Places: The Rise of Silas Lapham

*Boston. Rise of Silas Lapham, TheMassachusetts city in which the action of the novel unfolds. Having lived in Boston, Howells was familiar with the city and deftly portrays the social divide that existed there in the late eighteenth century between America’s aristocratic patricians, represented by the Coreys, who inherited their wealth and do not have to work for a living, and the rising tide of the newly rich, represented by the Laphams, particularly Silas, the self-made man. In the post-Civil War America Howells portrays, as industrialization increases and people like the Laphams move from farms to cities, the patrician class of Boston is being physically displaced. Along with this physical displacement comes the possibility of the displacement of spiritual and moral values brought about by excessive materialism. With its Puritan background and position as America’s cultural center, Boston is the perfect setting for this clash of values.

South End house. Home in which the Laphams have lived in an unfashionable South End neighborhood for twelve years. The furnishings of the house reflect the garish taste of the uncultured Laphams, and this bad taste signifies the possibility of a deficiency of character because it reveals values generated by excessive materialism. Silas is particularly materialistic. Ambitious to move up in society, Silas wants to live in the Beacon Hill neighborhood to display his monetary worth. While he is not a bad person, moral questions are raised about his earlier treatment of Rogers. His quest for wealth and position leads him to seriously consider saving himself financially by engaging in the shady land deal Rogers suggests later in the novel.

Corey house. Home of the Corey family in Bellingham Place. Reflecting the Coreys as members of a dying class, the house is elegantly and tastefully furnished, in contrast with the Laphams’, and it is one of several “stately” dwellings of classical simplicity on the street where the upper classes of Boston once lived. However, the houses on the street are gradually being converted into boardinghouses as the working classes displace the patrician families. In contrast to the Laphams (Silas especially), the Coreys are not materialistic but instead value their leisure to invest in cultural affairs. Bromfield Corey and his wife Anna do not need to work for a living, but they must increasingly live frugally as their inheritance is dwindling. It is clear that Tom Corey will have to work and will thus be forced to bridge the social gap.

*Beacon Street. Street in a prosperous Boston neighborhood on which Silas builds a house to show his social equality with, if not superiority to, the Bostonian patricians. It represents Silas’s ambition and materialism and thus his misplaced values. The burning of this house represents the reversal of Silas’s material ambitions and of his moral values as he comes to recognize at the end of the novel what is truly important in life.

Lapham farm. Farm in Vermont on which Silas grew up–the place where his commercial and materialistic aspirations began and to which he returns at the end of the novel. As people left farms to seek their fortunes in big cities at the end of the eighteenth century, they also left behind so-called rural values. Silas returns to those values in what is the true “rise of Silas Lapham.”