The Rise of Silas Lapham

WHEN Bartley Hubbard went to interview Silas Lapham for the "Solid Men of Boston" series, which he undertook to finish up in The Events, after he replaced their original projector on that newspaper, Lapham received him in his private office by previous appointment.

Rise-and-fall architecture—Lapham's paint fortune, Back Bay aspiration, Tom Corey's courtship, Rogers partnership, financial ruin, refusal to sell out to English buyers—delivers moral physics rather than melodrama, so plot scores 82.

"There!" Lapham pounded with his great hairy fist on the envelope he had been addressing. "William!" he called out, and he handed the letter to a boy who came to get it. "I want that to go right away. Well, sir," he continued.

Silas Lapham the self-made rough diamond, Persis his practical wife, Irene and Penelope the daughters, Tom Corey the genteel suitor, Bromfield and Anna Corey the old Boston gatekeepers, Rev. Sewell the moral auditor—each a distinct class position, so cast scores 84.

"Well, I don't know as I can tell, just yet," said Lapham, avoiding this look. "Things have been dull all the fall, but I thought they'd brisk up come winter. They haven't. There have been a lot of failures, and some of 'em owed me, and some of 'em had me on their paper; and----"

Victorian realist tempo—interview frame, society visits, financial exposition, romantic triangle—with Howells's deliberate dilation of social comedy before the crash; competent but less propulsive than Wharton or James, so pace scores 78.

"And you say, Mr. Lapham, that you discovered this mineral paint on the old farm yourself?" Lapham acquiesced in the return to business. "I didn't discover it," he said scrupulously. "My father found it one day, in a hole made by a tree blowing down."

Howells's plain, humane, observant style—Bartley's journalist ease, Lapham's vernacular directness, the Coreys' patrician understatement—effective social reportage without distinctive verbal fireworks on every page, so prose scores 83.

The Laphams now burned kerosene, of course, and they had no furnace in the winter; these were the only hardships the Colonel complained of; but he said that as soon as the company got to paying dividends again he meant to put in a furnace.

Boston as class battlefield—Nankeen Square vs Bellingham Place, the paint office vs the drawing-room—every dinner and newspaper interview carrying economic weight; the 'rise' of the title maps both fortune and moral testing, so world scores 85.

WHEN Bartley Hubbard went to interview Silas Lapham for the "Solid Men of Boston" series, which he undertook to finish up in The Events, after he replaced their original projector on that newspaper, Lapham received him in his private office by previous appointment.

Ch.I—Bartley Hubbard's interview, Lapham's private office and the 'Solid Men of Boston' premise—establishes the self-made man and the journalist's gaze, but opens as reportage rather than iconic scene, so hook scores 80.

"I don't know as I should always say it paid; but if I done it, and the thing was to do over again, right in the same way, I guess I should have to do it."

American business realism before Dreiser—the paint fortune as moral test, the Corey-Lapham courtship as class negotiation, the refusal to cheat as the true 'rise'—Howells's systematic answer to the romance of wealth, so innov scores 84.

"I don't know as I should always say it paid; but if I done it, and the thing was to do over again, right in the same way, I guess I should have to do it."

Lapham's confession to Sewell—he would do it again, the hole opened and he crept out—no windfall, only kerosene and integrity; morally satisfying in Howells's understated key, the family diminished but not destroyed, so ending scores 86.