# The Rise of Silas Lapham — Character guide

> Key figures in The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells.

- [Silas Lapham](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters/silas_lapham.md): Lapham clawed his fortune out of a Vermont paint mine and wears his success like armor, bragging that the Works' fire has never gone out. He wants Boston's old families to accept him, yet he cannot stop being himself—too
- [Mrs. Lapham](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters/mrs_lapham.md): Where Silas charges ahead, Persis watches, weighs, and waits—the one person who can say 'I guess you're in a pretty bad way, Si' and be answered. She is practical, morally exacting, and quietly formidable, the wife whose
- [Penelope Lapham](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters/penelope_lapham.md): Penelope is the witty one, the daughter her father roars through comedies for, the one who works his private figures at night when his troubles outgrow his wife's arithmetic. She loves her sister too well and thinks too 
- [Irene Lapham](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters/irene_lapham.md): Irene is the family's acknowledged beauty, the one the new house on the water was half-built for, and she loves with the wholehearted confidence of someone who has never been denied. When that certainty collapses, she do
- [Tom Corey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters/tom_corey.md): Tom Corey has the manners of his class and none of its money, so he does the unthinkable: he asks for a place in a paint merchant's office and works at it in earnest. His father is delighted, Lapham is flattered, and Bos
- [Bromfield Corey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters/bromfield_corey.md): Bromfield Corey lives on family money and cultivated leisure, a man whose chief occupation is observing the social comedy in which he no longer bothers to perform. He calls on Lapham out of courtesy and finds himself gen
- [Mrs. Corey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters/mrs_corey.md): Mrs. Corey moves through Brahmin society with the assurance of one born to it, and her son's interest in the Laphams strikes her as a problem to be managed rather than a romance to be welcomed. Her resistance is not crud
- [Milton K. Rogers](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters/milton_rogers.md): Rogers once stood beside Lapham in the paint business, and the terms of their parting left a stain Lapham cannot quite scrub out. Now he reappears with fresh propositions, pressing his old associate to go in deeper on ve
- [Bartley Hubbard](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters/bartley_hubbard.md): A journalist who interviews Silas Lapham at the novel's opening and later reappears.
- [Mr. Sewell](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters/sewell.md): Sewell moves among the same Boston circles as the Coreys, but he carries none of their social anxiety, which is precisely why the Laphams seek him out when their family crisis outruns their own counsel. He offers moral c
- [James Bellingham](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters/james_bellingham.md): A Boston Brahmin and Bromfield Corey's brother-in-law who advises on social matters.
- [Zerrilla Millon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters/zerrilla_millon.md): A young woman from a poor family who becomes entangled with the Laphams through Rogers.
- [Walker](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters/walker.md): Silas Lapham's clerk or assistant at the paint office.
- [William](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters/william.md): A relative or family friend of the Coreys mentioned in passing.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_rise_of_silas_lapham_se/characters