Character guide

Bibbs Sheridan

major

Also known as Sheridan, Bibbs, Mist’ Bibbs, Mr. Bibbs, fainthearted Bibbs

Bibbs is the Sheridan who fails to fit: too thoughtful, too unambitious, too easily tired by the family's roaring world of business and display. His father's favorite flourish—that his boys must double the yield of every field—lands on him as a sentence rather than an inspiration, and his quiet drift through the house and the office marks him as the family's disappointment. Yet his difference is the novel's opening wedge: through Bibbs, Tarkington asks whether a man can be worth something his father's ledger cannot measure.

Mary Vertrees

major

Also known as Vertrees, Miss Vertrees, Mary Vertrees’s

Mary Vertrees is the daughter of a household that still keeps its Landseers and its manners while the money quietly runs out, and she is practical enough to know what that means. When she lets Bibbs bring her home and laughs with her mother about how fast she got along with him, she is both candid and calculating, aware that the Sheridans next door represent something her family needs. Her clear-eyed presence gives Bibbs a mirror in which his own difference might be worth something.

James Sheridan

major

Also known as Jim, Sheridan, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. James Sheridan, Mr. Jim, Jim Sheridan, Ole man Sheridan

Sheridan dominates every table he sits at: thirty teeth, none bought, a voice that carries over the orchestra, and a boyish vanity in his own achievement. He is genuinely happy in his power, yet his grief for his dead son Jim is measured almost entirely in lost business—Jim was the one who would have kept the property growing. That hunger for succession, and his bafflement at the son who won't share it, is the engine of the family's trouble.

Roscoe Sheridan

supporting

Also known as Mrs. Sheridan, Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan, young Mrs. Sheridan, mother Sheridan, Poor Roscoe, Honest Roscoe, Old Roscoe

Roscoe is the son Sheridan counts on now that Jim is gone, the one who shows up and does the work—until his father finds him slumped in his office, bloodshot and incoherent, refusing to say a word about the young Lamhorn. His collapse is a quiet catastrophe: the dependable one coming apart while the family's attention is elsewhere. He matters because his fracture exposes how much of the Sheridan edifice rests on men who cannot afford to feel anything.

Sibyl Sheridan

supporting

Also known as Sibyl, Sheridan, Sibyl Sheridan, Frenzied Sibyl, XXX Sibyl

Sibyl moves through the Sheridan household with a grievance she never quite states and a memory for every slight. When she learns of the letter Mary Vertrees wrote to Jim, her perplexity gives way to a glow of triumph—the guilty, after all, have not been exalted. Her small, sharp victories are the novel's reminder that in this family even the bystanders are keeping score.

Edith Sheridan

supporting

Also known as Edie, Edith, Sheridan, Poor Edith, little Edith, Edith Sheridan, Edith Lamhorn

Edith fights her father every other evening and keeps her bed between times so he can see what his violence has done to her, then extracts a cheque and a trip to New York under the guise of forgetting. She is not gentle so much as determined, and Sheridan's heavy-handed campaign to cool her only sets her further on fire. Her rebellion is the family drama in miniature: the harder the old man clamps down, the more the young slip free.

Mr. Vertrees

supporting

Also known as V Mr. Vertrees

Mr. Vertrees belongs to a fading order of gentility, a man raised to talk around things rather than name them, now living next door to the raw new money of Sheridan's New House. He and his wife share a slender, unspoken hope that Mary's beauty might restore what their pride has lost, a hope neither can bear to put into words. His silent, backward-looking dignity makes him the quiet counterweight to Sheridan's blustering energy, and the measure of what the new century is displacing.

Mrs. Vertrees

minor

Also known as VII Mrs. Vertrees

Mother of Mary Vertrees, a conventional and anxious woman.

Dr. Gurney

supporting

Also known as Gurney, Dr. Kraft, Ole Doc Gurney, ole Doc Gurney, ole Gurney, Doc Gurney, Ole Gurney, Ole Doc

Dr. Gurney is the one man in the Sheridan orbit who refuses to be intimidated by the old man's money or temper, calling Sheridan 'hysterical' to his face while bandaging the hand he bloodied on a statue. He sees what Sheridan cannot: that Bibbs's nervous collapse is real, and that the family's worship of work is its own kind of disease. His gruff, unimpressed presence gives the novel its moral barometer, and his friendship with Bibbs becomes a quiet refuge from the Sheridan storm.

Robert Lamhorn

supporting

Also known as Robert, Lamhorn, Mr. Robert Lamhorn, Mr. Lamhorn, that Lamhorn, Bobby Lamhorn, Bobby

Robert Lamhorn is the smooth outsider who slips past the Sheridan family's guard and marries Edith in a quiet ceremony, telegraphing the news home while Sheridan rages and smashes statues. His charm is his currency and his mystery his weapon; the family knows almost nothing about him, and what they suspect they do not like. His arrival forces the Sheridans to reckon with the limits of their money and their judgment, and sets the household's simmering tensions boiling over.

George Waldo Emerson

minor

Also known as George, George Washington

A young man who becomes involved with the Sheridan family.

Mist’ Jackson

minor

Also known as Jackson

A servant or worker in the Sheridan household.

Herr Favre

minor

Also known as Mr. Farver, Mr. Favre

A European acquaintance of the Sheridans, possibly a business associate.

Midas

minor

A symbolic or allegorical figure representing greed and wealth.

Mrs. Kittersby

minor

A neighbor or acquaintance of the Sheridan family.

Uncle Gideon

minor

Also known as Gideon

An older relative of the Sheridan family, possibly a wise advisor.

J. R. Tracy

minor

Also known as Tracy

A business associate of James Sheridan.

Bildad the Shuhite

minor

Also known as Bildad the Shuhite spake

A biblical figure referenced in the narrative.

Abercrombie

minor

A minor character, possibly a servant or tradesman.

Daniel Boone

minor

Also known as Dan’l Boone, Dan’l

Historical figure referenced as a symbol of frontier spirit.

Nancy Lee

minor

Also known as Nancy

A young woman mentioned in passing.

Joe Gurney

minor

Also known as Joe

Possibly a relative of Dr. Gurney.

Chang

minor

A servant or worker in the Sheridan household.

R. T. Bloss

minor

A minor business contact.

Ray Wills

minor

A minor character, possibly a friend of the family.

Bash

minor

A nickname for a minor character.

Ajax

minor

A classical reference used as a metaphor.