# The Turmoil — Character guide

> Key figures in The Turmoil by Booth Tarkington.

- [Bibbs Sheridan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_turmoil_se/characters/bibs_sheridan.md): 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
- [Mary Vertrees](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_turmoil_se/characters/mary_vertrees.md): 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 la
- [James Sheridan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_turmoil_se/characters/james_sheridan.md): 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 so
- [Roscoe Sheridan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_turmoil_se/characters/roscoe_sheridan.md): 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
- [Sibyl Sheridan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_turmoil_se/characters/sibyl_sheridan.md): 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—th
- [Edith Sheridan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_turmoil_se/characters/edith_sheridan.md): 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 
- [Mr. Vertrees](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_turmoil_se/characters/mr_vertrees.md): 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 
- [Mrs. Vertrees](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_turmoil_se/characters/mrs_vertrees.md): Mother of Mary Vertrees, a conventional and anxious woman.
- [Dr. Gurney](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_turmoil_se/characters/dr_gurney.md): 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 She
- [Robert Lamhorn](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_turmoil_se/characters/robert_lamhorn.md): 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 h
- [George Waldo Emerson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_turmoil_se/characters/george_waldo_emerson.md): A young man who becomes involved with the Sheridan family.
- [Mist’ Jackson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_turmoil_se/characters/mist_jackson.md): A servant or worker in the Sheridan household.

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