Nos. 44, 46 and 48 Mount Vernon Street in Boston were built in the 1820s and are typical examples of the smaller houses found on the south slope of Beacon Hill. Frances Weston Carruth, in Fictional Rambles in & about Boston (1902) identified No. 48 (c. 1825) as William Dean Howells‘s inspiration for the home of the Coreys in The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Victorian Boston Today (2004), on the other hand, notes that Carruth’s photograph and the description in the novel do not fit no. 48 and that therefore no. 45 is the correct address.