The Minister's Charge; Or, the Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker
1886
The Minister's Charge; Or, the Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker
1886
A minister's careless encouragement launched a young man's impossible dreams, and now that man has arrived in Boston, hoping for help. David Sewell must face what he has done: Lemuel Barker stands before him, hopeful and naïve, while the minister grapples with a terrible truth he can neither speak nor escape. What follows is a quiet, devastating confrontation between honest criticism and the ruins of kindness. Howells, the great architect of American realism, transforms what could be simple moral drama into something far more unsettling: a novel about the violence of dashed hopes and the cowardice of those who inspire them. Through conversations that linger and confessions that wound, he builds toward a melancholy that asks whether we can ever be justified in breaking another person's dream, and whether mercy might be the crueler choice.
