The Bad Beginning Characters

All About VioletViolet is the oldest of the Baudelaire siblings at fourteen years old. She's also right-handed and loves inventing things—both of these traits wind up coming in handy—and she ke...

All About KlausKlaus is the middle child in the Baudelaire family and has the distinction of being the only boy. His favorite thing in the word is reading, so we like him already:The Baudelaire par...

Sunny is only a baby when her parents perish in an awful fire, but she still has some adorable personality going on. Check her out:She was an infant, and very small for her age, scarcely larger tha...

Can a villain get any more villainous? Count Olaf has to be one of the most dreadful and thoroughly terrible bad guys ever to grace the pages of a novel. He'd even give Iago, Simon Legree, or the W...

Mr. Poe is the banker who handles the Baudelaire children's affairs. Too bad he seems more worried about protecting their money than he does keeping them safe. He also always has a cough:The childr...

Justice Strauss is the next-door neighbor to Count Olaf and one of the only people who treats the Baudelaires with kindness and makes life bearable for them. The children have an excellent first im...

Mr. Snicket isn't just our narrator, he's also a part of the Baudelaires' story. We get a few small details about him in this book, but—spoiler alert—his role increases as the series goes on:He...

Count Olaf's associates are a pretty scary bunch. While he invites nine of them over for dinner, five of these baddies make a special impression on the Baudelaires:Soon they were crowding the roomâ...

Mr. Poe's wife and sons only show up briefly in the beginning of this story, but they make a very bad impression right away. Though Mrs. Poe allows the Baudelaires to stay in her home, she buys the...

Lemony Snicket dedicates The Bad Beginning to a mysterious lady named Beatrice.To Beatrice—dearest, darling, dead.Later, he mentions that he has "a blurry photograph, taken a very long time ago,...