Characters
Lord Arthur Savile
The dutiful murderer
A handsome, wealthy young man, engaged to Sybil Merton, who has lived a life of 'boyish insouciance' until Mr. Podgers reads his palm. Once over his night of terror, he becomes a model of practical good sense, treating murder as a duty to be done before his wedding. He is kind, polite and quite without malice, which makes his attempts on his relatives all the funnier. By the end he is a contented husband and father who, alone among his friends, takes cheiromancy seriously.
Mr. Septimus R. Podgers
The fashionable palmist
Lady Windermere's 'pet cheiromantist', a stout little man with a bald head, gold-rimmed spectacles and a sickly smile, who looks more like a country attorney than a seer. His readings are shrewd enough to alarm a roomful of guests. He sells Lord Arthur the full reading for a hundred guineas and becomes the victim of the murder he foretold, thrown into the Thames by his client. Lady Windermere later calls him an impostor.
Sybil Merton
The beloved bride
Lord Arthur's fiancée, one of the most beautiful girls in London, with a slender neck, dreaming eyes and a Greek grace that her photograph captures. She trusts him completely through two unexplained postponements of the wedding, even when her mother, Lady Julia, urges her to break it off. She innocently finds the unused poison in Lady Clementina's house. She ends as Lady Arthur, happily married, with no idea of what was done for her.
Lady Windermere
The hostess of lions
Gladys, Lady Windermere, is forty, childless, married three times according to Debrett, and devoted to pleasure. She collects famous people as 'lions' who must perform on demand, and her cheiromantist is her latest novelty. Her epigrams on marriage, Providence and mistakes supply the story's sharpest wit. At the end she has tired of palmistry and taken up telepathy, and she dismisses Lord Arthur's faith in cheiromancy as nonsense.
Lady Clementina Beauchamp
The first intended victim
Lord Arthur's second cousin, known to everyone as Lady Clem, a witty, rheumatic old lady in Curzon Street with a false front, a bad temper and a taste for the worst French novels. She hates doctors but loves medicines, and is eager to swallow the capsule on the spot. She dies a natural death in the night after complaining of heartburn, leaving Lord Arthur her house and Sybil her amethyst necklace.
Herr Winckelkopf
The genial bomb-maker
A German conspirator in a shabby house in Bayle's Court, Soho, who recognises Lord Arthur at once from Lady Windermere's parties. He serves pâté and Rhine wine, relies on the 'stupidity' of English detectives, and charges almost nothing because he does not work for money. When his clock fails he apologises and offers nitroglycerine bombs at cost price, then an explosive umbrella just arrived from Geneva.
Count Rouvaloff
The revolutionary go-between
A young Russian of 'very revolutionary tendencies' whom Lord Arthur met at Lady Windermere's. He is supposed to be writing a life of Peter the Great but is suspected of being a Nihilist agent. Amazed to hear that Lord Arthur wants an explosive for 'a purely family matter', he writes down Winckelkopf's address, remarking that Scotland Yard would give a good deal to know it.
The Dean of Chichester
The second intended victim
Lord Arthur's uncle, a man of great culture and learning with a wonderful collection of clocks, which is why Lord Arthur chooses a clock bomb for him. He takes the exploding clock for a tribute from an admirer of his sermon 'Is Licence Liberty?', is amused when its figure falls off, and soon has it sent to the stables. He later reads the service at Lord Arthur's wedding.
Jane Percy
The Dean's chatty daughter
The Dean's daughter, who writes to her aunt, Lord Arthur's mother, about the Dorcas Society, the proper dress for the poor and whether to wear bows. Her cheerful letter describes the failed bomb as a 'pretty and ingenious toy' and wonders whether Arthur would like one for a wedding present. Without knowing it, she reports the collapse of his second plot.