleton remembers the stern, disagreeable man he was before Pollyanna's childish liking saved him, and he tells her so with a tenderness that visibly alarms her. Having adopted Jimmy, he still insists a child's pr
- [Della Wetherby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pollyanna_grows_up_se/characters/della_wetherby.md): Della Wetherby sweeps into her sister's gloomy Commonwealth Avenue mansion radiating health and capability, cheerfully overriding the maid's protests that Mrs. Carew is seeing no one. Where Ruth clings to eight years of 
- [Nancy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pollyanna_grows_up_se/characters/nancy.md): Nancy arranges flowers in every room, coaxes the household along, and hovers with pleas to be allowed to help out a bit at any time. When Aunt Polly faces dwindling income and the shame of near-poverty in Beldingsville, 
- [Sadie Dean](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pollyanna_grows_up_se/characters/sadie_dean.md): When Pollyanna meets Sadie again after six years, the features are the same but everything else has changed: hair, dress, disposition, all of it. Sadie belongs to the Carew household circle, and her visible transformatio
- [Jerry Murphy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pollyanna_grows_up_se/characters/jerry_murphy.md): Jerry Murphy climbs the steps of Mrs. Carew's mansion not for money but for Pollyanna, whose help his friend Jamie desperately wants. His flash of resentment when offered coin, and his awe at riding in a limousine, captu
- [Dr. Chilton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pollyanna_grows_up_se/characters/dr_chilton.md): Dr. Chilton cheerfully credits Pollyanna with transforming Mrs. Snow, John Pendleton, and half of Beldingsville, while Aunt Polly insists the child must never learn she is a cure-all. Their debate over whether to protect
- [John Kent](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pollyanna_grows_up_se/characters/john_kent.md): John Kent's identity surfaces through the tangled clues surrounding Jamie, the lame boy in Murphy's Alley who cannot remember his mother and whose father died without revealing his name. His disappearance is the wound th
- [Thomas Chilton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pollyanna_grows_up_se/characters/thomas_chilton.md): A relative of Aunt Polly's who appears briefly.
- [Mrs. Murphy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/pollyanna_grows_up_se/characters/mrs_murphy.md): Jerry's mother, a poor Irish widow in the tenements.

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