Edward Dickinson

Edward Dickinson presides over the Amherst household with the anxious rigidity of a man convinced that reputation is the only thing holding civilization together. A lawyer and aspiring politician, he wants his daughters married respectably and his son groomed to inherit his position. He loves them, but mostly by trying to control them.

Toby Huss plays him as comedy and tragedy at once — a blustering Victorian father whose rules keep buckling against a show that treats him as absurd and sympathetic in the same breath. The writing lets his stiffness crack into real tenderness just often enough that you start rooting for the thaw.