The Rise of Silas Lapham

Excerpts from The Rise of Silas Lapham

By William Dean Howells

Originally published in 1885

Reprinted by Signet Classic in 2002

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was a journalist, a well-known literary critic, and a popular writer of novels, poetry, travel essays, plays, and short stories. His most famous book, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), captured the changes taking place in the social world of Boston in the 1880s, when the "new rich"—people from humble backgrounds who had made a fortune in the industrial era—were entering the once-exclusive circles of the city's old ruling class of wealthy and elite. The novel presents Howells's vision of a more democratic and tolerant, if less cultured, American society of the future and introduced business and industry as an essential subject in fiction writing during the industrial age.

Howells was born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, and was the second child in a family of eight. His father, William Cooper Howells, was a printer for several small Ohio newspapers. When William Dean was three, the family moved to Hamilton, Ohio, where his father was the editor of a weekly journal. According to his memoirs, Howells learned to set newspaper type before he could read. (In the nineteenth century typesetting, or preparing text for print, was done with small pieces of metal that had been formed into the shapes of letters, punctuation marks, and spaces. Workers would use these shapes to form the lines of text on the page.) Howells's parents soon purchased a tri-weekly newspaper (a paper published three times a week) in Dayton, Ohio, with the intention of turning it into a daily paper. The project proved more difficult than anticipated, and the entire family was required to labor long hours. Therefore Howells dropped out of school at a young age in order to work, frequently setting type until midnight only to arise four hours later to deliver papers. This prevented him from getting a high school or college education, but he was very successful at instructing himself with the few books the family owned. He preferred literature and languages to other studies and taught himself Greek, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and some Latin.

In 1851 the Howells family moved to Columbus, Ohio. William Dean proved to his employer, the Ohio State Journal, that he was as skilled at journalism as he was at typesetting. Between 1856 and 1861, he served as reporter, editor, and editorial writer. His goal, however, was to become an accomplished poet, and at twenty-two he succeeded in publishing a collection of poems with a friend. Several of his other poems were then published in the Atlantic Monthly, a new literary journal based in Boston. Howells traveled to Boston to meet the famous founders of the magazine. The founders included poet James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), essayist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), novelist and essayist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892), and legal scholar, essayist, and future justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935). As well as being successful writers, all were Boston Brahmans, a term used to describe a class of wealthy, educated, elite members of Boston society in the nineteenth century.

Howells accepted an assistant editorship at the Atlantic Monthly in 1866. He became the magazine's editor in chief by the age of twenty-nine and transformed the magazine from a regional New England journal into a national one. Howells remained a prominent literary magazine editor for more than forty years, during which time he advanced the early careers of many major American writers, such as novelists Stephen Crane (1871–1900), Frank Norris (1870–1902), Henry James (1843–1916), and Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens; 1835–1910).

Howells was passionately devoted to American literature. As he became well respected among American literary critics and editors, his career as a novelist was also blossoming. Howells believed that modern literature was moving toward realism, which he defined simply as depicting one's subjects honestly, without making them overly sentimental or romantic. To Howells, every detail of daily life and human interaction was important. His novels were often called novels of manners because he focused on the habits, tastes, and conversations of his characters, particularly when different social groups came into contact with each other. Henry James described Howells's writing in a Harper's Weekly article in 1886: "He is animated by a love of the common, the immediate, the familiar and vulgar elements of life…. He adores the real, the natural, the colloquial [in the style of informal conversation], the moderate, the optimistic, the domestic, and the democratic."

As he had progressed from his humble origins in the American West to rise to the top of the Boston elite, Howells had a rare personal understanding of some of the different social elements of the rapidly industrializing nation. James W. Tuttleton, in his 1972 book The Novel of Manners in America, remarked:

Few men of his time were more capable than Howells of representing accurately in fiction the social contradictions that characterized American life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He saw the spectacle of simple Westerners like himself thrown up against hyper-civilized Boston snobs, of provincial country folk deracinated [uprooted] and struggling to find themselves in the developing cities, of the underworld of the laboring poor, and of the newly rich millionaires trying to crash polite society.

In novels such as The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells brought together some of the many opposing groups of the United States—urban/rural, aristocrat/working class, Northeasterns/Westerners, and older generation/younger generation. His literary portrait of the country showed its flaws and weaknesses, but it also showed the goodness and humanity in its citizens.

The Rise of Silas Lapham reflected Howells's optimism about life in the United States. The businessmen in the story valued morality over riches, the aristocrats tolerated change, and the younger generation was principled and wisely realistic. In an essay written in the early 1880s (collected in Criticism and Fiction [1891]), Howells argued that circumstances in the United States were usually pleasant and comfortable compared with other nations: "Very few American novelists have been led out to be shot, or finally exiled to the rigors of a winter at Duluth [a city in Minnesota that was very cold in winter]; and … the sum of hunger and cold is comparatively small, and the wrong from class to class has been almost inappreciable [too small to be perceived], though all this is changing for the worse." He believed that writers should present the "smiling aspects of life" in America in order to present an honest picture of the country. His views, however, soon changed after the publication of The Rise of Silas Lapham.

Things to remember while reading the excerpts from The Rise of Silas Lapham:

• By the time The Rise of Silas Lapham was published, Howells had become the most well-known novelist of his day and had a large following. The novel was first published as a series in the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine from October 1884 to May 1885. An estimated one million readers eagerly followed the novel's installments. It was published in book form in 1885.

• The title character of the novel, Silas Lapham, is from a rural Vermont background and has had little education. He served nobly as a colonel for the Union army in the American Civil War (1861–65; a war between the Union [the North], who were opposed to slavery, and the Confederacy [the South], who were in favor of slavery). After achieving modest success in several businesses, Lapham discovers an important mineral used to make paint on his family farm in Vermont. He experiments with making paint and then establishes a large paint manufacturing business. The business does well, and Lapham finds himself a very wealthy man operating a large industry. He is initially very good at taking care of his business and often brags about his success and the profits he makes.
• Lapham's experiences echo the life stories of some of the real-life industrialists of the era, such as oil businessman John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) and railroad owner Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877). Unlike these men, however, Lapham is extremely honest and conscientious in his business dealings.
• Lapham and his wife and two daughters move to Boston, where they are unable to find a social circle they feel comfortable in. The Laphams do not want to mingle with the upper-class society in the city, but they do wish to find husbands for their two daughters. Silas Lapham is building a home in an exclusive area in the hopes of making new acquaintances there.
• Tom Corey, a young man from a wealthy Boston family, meets the Laphams and begins to court one of their daughters. Tom's father, Bromfield, is from the old aristocracy. A talented artist and a brilliant conversationalist, he spent years entertaining himself in Italy and lost most of his family fortune, which he has no intention of going to work to replace. A man of the greatest refinement, wit, and taste, Bromfield Corey's idleness and snobbery are offset by basic charm and honesty.
• Tom Corey, unlike his father, wants to work and to find a role for himself in the new industrial society. He understands that successful industrialists like Silas Lapham are the key to the nation's economic future. Over the objections of his parents he goes to work in Lapham's paint manufacturing industry.
• During the course of the novel Lapham encounters problems with his business. He struggles with unprincipled men who seek to gain control over the entire paint industry. Lapham tries to maintain his own moral standards and deal honestly with the dishonest people. In the end his honesty results in the collapse of his business, but this failure brings about Lapham's spiritual and moral rise. In losing his money and the trappings of wealth, Lapham finds peace and comfort in the things that have always mattered most to him, his family and his conscience.
• Two excerpts from the novel are included here. Excerpt 1 is from the first chapter and serves as an introduction to the boastful earnestness of Silas Lapham as he relates the story of his rise to success. The second excerpt is a conversation between Tom Corey and his father, Bromfield, about the changing social world in the industrial era.

Excerpts from The Rise of Silas Lapham

[Excerpt 1]

[As the novel begins, Lapham is being interviewed by a journalist for a series on Boston's eminent and wealthy men. In this excerpt Lapham is in the midst of an overly long and detailed history of his favorite subject: himself.] "Mother," he added gently, "died that winter, and I stayed on with father. I buried him in the spring; and then I came down to a little place called Lumberville, and picked up what jobs I could get. I worked round at the saw-mills, and I wasostler a while at the hotel—I always DID like a good horse. Well, I WA'N'T exactly a college graduate, and I went to school odd times. I got to driving the stage after while, and by and by I BOUGHT the stage and run the business myself. Then I hired thetavern-stand, and—well to make a long story short, then I got married. Yes," said Lapham, with pride, "I married the school-teacher. We did pretty well with the hotel, and my wife she was always at me to paint up. Well, I put it off, and PUT it off, as a man will, till one day I give in, and says I, 'Well, let's paint up. Why, Pert,'—m'wife's name's Persis,—'I've got a whole paint-mine out on the farm. Let's go out and look at it.' So we drove out. I'd let the place for seventy-five dollars a year to a shif'less kind of aKanuck that had come down that way; and I'd hated to see the house with him in it; but we drove out one Saturday afternoon, and we brought back about a bushel of the stuff in the buggy-seat, and I tried itcrude, and I tried it burnt; and I liked it. M'wife she liked it too. There wa'n't any painter by trade in the village, and I mixed it myself. Well, sir, that tavern's got that coat of paint on it yet, and it hain't ever had any other, and I don't know's it ever will. Well, you know, I felt as if it was a kind ofharum-scarum experiment, all the while; and I presume I shouldn't have tried it but I kind of liked to do it because father'd always set so much store by his paint-mine. And when I'd got the first coat on,"—Lapham called it CUT,—"I presume I must have set as much as half an hour; looking at it and thinking how he would have enjoyed it. I've had my share of luck in this world, and I ain't a-going to complain on my OWN account, but I've noticed that most things get along too late for most people. It made me feel bad, and it took all the pride out my success with the paint, thinking of father. Seemed to me I might 'a taken more interest in it when he was by to see; but we've got to live and learn. Well, I called my wife out,—I'd tried it on the back of the house, you know,—and she left her dishes,—I can remember she came out with her sleeves rolled up and set down alongside of me on the trestle,—and says I, 'What do you think, Persis?' And says she, 'Well, you hain't got a paint-mine, Silas Lapham; you've got a GOLD-mine.' She always was just so enthusiastic about things. Well, it was just after two or three boats had burnt up out West, and a lot of lives lost, and there was a great cry about non-inflammable paint, and I guess that was what was in her mind. 'Well, I guess it ain't any gold-mine, Persis,' says I; 'but I guess it IS a paint-mine. I'm going to have it analysed, and if it turns out what I think it is, I'm going to work it….'"

"I set to work and I got a man down from Boston; and I carried him out to the farm, and he analysed it—made a regular Job of it. Well, sir, we built akiln, and we kept a lot of that paint-ore red-hot for forty-eight hours; kept the Kanuck and his family up, firing. The presence of iron in the ore showed with the magnet from the start; and when he came to test it, he found out that it contained about seventy-five percent of theperoxide of iron."

Lapham pronounced the scientific phrases with a sort of reverent satisfaction, as if awed through his pride by a little lingering uncertainty as to what peroxide was. He accented it as if it were purr-ox-EYED; and Bartley had to get him to spell it.

"Well, and what then?" he asked, when he had made a note of the percentage.

"What then?" echoed Lapham. "Well, then, the fellow set down and told me, 'You've got a paint here,' says he, 'that's going to drive every other mineral paint out of the market. Why" says he, 'it'll drive 'em right into theBack Bay! ' Of course, I didn't know what the Back Bay was then, but I begun to open my eyes; thought I'd had 'em open before, but I guess I hadn't."

[Excerpt 2]

[Bromfield Corey and his son Tom are talking in their home. The dialogue begins with Bromfield.] "… But the suddenly rich are on a level with any of us nowadays. Money buys position at once. I don't say that it isn't all right. The world generally knows what it's about, and knows how to drive a bargain. I dare say it makes the new rich pay too much. But there's no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age. It's the thing that chiefly strikes the imagination. The Englishmen who come here are more curious about the great new millionaires than about any one else, and they respect them more. It's all very well. I don't complain of it."

"And you would like a rich daughter-in-law, quite regardless, then?"

"Oh, not quite so bad as that, Tom," said his father. "A little youth, a little beauty, a little good sense and pretty behaviour—one mustn't object to those things; and they go just as often with money as without it. And I suppose I should like her people to be rathergrammatical. "

"It seems to me that you'reexacting, sir," said the son. "How can you expect people who have been strictly devoted to business to be grammatical? Isn't that rather too much?"

"Perhaps it is. Perhaps you're right. But I understood your mother to say that those benefactors of hers, whom you met last summer, were very passably grammatical."

"The father isn't…. But do you know that in spite of hissyntax I rather liked him?"

The father lookedkeenly at the son; but unless the boy's full confidence was offered, Corey was not the man to ask it. "Well?" was all that he said.

"I suppose that in a new country one gets to looking at people a little out of our tradition; and I dare say that if I hadn't passed a winter in Texas I might have found Colonel Lapham rather too much."

"You mean that there are worse things in Texas?"

"Not that exactly. I mean that I saw it wouldn't be quite fair to test him by our standards."

"This comes of the error which I have often deprecated [disapproved of]," said the elder Corey. "In fact I am always saying that the Bostonian ought never to leave Boston. Then he knows—and then only—that there can BE no standard but ours. But we are constantly going away, and coming back with ourconvictions shaken to their foundations. One man goes to England, and returns with the conception of a grander social life; another comes home from Germany with the notion of a more searching intellectual activity; a fellow just back from Paris has the absurdest ideas of art and literature; and yourevert to us from the cowboys of Texas, and tell us to our faces that we ought to try Papa Lapham by a jury of his peers. It ought to be stopped—it ought, really. The Bostonian who leaves Boston ought to becondemned to perpetual exile. "

The sonsuffered the father to reach his climax with smiling patience. When he asked finally, "What are the characteristics of Papa Lapham that place him beyond ourjurisdiction? " the younger Corey crossed his long legs, and leaned forward to take one of his knees between his hands.

"Well, sir, he bragged, rather."

"Oh, I don't know that bragging shouldexempt him from the ordinary processes. I've heard other people brag in Boston."

"Ah, not just in that personal way—not about money."

"No, that was certainly different."

"I don't mean," said the young fellow, with the scrupulosity which people could not help observing and liking in him, "that it was more than an indirect expression of satisfaction in the ability to spend."

"No. I should be glad to express something of the kind myself, if the facts would justify me."

The son smiled tolerantly again. "But if he was enjoying his money in that way, I didn't see why he shouldn't show his pleasure in it. It might have beenvulgar, but it wasn'tsordid. And I don't know that it was vulgar. Perhaps his successful strokes of business were the romance of his life…."

"I don't believe," added the young fellow, "that I can make you see Colonel Lapham just as I did. He struck me as very simple-hearted and rather wholesome. Of course he could be tiresome; we all can; and I suppose his range of ideas is limited. But he is a force, and not a bad one…."

"Oh, one could make out a case. I suppose you know what you are about, Tom. But remember that we are Essex County people, and that insavor we are just a little beyond thesalt of the earth. I will tell you plainly that I don't like the notion of a man who has rivaled the hues of nature in her wildest haunts with the tints of his mineral paint; but I don't say there are not worse men. He isn't to my taste, though he might be ever so much to my conscience."

Ostler:

Also hostler; someone who tends horses.

Tavern-stand:

An inn, usually with a bar/eatery and rooms to rent by the night.

Kanuck:

Impolite term for a Canadian.

Crude:

In the state in which it came from the ground; unrefined.

Harum-scarum:

Reckless.

Trestle:

Metal framework perhaps being used as a scaffold to paint from.

Kiln:

Oven.

Peroxide:

Compound in which two parts of oxygen are joined.

Back Bay:

Once a bay in the city of Boston, the waters of the Back Bay were filled in with dirt over a period of forty years between the 1840s and 1880s, and the area became one of the city's elegant neighborhoods.

Grammatical:

Conforming to the rules of grammar.

Exacting:

Making heavy demands.

Syntax:

The way words are put together to form sentences.

Keenly:

Intensely.

Convictions:

Beliefs.

Revert:

Return.

Condemned to perpetual exile:

Banished from his home forever.

Suffered:

Endured; put up with.

Jurisdiction:

Authority to apply law; meaning in this case the standards used in Boston society.

Exempt:

Excuse from duty or requirement.

Scrupulosity:

Strict regard for what is right.

Vulgar:

lacking refinement; coarse.

Sordid:

Vile or degrading.

Savor:

Experience or taste.

Salt of the earth:

The best or noblest part of society.

What happened next …

On May 3, 1886, there was trouble at the McCormick Harvester plant in Chicago, Illinois, a factory that produced machinery for harvesting wheat. A strike for better working conditions and a shorter workday had been going on there for several months when, in May, the factory owners decided to replace fourteen hundred of the laborers at the plant who were on strike with nonunion workers. Violence broke out between the two groups, resulting in the deaths of four strikers at the hands of the police. At a rally for labor groups the following day at nearby Haymarket Square, an unidentified person tossed a bomb at a group of policemen, killing seven people and injuring sixty. Police fired their pistols into the crowd. In the resulting disorder, ten people were killed and approximately fifty wounded. Eight anarchist (people who advocated the use of force to overthrow all government) labor leaders, most of whom had not even been at the rally, were charged with the deaths of the policemen. The labor leaders were determined guilty because of their political beliefs. Seven were sentenced to death and the eighth to fifteen years in prison.

Howells was shocked by the unfairness of the trial. He was one of a small number of prominent Americans who publicly sought justice for the unpopular anarchists. Nevertheless, in 1887 four of the labor leaders were hanged, and another committed suicide in prison shortly before his execution date. Howells was outraged and became more involved in politics after the Haymarket incident. He was disappointed with the capitalist system (an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately owned by individuals or groups and competition for business establishes the price of goods and services) and spoke out against the concentration of money in the hands of the few. He began to take up the principles of socialism, an economic system in which the means of production and distribution is owned collectively by all the workers and there is no private property or social classes. These ideas were reflected in his later novels.

Did you know …

• William Dean Howells and Mark Twain were close friends for over forty years. In an article that can be found online at The Literature Network, Twain wrote of Howells: "For forty years his English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities—clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity [pleasing manner] of phrasing—he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing world."

Consider the following …

• Read over the first excerpt and make a list of the good characteristics and another list of the bad characteristics of Silas Lapham that are revealed in it.
• In reading the second excerpt, what characteristics do you notice about Bromfield Corey? Make a list of his good and bad characteristics, and compare the characteristics of Silas Lapham to those of Bromfield Corey. Which man do you like better and why?
• Read the excerpts from Horatio Alger's rags-to-riches novel Ragged Dick in Chapter 17. Compare and contrast the characters of Ragged Dick and Silas Lapham.

For More Information

Books

Howells, William Dean. Criticism and Fiction, and Other Essays. Edited by C. M. Kirk and R. Kirk. New York: New York University Press, 1959.

Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Lapham. New York: Signet Classic, 2002.

Tuttleton, James W. The Novel of Manners in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

Van Doren, Carl. The American Novel. New York: Macmillan, 1921.

Periodicals

James, Henry. "William Dean Howells." Harper's Weekly, 30 (June 19, 1886): pp. 394-95. This article can also be found online at http://www.wsu.edu/∼campbelld/amlit/howjames.htm (accessed on July 6, 2005).

Web Sites

"A History of the Atlantic Monthly." From a presentation given in 1994 by Cullen Murphy, managing editor. The Atlantic Online. http://www.theatlantic.com/about/atlhistf.htm (accessed on July 6, 2005).

Twain, Mark. "William Dean Howells." The Literature Network. http://www.online-literature.com/twain/1325/ (accessed on July 6, 2005).