Humphrey Cadwallader

Humphrey Mrs. Cadwallader is a country gentleman of settled years and established station, living in the neighbourhood of Tipton with his wife, the more forceful and socially acute Mrs. Cadwallader. A man of property and moderate influence, he participates in the social and political life of the provincial gentry with an easy confidence born of long habit and unchallenged position. He takes interest in the affairs of his neighbours—marriages, inheritances, preferments—with the leisured attention of someone who has neither urgent necessity nor great ambition to drive him. His manner is affable and open, his judgement generally sound if somewhat conventional; he tends to follow his wife's lead in matters requiring sharper discernment, and is content to act as her amiable companion in her observations of local society. He is neither intellectually pretentious nor deliberately stupid, but rather a solid, unpretending figure of the provincial English gentry, secure in his place and reasonably satisfied with his understanding of the world as it is.