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The Life of Henry James
BLACKWELL CRITICAL BIOGRAPHIES
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The Life of Henry James: A Critical
The Life of Goethe Biography
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The Life of
Henry James
A Critical Biography
Peter Collister
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Contents
Acknowledgmentsix
Note on the text xi
Abbreviationsxii
Prelude: James and Biography xiv
Part I The Early Years 1

1 ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City (1843 –1855) 3
2 Europe and Newport: In Search of a ‘Sensuous Education’ (1855 –1861) 26
3 Civil War and ‘a Consecration to Letters’ (1861 –1869) 49
Part II Independence and Europe 71

4 Italy and the ‘Complex Fate’ of Being an American (1869 –1872) 73
5 Return to Italy and ‘an Incalculable Number of Gathered
Impressions’ (1872 –1873) 93
6 Rome and Paris: Roderick Hudson: An Experiment in Journalism
(1873 –1876) 110
7 ‘The Wheel of London Life’ and Early Novels (1876 –1879) 134
8 Friendships Begin and End: The Achievement of The Portrait of a Lady
(1879 –1881) 156
Part III The Lure of the Theatre 181

9 Family Deaths: New Friendships in Europe (1881 –1884) 183
10 A Range of Novels: Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance
Fenimore Woolson (1885 –1887) 209
11 ‘The Sawdust & Orange-peel Phase’ Begins: The Tragic Muse
(1887 –1891) 229
12 Deaths and Losses: Theatrical Ventures (1891 –1895) 248
vii
Contents
Part IV The Later Years 269

13 Return to ‘The Sacred Fluid of Fiction’ (1895 –1899) 271
14 A Roman Encounter: ‘Letting Yourself Go’ (1899 –1902) 297
15 ‘Dearly Beloved’ Young Men: The Final Novels (1902 –1904) 323
16 The ‘Agreeable and Absorbing Adventure’ of America:
The New York Edition and Last Stories (1904 –1909) 343
17 Loss of William, ‘So Shining a Presence’: Autobiographical
Writing: The Great War and Death (1909 –1916) 369
Letter Details 395

Notes421
Bibliography435
Index447
viii
Acknowledgments
The literature on Henry James, biographical and critical, is enormous and my

indebtedness to the books and articles I have managed to read is correspondingly
great. Even in death, Leon Edel stands at the portal for students of James. In recent
years he has been criticized on several counts – for his sometimes cavalier editorial
methods, for his predominantly Freudian interpretation of events in James’s life, and
for his exclusive control over the availability of manuscripts – yet the breadth of his
work as biographer and editor in making James’s writing available to readers is
undeniable. Edel’s own writing is invariably engaging and persuasive and his bio-
graphical endeavours have an assurance which comes from his having met many of
the protagonists in James’s later life. Of more recent biographers of James and mem-
bers of the James family I have found the work of Fred Kaplan, Sheldon Novick,
R.W.B. Lewis and Alfred Habegger most helpful.
The most significant event in biographical terms in recent years has been the
project to publish The Complete Letters of Henry James undertaken by the University
of Nebraska Press which began in 2006. Given the number of his extant letters
(some 10,000), this is an ambitious undertaking which, as it progresses, is already
proving of immense benefit to those investigating James’s life and work. Based on
the Calendar and Biographical Register created by Steven H. Jobe and Susan E.
Gunter, the collection of Complete Letters (fifteen volumes so far) contains a wealth
of detailed biographical information, the product of extensive research by editors
Greg W. Zacharias, Pierre A.Walker, Michael Anesko and Katie Sommer. It has been
the indispensable resource for the first forty-three years of Henry James’s life and
my indebtedness to this team of scholars will be apparent.
Editions of James’s fiction are now appearing under the aegis of Cambridge
University Press and, as well as supplying a reliable text, they provide a range of
editorial matter which helps contextualize his work in personal and cultural terms.
ix
Acknowledgments
When available (there are currently ten volumes – the eleventh, Washington Square,
arrived too late for me to consult), this is the edition I have used when discussing
James’s novels.
For much of my work I have relied on the resources of the British Library and,
once again, I am pleased to record my gratitude to its staff in the Rare Books and
Music Reading Room whose professionalism and helpfulness remain unparalleled.
Also in London, I wish to thank Kate Jarman, Trust Archivist, Barts Health NHS
Trust, who gave me useful advice as well as access to the archive at St Bartholomew’s
Hospital in the City. I am especially grateful to Bay James, James’s literary executor,
for granting me permission to quote from previously unpublished material held at
the Houghton Library, Harvard College, at the Henry James Collection, Yale
Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University, and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, where Dr Philip
S. Palmer was especially helpful. Meredith Mann of the New York Public Library
also arranged for me to use the resources of the New York Public Library.
For granting permission to reproduce the Mathew Brady daguerreotype of
Henry James with his father (Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am
1092-9 (4597.6), I am grateful to Leslie A. Morris, Gore Vidal Curator of Modern
Books and Manuscripts, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Houghton Library,
on behalf of the president and fellows of Harvard College. On literary executors
and permissions I received some useful advice from Michael B. Winship. In Rome
the helpful and well-informed volunteer staff at the Non-Catholic Cemetery on
Via Caio Cestio made me feel very welcome. At Wiley Blackwell I am grateful for
the support and advice given by Nicole Allen, Britta Ramaraj, Liz Wingett and Ed
Robinson.
I am indebted to the two anonymous readers appointed by Wiley Blackwell
who offered detailed and sometimes challenging comments on my manuscript.
They saved me from a number of errors: I am to blame for any remaining. I am
grateful, too, for the encouragement and advice offered over the years by Pierre A.
Walker, Adrian Poole, Peter C. Caldwell, Michael Anesko and Greg Zacharias (who
provided copies of James letters as well as advance sight of the most recent volumes
of the Complete Letters). I also spent an illuminating hour with Alexander Nemerov
looking at the Holbein portrait of The Ambassadors in the National Gallery, London.
From the beginning, Linda Bree and Claude Rawson have been involved in the
progress of my manuscript and have made many valuable suggestions: I am grateful
to them both for their kindness and support. Finally, it is a pleasure to express my
gratitude to John Aplin who has been an enthusiastic and encouraging partner in
my study of James both in Britain and America.
x
Note on the text
Currency values
At certain points in the biography I note Henry James’s earnings from his writing and
lecturing. It is very difficult to assess their equivalent current values, but it might be
worth noting that in the last decades of the nineteenth century the average US
worker in manufacturing earned roughly $345 per annum (£71). Exchange rates for
dollars and pounds sterling remained fairly constant from 1875 through to the 1900s
when £1 sterling (with minor annual changes) was equivalent to $4.85 (see Lawrence
H. Officer, ‘Dollar-Pound Exchange Rate from 1791’, MeasuringWorth, 2022.
URL: http://www.measuringworth.com/exchangepound).
Methods of Documentation
The practice of the editors of James’s Complete Letters is to reproduce the MS text
as it appears; any slips or spelling mistakes are reproduced without editorial inter-
vention and I have followed this principle.
References to frequently-quoted texts are given in parentheses; all other refer-
ences appear at the end of the volume.To avoid cluttering my narrative, information
on the dates and recipients of letters from which I quote, each with a cue phrase, is
provided in ‘Letter Details’ at the end of the volume.
Translations
I have included translations only of less familiar French words or phrases.
xi
Abbreviations
AS The American Scene, ed. Peter Collister (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2019)
CH Henry James:The Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Gard (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968)
CL55-72 Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855–1872, 2 volumes, ed. Pierre A.
Walker, Greg W. Zacharias (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska
Press, 2006)
CL72-76 Complete Letters of Henry James, 1872–1876, 3 volumes (2008)
CL76-78 Complete Letters of Henry James, 1876–1878, 2 volumes (2012–2013)
CL80-83 Complete Letters of Henry James, 1880–1883, 2 volumes (2016–2017),
ed. Michael Anesko, Greg W. Zacharias
CN Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
CP The Complete Plays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (London: Rupert
Hart-Davis, 1949)
CR Henry James:The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Kevin J. Hayes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
CT The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, 12 volumes
(London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962–1964)
CTWC Henry James: Collected Travel Writings:The Continent, ed. Richard
Howard (New York: Library of America, 1993)
CTWGBA Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America, ed.
Richard Howard (New York: Library of America, 1993)
CWHJA The Complete Writings of Henry James on Art, ed. Peter Collister
xii
Abbreviations
CWHJD The Complete Writings of Henry James on Drama, ed. Peter Collister
CWJ Correspondence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth
M. Berkeley, 12 volumes (Charlottesville,VA: University Press of
Virginia, 1992–1999)
DBF Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men, ed. Susan
E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 2001)
HJC Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American
Social Scene, ed. Pierre A. Walker (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 1999)
HJL Henry James: Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 volumes (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1974–1984)
HJ&EW Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters: 1900–1915, ed. Lyall H.
Powers (New York: Scribner, 1990)
LC 1 Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature: American Writers:
English Writers, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Library
of America, 1984)
LC 2 Henry James: Literary Criticism: French Writers: Other European Writers:
the Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson
(New York: Library of America, 1984)
LHJ Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock, 2 volumes (London:
Macmillan, 1920)
LL Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (London: Allen Lane,
Penguin Press, 1999)
NSB Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) and The Middle Years (1917), ed. Peter
Collister (Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011)
SBO A Small Boy and Others (1913), ed. Peter Collister (Charlottesville,VA:
University of Virginia Press, 2011)
TMY Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) and The Middle Years (1917), ed. Peter
Collister (Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011)
WWS William Wetmore Story and His Friends from Letters, Diaries, and
Recollections, 2 volumes (London: Blackwood, 1903)
HJ Henry James
AJ Alice James (sister)
HJ Sr Henry James Senior (father)
MWJ Mary Walsh James (mother)
WJ William James (elder brother)
AGJ Alice Gibbens James (wife of WJ)
xiii
Prelude: James and Biography
‘The Real Right Thing’ (1899), a strange, ghostly story by Henry James, outlines
some of the pleasures and (more emphatically) the anxieties of writing biography.
Just a few pages long, it is less a story than a record of changing circumstance. The
widow of a recently dead author approaches one of his younger, obscure friends,
offering him all her husband’s papers and his warm, comfortable study to work in
so that he can record his life. It is a convenient arrangement, but she is a strange
Gothic figure clad in black, her face half-obscured by a black fan, as she silently
appears and disappears in stairways and rooms. And her intentions soon become
clear – she will ensure that her role in the author’s life is represented as she wishes.
Initially the work goes well and Withermore, the emblematically named young
man, senses the benign presence of his friend: ‘the light breath of his dead host was as
distinctly in his hair as his own elbows were on the table before him’ (CT 10: 478). If
he only were to look up from his work, he knows he would see him across the table.
Both widow and aspiring biographer acknowledge his presence. Then, one evening,
Withermore realizes that he has been abandoned. He presses on, but it is hopeless. He
stands with the widow in the hall, the world of the living illuminated by electric light
and furnished with fashionable rugs from Tottenham Court Road stores, and they
recognize that ‘some monstrous oppression … was closing over both of them’.
Withermore’s earlier conviction that the ‘artist was what he did – he was nothing
else’ is confirmed (475). The dead man is vulnerable and helpless, and his admirer
has to acknowledge the effrontery of the intrusion: ‘“[w]e lay him bare. We serve
him up. What is it called? We give him to the world”’ (483). Finally, his biographer
must surrender as his subject seems to stand in the darkness at the top of the stairs,
projecting the incontrovertible wishes of the dead: ‘[h]e strains forward out of his
darkness; he reaches toward us out of his mystery; he makes us dim signs out of his
horror’. It is not the horror of death or oblivion but rather his helplessness – he is
not indifferent and his strength of feeling has the power of a curse. Withermore
finds the door to his room guarded by his presence, ‘“[i]mmense. But dim. Dark.
Dreadful”’ (484, 485).
xiv
This is one, sensationally sinister version of the biographical enterprise, though

other acts of investigation, or intrusion, and entailing alternative horrors, feature in
James’s fiction. In ‘The Aspern Papers’, the posthumous privacy of Jeffrey Aspern is
threatened by the inquiries of the dishonourable American scholar who turns up in
Venice to befriend the two women who can help him. Aspern is finally saved when
the unnamed man (who also narrates) is frightened off by the final bargain offered
to him: the unpalatable prospect of marriage to the younger of the women – his
own life and body in exchange for the real object of his desire: Aspern’s papers.
James’s great essay of 1907 on Shakespeare and The Tempest endorses the complete-
ness and untouchability of the poet’s works, the corresponding irrelevance of his
personal circumstances and the futility of scholars’ biographical enquiries.
By contrast, the novelist assumed the biographer’s role himself in the portraits
and sketches he wrote in the manner of Sainte-Beuve, the French critic he so
admired, which combine the critical with a selection of biographical detail, ‘life’
made to serve ‘letters’. In an early monograph on Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879),
James distances himself from the genre from the beginning by affirming that he will
give ‘this short sketch the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography’
(Hawthorne, p. 1). The title of his other biographical essay, William Wetmore Story and
his Friends (1903), indicates the broader nature of James’s interest beyond its principal
subject.The life of this expatriate Bostonian, resident in Rome, established sculptor
and aspiring dramatist, is approached through impressions of Italian landscapes and
cities and sketches of celebrated writers such as James Russell Lowell and Robert
and Elizabeth Browning. James confessed that ‘there is no subject – there is nothing
in the man himself to write about. There is nothing for me but to do a tour de force,
or try to – leave poor dear W.W.S. out, practically, and make a little volume on the
old Roman, Americo-Roman, Hawthornesque and other bygone days’.1 The text
of this biography is, naturally, more circumspect, though ‘the interesting boxful’ of
materials to which he refers seems to be a formal invocation of the biographer, a
rhetorical aside, rather than raising the romantic possibilities and mysteries attach-
ing to his subject, the dark mood of ‘The Real Right Thing’.
In his own latter years, James, clearly and acutely aware of the biographical curi-
osity attaching to great authors, sought continuously to preserve his own posthu-
mous privacy. He insistently (and often fruitlessly) advised friends to destroy his
letters, and the scene of his supervising the burning of papers in his back garden in
later years must have seemed like an episode from one of his short stories. He did
not wish – quite understandably – to leave ‘personal and private documents at the
mercy of any accidents’.2 Many of his letters to family and friends are finely written
and engaging documents, but those to the young men he loved in later life, make
the reader feel, even now, as if intruding on the novelist’s privacy.
Finally, recording a time long past, a society and culture quite distinct from a
present that was preparing for world war, James embarked on his own autobiography,
xv
highly original in its avoidance of the ponderousness of many Victorian memoirs,

affectionate in its recollection of people and incidents otherwise forgotten, and
faithful in its adherence to the prevailing motive which was to follow the
development of a life pursuing the ambition to be ‘just literary’. He exploits allusion
and a style rich in possibility which conveys (at least initially) ‘the indelibility of the
childish vision’ (AS, p. 92). In these two and a half volumes, A Small Boy and Others,
Notes of a Son and Brother and the incomplete Middle Years, James discloses a wealth
of unique biographical detail and has thus determined how posterity will learn of
his earlier life. In addition, his text contains other less obvious messages, minor rev-
elations which yield their secrets when innocent assertions are examined. His last
typist and amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, recalls the scene of their composition
and the fluency of James’s thoughts as he paced the room, ‘sounding out the periods
in tones of free resonant assurance. At such times he was beyond reach of irrelevant
sounds or sights’.3
The process had not been without hazards for James himself: the genesis for the
autobiographical writing was a projected edition of his late brother William’s letters,
though his handling of these soon led him to his own childhood memories which
take up the first volume, A Small Boy and Others. The second volume, Notes of a Son
and Brother, contains a generous selection (closely ‘edited’ by James himself) of
family letters, written principally by his brother, father, and cousin, Minny Temple.
The fact that they were now all dead clearly allowed him a revisionary freedom that
he sometimes exploited, whatever others said. Editorial criteria have, of course,
changed over the years, but James’s confidence in handling such documents never
wavers. In Notes of a Son and Brother, he assumes an assured authorial stance, a role
as informed mediator and arranger of information uniquely qualified and therefore
to be trusted: ‘I allow myself not to hang back in gathering several passages from
another series for fear of their crossing in a manner the line of privacy and giving a
distinctness to old intimate things. The distinctness is in the first place all to the
honour of the persons and the interests thus glimmering through; and I hold, in the
second, that the light touch under which they revive positively adds, by the magic
of memory, a composite fineness’ (NSB, p. 207).
If these volumes have indeed negotiated a ‘line of privacy’ and honoured to
some degree those ‘old intimate things’, they may stand then as an authorized life
quite literally, and they offer the richest resource for the biographer. But the dangers
of the biographical process are many and forbidding, not least in diminishing or
compromising the mystery and autonomy of the individual. James himself, who in
his later years gave an interview whose premises he then denied, spells out his own
anxieties to what may have been his surprised interviewer – though his change of
mind or disowning of the process nevertheless was included as part of the final
published portrait. He seems struck by the potential vulgarity of any association
with the press and its ‘reverberations’, and, more forcefully, by the horror of his
xvi
private self publicly paraded: ‘“I have a constituted and systematic indisposition to
having anything to do myself, personally, with anything in the nature of an inter-
view, report, reverberation, that is, to adopting, endorsing, or in any other wise tak-
ing to myself anything that any one may have presumed to contrive to gouge, as it
were, out of me. It has, for me, nothing to do with me – my me, at all; but only with
the other person’s equivalent for that mystery, whatever it may be. Thereby if you
find anything to say about our apparently blameless time together, – it is your little
affair exclusively”’.4
Given that biography demands such violent intrusion – and James has been
unusually emphatic here – it must also be alive to the mystery of its subject and to
the darkness, mysteriousness or ghostliness which he sees as a potential consequence
of enquiry. The late short story, ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908), raises a comparably
unsettling biographical vision: when the mature expatriate (with much experience
in common with James himself) returns to New York, to the house of his youth, he
there pursues and confronts his alternative self, the man he might have become, in
whose spectral presence he finally collapses.
xvii
Part I
The Early Years

1
‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’
in New York City
(1843 –1855)
On the fine late-summer afternoon of 1904 when the ocean liner Kaiser Wilhelm II
arrived from Southampton and docked at Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson
River from New York City, the passengers who gathered to disembark included the
distinguished and highly respected novelist, Henry James. Now tending to corpu-
lence, he was 61 years old, representing himself archly to his readers as a ‘mere
ancient contemplative person curious of character’ (AS, p. 19). Though born in
America, he had lived in England for most of his adult life. As for his personal cir-
cumstances: he was a celibate bachelor in indifferent health, enjoying a variety of
close friendships with both men and women, though his passions were engaged by
younger men; his closest family was that of his brother William James, America’s
foremost philosopher and professor of Psychology at Harvard University.
Henry, too, was a public figure, and this visit to his homeland which would last
almost a year, partly answering a personal need, had a public dimension; his progress
was reported regularly by newspapers across the country. He planned a book that
would record his impressions, to be published in 1907 as The American Scene, and he
went on to deliver two lectures at numerous venues. He was a name and a celebrity,
though comparatively few had read his fiction which, short on action, returned most
characteristically to the theme of innocence and its loss, dramatized within intricate
relationships in settings both American and European. He had last visited America
in 1883 and now he was particularly shocked at the transformation of New York; the
once prominent spire of Trinity Church in Manhattan’s Financial District, had been
dwarfed by skyscrapers – some reaching as high as 21 stories. The city’s population
The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister.
© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
3
‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City
had tripled and it had become a centre of commerce and industry.When walking its
streets, James was shocked both by the place and its occupants.
The place in which James had spent many of his boyhood years was mid-nine-
teenth-century New York: he was born on 15 April 1843, at 21 Washington Place,
into a family which belonged to the privileged classes. The city had recently become
America’s largest conurbation, boasting fresh running water for its inhabitants from
the Murray Hill Reservoir, and offering cultural diversion with the founding of the
New York Philharmonic Orchestra. James’s twentieth-century return acted power-
fully, it seems, to draw him back to his memories of that earlier time, a retreat later
made more pressing by the death of William in 1910 and a planned edition of his
brother’s letters. As a consequence, James embarked in his last few remaining years
on a major autobiographical project. In A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son
and Brother (1914) and The Middle Years (1917), he found a new voice and evolved a
new medium of autobiographical expression. As he explained to his nephew, Harry,
‘It must be an absolutely original, personal, unprecedented thing’.1
The first two-thirds of A Small Boy and Others has New York for its setting, and
this city of the 1840s and fifties provides a rich and complex setting for his tender,
sometimes self-effacing account of his early life. A short story of 1884, ‘Georgina’s
Reasons’, refers to this ‘primitive epoch’ with pointed nostalgia, and it clearly has a
kind of Arcadian status for the narrator as he recalls a time when ‘the battered
rotunda of Castle Garden echoed with expensive vocal music’, and ‘Hoboken, of a
summer afternoon, was a genteel resort’ (CT 6: 17). In James’s late memoir, its
houses, streets, parks, entertainments, shops, transport, are itemized in detail and in
their different seasons – in summer time, for instance, the dusty smell of the city,
down in ‘the rank and rubbishy waterside quarters’, and the bushels of peaches
transported from Middlesex County, New Jersey (SBO, p. 60). Even the playbill
advertisements on Fifth Avenue were read and pondered with serious concentration.
It is an idealized version of the past, as he readily admits, of locations viewed ‘in a
dusty golden light that special memories of small misery scarce in the least bedim’
(p. 161). It was a place of such innocence – his own, at least – that, as he wandered
alone, Broadway itself ‘must have been then as one of the alleys of Eden’ (p. 164). It
is a place which no longer exists, as ephemeral as his own childhood, a form of
personal construction. Everything, it seems, was noticed, nothing wasted, such, as he
confesses, was ‘the measure of my small adhesiveness’ (p. 82).
The James Family
James’s paternal ancestry was predominantly Irish; the grandparents of his grand-
mother, Catharine Barber, had emigrated in the previous century, while his
grandfather, William James, had travelled to New York from County Cavan more
4
1843 –1855
recently in 1789. James believed that his grandmother represented ‘the only
English blood’ in the family (SBO, p. 8), though this has been questioned or mod-
ified by later commentators.2 Her family had been Scottish Presbyterians, a form
of dissent shared by William, and they had emigrated from Ireland. When the two
married in Albany, New York, in 1803, Catharine became William’s third wife,
both of her predecessors having died young; this partnership in which eight chil-
dren survived to adulthood could not have been especially happy – Alfred
Habegger regards her as ‘simultaneously disregarded and depended on’3 – but it
lasted almost thirty years until William’s death in 1832. Their substantial house in
Albany, with Catharine at its centre, became a home for her children and grand-
children within an extended family whose members seem to have been especially
prone to illness and early death. Aside from her own children (the last born when
she was forty-six), there were three from her husband’s earlier marriages;
Catharine’s younger sister had also died, leaving eight children. James, in his
memoir, remembers this home as ‘a nurseried and playroomed orphanage’ and it
is clear that his grandmother, daughter of a former Minuteman, gentleman farmer
and judge, had become the kindly but exhausted centre of the large family estab-
lishment at 43 North Pearl Street.
Money was not a problem, for William James was a shrewd businessman whose
fortune was originally built on trading and importing goods. He had later pur-
chased land in the distant Midwest, in Syracuse, New York, and also Manhattan,
and had invested widely and successfully. He had been an early proponent of the
construction scheme which linked Lake Erie with the Hudson River; the building
of the Erie Canal linked the Great Lakes, and thus the Midwest, with the Atlantic
Ocean, an ambitious and highly lucrative venture. The chief speaker at the cere-
mony celebrating the completion of this historic project on 2 November 1825 at
the Albany Capitol was William James. Forceful, irascible, he had become rich,
leaving an estate on his death of over a million dollars (some say $3 million) – a
fortune which allowed the next generation (including Henry Sr, the novelist’s
father) the luxury of never having to seek employment. His will proved conten-
tious, however: he bequeathed just $3,000 per year in her lifetime to his wife, and
seriously reduced amounts to two of his sons, one of them Henry Sr, with whom
there had been a falling-out; he received a mere $1,250 per year, much less than
what most of his more compliant siblings received. But the will was successfully
contested and the estate more equitably divided; Henry Sr’s inheritance worked
out at $10,000 per year.
There had been conflict within the family and Henry Sr, whatever his father’s
high-handedness, had also been a source of disappointment.The crucial point in his
young life had been the major accident he suffered as a boy of thirteen; in a school
game (or possibly experiment) illustrating how hot air rises which involved flying
balloons with a burning rope attached to them, a hayloft had been set ablaze; he had
5
tried to douse the fire but his trousers, soaked in turpentine, ignited. One of his legs
was so badly burnt that he spent two years in bed and underwent two amputations,
the last removing the leg from above the knee. He would later use a cork prosthetic
limb, though his capacity to walk would always be compromised. Henry Sr’s tutor,
the brilliant Joseph Henry, went on to become a professor at the Smithsonian
Institution, a connection ‘of grateful pupil with benignant tutor’ which Henry Jr is
keen to mark in his biography of William Wetmore Story, the artist commissioned
to execute a bronze sculpture of the eminent scientist (WWS 2: 269).
In 1828, Henry Sr, a bright boy of seventeen, enrolled at Union College,
Schenectady, an institution not far from Albany to which his father, a trustee, had
been a generous donor. He followed a classical curriculum including Latin, Greek
and rhetoric, and was popular with fellow students and members of staff. Student
life there, was, however, too strict for Henry. Drinking excessively, he quickly ran
into debt and eventually dropped out. Having returned, he graduated in 1830,
though his academic record remained mediocre. Eventually he gave up alcohol, but
his dependency had blighted much of his early manhood.
Having taken up gambling, he followed an uncertain path in the years following.
He also became, however, religiously enthusiastic, enrolling in 1835 on a course at
Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey, well known for its strong Calvinistic
tendencies. He intended to prepare for the ministry, but his religious views here
became extreme and he was still beset by his addictions; at this time, some years
after the death of his father, his inheritance came through, and he realized that he
need never work to maintain self or dependents; after almost two years he left the
college and set off on the long journey to England and Ireland, much of his visit
spent quietly in London. He returned once more to Princeton, but by now vocally
hostile to established religion, he soon dropped out. His later writings, original and
sometimes controversial, chart James Sr’s earnest, lifelong spiritual questing and
social engagement, though, as F.O. Matthiessen points out, he was ‘always talking
about potentiality rather than actuality’.4 Two and a half chapters of his autobiog-
raphy survive, attributed, as his son William observes, to ‘an entirely fictitious per-
sonage’. Immortal Life: illustrated in a brief Autobiographic Sketch of the late Stephen
Dewhurst. Edited with an Introduction by Henry James, reflects his spiritual and emo-
tional commitment, often in highly dramatic detail.
This fragment is included in The Literary Remains of Henry James, a collection
selected by William James, who attempts to synthesize the essentials of Henry Sr’s
philosophical belief: ‘[i]n the first place, he felt that the individual man, as such, is
nothing, but owes all he is and has to the race nature he inherits, and to the society
into which he is born. And, secondly, he scorned to admit, even as a possibility, that
the great and loving Creator, who has all the being and the power, and has brought
us as far as this, should not bring us through, and out, into the most triumphant har-
mony’. William includes, however, a warning for his readers: ‘[d]o not squeeze the
6
1843 –1855
terms or the logic too hard!’, for ‘he despised every formulation he made as soon as
it was uttered’.5
A fellow student and room-mate of Henry Sr at Princeton, Hugh Walsh, intro-
duced him to his sister in New York City, Mary Robertson Walsh, who (after he had
made another trip to Europe) became his wife in 1840. The civil ceremony took
place at Mary’s home in Washington Square, accommodating Henry Sr’s distaste for
formalized religion; the bride wore ‘India muslin and a wondrous gold headband’
(SBO, pp. 184–185). A year older than her husband, she came from a wealthy New
York family; her father had died long ago in 1820, and her sister Catharine (who
also found Henry Sr’s original thinking attractive), would, as ‘Aunt Kate’ become a
semi-permanent member of what became the James household. Mary clearly
offered her husband a reassuring stability, and her son Henry (despite portraying
some grotesque family dynamics in his fiction) invariably speaks of her with
warmth.The couple would have five children, and the marriage seems to have been
happy, though from the beginning when Mary had renounced her ‘rigidly devout’
faith,6 it was largely she who deferred to her husband’s often idiosyncratic needs.
Children quickly arrived: William in 1842, Henry in 1843, Garth Wilkinson
(Wilky) in 1844, Robertson (Bob) in 1846, and Alice in 1848. Theirs was a peripa-
tetic childhood owing to Henry Sr’s restlessness.When Henry Jr was just six months
old the family travelled to England and also visited France before returning to New
York a year later, in autumn 1844. The following year they were living at 50 North
Pearl Street, in what is now downtown Albany, close to grandmother James, where
they remained until early 1846. Albany, high up on the Hudson River, some
150 miles north of Manhattan, was at this time considered to be on the edge of
frontier territory, a thriving river port, and one of the country’s biggest cities,
though Henry recalls it as bathed in a golden light redolent of a painting of a Dutch
street scene, his grandmother’s house (demolished in 1860) with its ‘yellow archaic
gable-end’, a memory of ‘brick baked in the land of dykes’, and cobbled streets
(SBO, p. 13). The family then returned to New York, travelling between the two
cities until 1848, when they moved into a newly built house bought by Henry Sr
at 58 West Fourteenth Street. Here they stayed until 1855 when once again the
entire family crossed the Atlantic; they remained in Europe for almost three years,
living in Switzerland, France and England. They returned, not to New York, but to
Newport, Rhode Island, when, having stayed for a year, they left once more for
Switzerland in 1859. By October 1860 they were back again in Newport, and here
they stayed until 1864. The next move was to Boston, Massachusetts, and, in 1866
they crossed the Charles River to Cambridge. Their house at 20 Quincy Street
would become the family home until Mary’s death in 1882.
European travel was the norm for comparably wealthy, privileged American
families in these ‘classic years of the great Americano-European legend’ (LC 2:
1167), but such relentless movement and long-distance travel are exceptional.
7
Doubtless, however servanted and supported, the weight of organizing travel

arrangements for small children and for creating some form of domestic order fell
upon Mary James’s shoulders. The intellectual excitement, meantime, was for her
husband; in London in the winter of 1843, carrying a letter of introduction from
Ralph Waldo Emerson, he met Thomas Carlyle as well as a range of other British
luminaries, including John Stuart Mill, Alfred Tennyson (not yet a Lord) and George
Henry Lewes. The following year while staying near Windsor he suffered what he
described as a ‘vastation’. The term applies primarily to the idea of laying waste, as
in war, but by the middle of the nineteenth century (OED quotes Emerson’s
‘Swedenborg; or, the Mystic’ (1847) as an example) the term had come to mean
‘the action of purifying by the destruction of evil qualities or elements’. James Sr’s
account indeed dramatically describes ‘some damnèd shape squatting invisible to
me … raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life’,7 as if some
demon within, perhaps expressing the kind of inherited guilt derived from forma-
tive religious teaching, needed to be exorcized. He attributed his long and difficult
recovery from this crisis to the writings of Swedish philosopher and mystic, Emanuel
Swedenborg, whose ideas he would study for the rest of his life.William James sug-
gests that ‘his philosophy indeed is but the statement of his cure’.8 Henry Sr had
been drawn to Swedenborg by the anonymous articles of the British doctor, James
John Garth Wilkinson, who would become a close friend, and for whom his third
son would be named. Emerson, too, published an important essay on Swedenborg,
examining the relations between mysticism and scientific reasoning.
The effect of the Jameses’ migratory life on the children was enduring: apart
from the six years they spent in New York, every home and any local friendship
would have seemed temporary; education was similarly piecemeal, provided
through a range of establishments or private tutors. On the other hand, they lived
in a stimulating, unconventional and loving environment, and were exposed to an
extraordinary range of experiences as they moved between two continents and
appreciated at first hand the riches of European culture. In later years William James,
commenting on his younger brother Henry and his long residence in England,
offered a more general insight applicable to the dynamics of their family and the
rich interdependencies it engendered: ‘[h]e’s really … a native of the James family,
and has no other country’.9
The ‘Dispensaries of Learning’
Henry Jr’s education, as he recalls it, was curiously haphazard, allowing him little
opportunity to distinguish himself. School didn’t begin well: brother William had
preceded him to the Dutch House in Albany and ‘was already seated at his task’;
Henry, by contrast, was dragged there, ‘crying and kicking’, quickly retreated and
8
1843 –1855
refused to return (SBO, p. 12). The two brothers, we are told (possibly with some
exaggeration) were never again in the same schoolroom together. Always ‘round the
corner and out of sight’, William would never be caught up with, and Henry pro-
jects his own role as secondary and subservient. His schooldays in New York City
emerge as generally uninspiring and uncertain, both stressful and dull, peopled by
Dickensian grotesques among the adults and unleavened by peer friendships. He
began in Dames’ schools, feeling some ‘humiliation’ at being taught by genteel
women who ‘handled us literally with gloves’ (p. 17): their names survive – Mrs Daly,
Miss Rogers, Miss Sedgwick, Mrs Wright (Lavinia D.). He was tutored at home in
French, by ‘small brown snappy Mademoiselle Delavigne’, and ‘a large Russian
lady’, with ‘Merovingian sidebraids’ who had arrived, it seems,‘straight from Siberia’
(pp. 19, 21). He takes pleasure in summoning up ‘certain faint echoes, wavering
images’ of other teachers now consigned to anonymity,‘ladies and gentlemen, dimly
foreign, mere broken syllables of whose names come back to me’ (p. 160), though
the name of the formidable Count Adam Gurowski, a Polish émigré, fluent in
French, German and Russian, survives, however brief his tenure.
Later Henry was enrolled at the Institution Vergnès, probably on 166 East 10th
Street (though he says Broadway, SBO, p. 160) which offered a wide variety of
modern languages (such schools were fashionable at the time) as well as
commercial arithmetic and higher mathematics. There he witnessed, sitting
alongside ‘[l]ittle Cubans and Mexicans’ much ‘whacking’; among ‘infuriated
ushers, of foreign speech and flushed complexion’, Henry sat ‘unscathed and
unterrified’, protected simply by his own insignificance (p. 163). In 1853–1854 he
attended with William the school of Richard Puling Jenks at 689 Broadway,10 ‘a
small but sincere academy’ whose drawing- and writing-masters, Mr Coe and Mr
Dolmidge, are recalled with affection (p. 170). Benjamin H. Coe looked like the
formidable war veteran General Winfield Scott, but produced small, treasured
‘drawing cards’ for his pupils. Handwriting and calligraphy were important ele-
ments in the curriculum of the time, and Mr Dolmidge becomes an emblem of
his discipline, ‘a pure pen-holder of a man’ and likened to a Phiz or Cruikshank
illustration for Dickens’s fiction (p. 165). After a year the boys were withdrawn,
ostensibly because Mr Jenks moved premises, and in 1854–1855 Henry came
under the tutelage of Messrs Forrest and Quackenbos in a shop-like if fashionable
establishment at 71 West Fourteenth Street, where, once again, he languished.
Having failed to succeed at Latin in Mr Jenks’s school, Henry was compelled to
study ‘the theory and practice of book-keeping’, while William was promoted to
the first floor ‘classical’ department. Here at least, with Mr Forrest, ‘awful and
arid’, school became reassuringly predictable: ‘we didn’t, under his sway, go in
terror, only went exceedingly in want’ (pp. 170, 172).
Henry attended some dozen schools and experienced a range of curricula, but
remained passive and unengaged, preoccupied ‘with almost anything but the fact of
9
learning’ and receiving no ‘throb of assurance or success’ (pp. 169, 158).Though we

are reliant here on the elaborate medium of the writer’s recollections, a few points
emerge: the large number of establishments attended, enough to ‘excite’ the author’s
‘wonder’ (p. 17), his seeming imperviousness to most of what was offered, and his
confessed insignificance. No blame is attached to the parents who were paying
these school fees, and for whom the idea of continuity seems to have been absent.
It was not unusual for boys at this time to attend a number of schools (as occurred
with some of the James cousins) though even in subsequent years in Switzerland,
James Sr’s choice of schools was, at best, eccentric. Henry’s vocabulary as he recalls
his relationship to his education as ‘inapt’ and of his having shown ‘inaptitude’ –
terms much less common than ‘inept’ and ‘ineptitude’ – may signify some unease, a
sense of opportunity lost.
Aside from the Dickensian references which represent Henry’s young self as a
kind of innocent, haplessly abandoned to the world, James invokes in these pages
of recollection another work of fiction, Alphonse Daudet’s Jack (1876).The young
hero of the title attends the Gymnase Moronval, described in consistently colo-
nialist language as a ‘multi-coloured school’, located in ‘one of the finest quarters
of Paris’,11 having been deposited there by his self-indulgent mother. James sees
his own schooldays as presaging this work, a fictionalized account of ‘contempo-
rary customs’, as if he had already lived certain of the experiences it narrates and
can vouch for their authenticity. He sees himself in the moment, so absolute and
unavoidable as such childhood moments are, when Jack looks around and believes
he, a native of the place, is as bereft as those of his contemporaries who have come
from the distant tropics, the ‘pays chauds’: ‘It seemed to him that his life was now
to be thrown amongst orphans, forsaken children, himself as forsaken as though
he also had come from Timbuctoo or Tahiti’ (Jack, p. 51). Such sensations of iso-
lation, institutional carelessness, parental negligence, enacted in privileged condi-
tions, are powerfully – forensically – recorded, though the pain and irritation
have become tempered in the elaborate nuances and allusive gestures of late-
Jamesian prose.
Adopting a more direct, assertive voice, James himself offers a strange (if touch-
ing) justification of his parents’ approach to education – namely, an encouragement
of their children to ‘Convert, convert, convert!’ all experience, even ‘things vain and
unintended’, for their best moral development (SBO, pp. 173–174): not to pursue
the vain idea of ‘success’ but to aspire to ‘spiritual decency’ – as if life itself didn’t
already offer enough opportunities for boredom or disappointment. In the public
arena of his writings Henry Sr affirmed portentously that he wished any child of
his to become ‘an upright man’, by ‘instructing his understanding by moral truths,
and investing him with a certain responsibility over his own conduct’.12 By contrast,
his son’s most unguarded, and significantly retrospective comment on his education
is direct and untypically bitter; it appeared not in print but in a letter of 8 November
10
1843 –1855
1906 to his niece, Peggy James (William’s daughter), with reference to himself as
that distant ‘small boy’: he looks tenderly at his past self, as if he were a neglected
Dickensian child: ‘No one took any interest whatever in his development, except to
neglect or stunt it where it might have helped – and any that he was ever to have
he picked up wholly by himself ’.The conclusion is corroborated independently by
the youngest of the James children, Alice, when she advised William on his chil-
dren’s education: ‘What enrichment of mind and memory can children have
without continuity and if they are torn up by the roots every little while as we
were! Of all things don’t make the mistake wh. brought about our rootless and acci-
dental childhood’.13
Young Henry’s early education may have failed him, though he was to find less
formal means of apprehending the world. For instance, the British illustrated weekly
magazine Punch, with its humorous satirical commentary on current figures and
institutions, which he describes, with a nod to Matthew Arnold, as its ‘“criticism of
life” … gentle and forbearing’,14 with contributions from William Makepeace
Thackeray (a favourite author) and illustrations by John Leech, provided insights
into alternative social and political systems in the most entertaining way for this
‘silent devotee’. It must have helped form part of that soon-to-be-fulfilled dream of
Europe; indeed, he recalls how, for him, ‘Punch was England: Punch was London; and
England and London were at that time words of multifarious suggestion to this
small American child’ (CWHJA, pp. 358, 359).
For the time, though, New York itself could offer him a richly diverse, poten-
tially dangerous, set of experiences. The most important opportunity was to be
found in the operation of the city itself and his parents’ apparent willingness to let
him wander its ‘beguiling’ streets alone, ‘master of my short steps’, like some child
in a Perrault fairy tale, though he, at least, remained a ‘safely-prowling infant’
(SBO, pp. 24, 85). He sees himself once more as the small boy, smelling ‘the cold
dusty paint and iron as the rails of the Eighteenth Street corner rub his contem-
plative nose’ (p. 25), yet such a natural habit of observation also anticipates a
future adult calling to be played out on the streets of Europe’s great cities. It is an
activity which he self-deprecatingly calls ‘dawdling and gaping’, a pursuit osten-
sibly unambitious and inactive, but which denotes a sensitivity, a capacity to
receive an impression, to feel a relation or ‘vibration’ which is the distinguishing
mark of the creative artist.
Mid-nineteenth-century New York City retained a semi-rural or -agricultural
character, with poplars, pigs and poultry in evidence near Henry’s Fourteenth
Street home. Soldiers still rehearsed their parades in Washington Square seven
blocks from home. But even now the city’s infrastructure was changing: as Henry
and William walked back from school along Fourth Avenue, they witnessed with
excitement ‘a riot of explosion and a great shouting and waving of red flags’ as work
began on the Hudson River Railroad which would link Manhattan with Albany
11
(p. 23). For the James family it meant that the twelve-hour overnight voyage up the
Hudson by steamboat would be replaced by a shorter rail journey along its banks,
and the consequent loss for young Henry of that ‘peculiar note of romance’ (AS,
p. 164) as the boat docked ‘in dim early dawns’ (p. 146).
New York City: Art and Theatre
The young Henry was also taken to art galleries by his parents, having an espe-
cially vivid memory of a painting which would achieve an almost mythological
status as a patriotic emblem of the heroic in American history. Emanuel Leutz’s
Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), now exhibited at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, shows the revolutionary commander highlighted against a line
of boats crowded with men and horses battling through the winter ice-floes as
they prepare for victory. When it was exhibited in New York at the Stuyvesant
Institute the James family went to view it after dinner one winter evening; the
eight-year-old Henry was especially thrilled at the lateness of the hour and the
‘wondrous flare of projected gaslight’ which illuminated the work. The romance
of the experience did not deter him from eventually questioning this initial
enthusiasm; his critical scruples were engaged and he later judged it ‘lividly
dead’. At home, the emphasis, in decorative terms at least, was on Europe, with
front and rear sitting rooms displaying ‘a great abundance of Italy’ (SBO,
pp. 207–208, 210); a sculpture of a Bacchante made in some Roman studio by
an American artist graced the back parlour.
In the other room was hung a large painting of great significance: Thomas
Cole’s View of Florence from San Miniato, completed just a few years before Henry’s
birth (1837). In a sense, it reflects some of the values and aspirations of the James
family itself. Cole is habitually called ‘the American Turner’, as James mentions,
and his work certainly inspired the generation of painters belonging to the Hudson
River school who created atmospheric, often sublime landscapes, typically depict-
ing the grandeur of the country’s rivers and mountains. In fact, Cole was a British
painter who responded to the scale and magnificence of the New World to which
he had emigrated, and his training was essentially European. The choice of subject,
too, is European, a product of the artist’s first stay in Italy (1831–1832). None of
the James family had, as yet, visited Italy, though James Sr had crossed the Atlantic
several times.
As we shall see, Europe was a seductive and troubling presence in young Henry’s
early years, but a place as yet to be dreamt of and wondered at. The picture mean-
while allowed him to lose himself ‘as soon as look’, and a small monk seated in the
foreground became ‘a constant friend of my childhood’ (SBO, p. 210). When he
12
1843 –1855
finally arrived in Europe the continent’s meaning became manifest to him as a pic-
torial insight, a glimpse altogether less serene and composed than the Cole veduta.
He had looked out from a travelling carriage on a scene both humble and romantic,
which seemed somehow timeless. A ruined castle formed the backdrop for a single
figure, ‘a woman in a black bodice, a white shirt and a red petticoat, engaged in
some sort of field labour’: ‘I knew her for a peasant in sabots’. He had never before
seen a peasant and the scene with its quite complex sociological and historical mes-
sage served as an emblem of Europe, a ‘sublime synthesis, expressed and guaranteed
to me’ (SBO, pp. 220, 221).
The theatrical entertainments available in mid-century Manhattan constituted
the other facet of Henry’s unofficial education which would play out significantly
in his mature life. The idea of the dramatic ‘scene’ (such as that in a play) would
come to occupy a central role in the construction of his fiction, but, more directly,
his aspirations to succeed in the theatre were long-lasting. To write for the stage
was, he noted in 1881, ‘the most cherished of all my projects…. None has given me
brighter hopes – none has given me sweeter emotions’ (CN, p. 226). His early
memories conjure up in lovingly colourful detail the theatrical productions, vaude-
villes, circus spectaculars and pantomimes, along with their participants, which
formed the entertainment of ‘our old original New York’.15 Along with the per-
formers the names of the venues – Burton’s Theatre, the ‘Lyceums’ of Wallack and
Brougham, Old Broadway Theatre, Park Theatre, Niblo’s Garden, Castle Theatre,
Tripler Hall, Barnum’s, National Theatre – are all affectionately listed. Early in life
he enjoyed watching such plays as Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream and Much Ado about Nothing. He could have been as young as seven
when he saw the first of these at Niblo’s Garden, the magnificent, recently rebuilt
theatre on Broadway, and Harriet Holman, playing the role of Luciana, came out
dressed in white satin, ‘quite irrelevantly’ to sing to the audience between the acts,
much in the manner of popular vaudeville. The waiting for the curtain to rise was
an anguish hardly to be borne: ‘One’s eyes bored into it in vain, and yet one knew
it would rise at the named hour, the only question being if one could exist till then’
(SBO, p. 88).
Although alive to the romance of the theatre and to its staged illusions, this
sharp-eyed child didn’t fail to notice the mechanics by which such effects could be
achieved. He enjoyed an old favourite of the time, W.T. Moncrieff ’s Cataract of the
Ganges, billed temptingly as ‘an equestrian melodrama’, and recalled as ‘a tragedy of
temples and idols and wicked rajahs and real water’. He watched with excitement
the heroine, ‘preferring death to dishonour’, dashing up ‘the more or less perpen-
dicular waterfall on a fiery black steed and with an effect only a little blighted by
the chance flutter of a drapery out of which peeps the leg of a trouser and a big
male foot’ (SBO, pp. 93, 92).
13
The world of theatre seems, from the beginning, to have existed for him as a
fascinating mix of the glamorous and the mundane. He looks back, in older age, to
the unnervingly corporate ‘face’ of the actor and the dismaying gap between its
‘histrionic’, stage presence and, ‘with the artificial lights turned off – the fatigued
and disconnected face reduced to its mere self ’ (p. 86). He had admired the ‘tragic
actress’, Miss Emily Mestayer, who had appeared in James Sheridan Knowles’s Love,
performed at the Old Broadway Theatre in the 1850s, yet when he had glimpsed
her, years later, in a Boston street, she appeared as ‘the very image of mere sore his-
trionic habit and use, a worn and weary, a battered … thing of the theatre, very
much as an old infinitely-handled and greasy violoncello of the orchestra might
have been’ (p. 129).The unsparing observation marks the disappointment of finding
that the fostered illusions of the past cannot be sustained. The adult James would
always be drawn to the idea of performance, the mystery of dramatic illusion, and
the contrasting reality of everyday circumstance.
Though Shakespeare was fairly consistently in production in New York, the
plays of Sheridan were also popular, as well as those more modern works by actor-
manager Dion Boucicault. Such Dickens novels as Dombey and Son, Oliver Twist and
Nicholas Nickleby were frequently plundered for their high drama, ready sentiment
and comic eccentricities, and reduced to knockabout stage adaptations – ‘the
roughest theatrical tinkers’ work’. Similarly crude versions of French plays, notably
those of Alfred de Musset, were frequently performed:‘what was then not of French
origin?’ James wonders (SBO, pp. 97, 94). Some six decades later he could recall
(mostly with great accuracy) the names of the actors and their costumes, the stage
effects – the wrecking of a steamboat, for instance, the live horses onstage, the sheer
spectacle ingeniously achieved. Meantime, the names of these places of entertain-
ment,‘Lyceums and Museums and Lecture Rooms and Academies of Music’ (p. 89),
promoted an idea of high seriousness which belied their commercial priorities.
Henry enjoyed performances by Italian singers and conjurors, by the Ravel family,
acrobats, dancers and pantomimists, in this ‘pre-trapèze age’, as well as admiring the
grace of Signor Leon Javelli, the celebrated rope-dancer now remembered for hav-
ing crossed the Niagara Falls on a tightrope (pp. 136, 137). And on certain Saturdays
Henry would travel down Broadway to the Great American Museum of Phineas T.
Barnum to pass along ‘the dusty halls of humbug, amid bottled mermaids, “bearded
ladies” and chill dioramas’ (p. 127).
New York theatre of the mid-century mixed high art with the sensational and
spectacular, and its plays and players were primarily of European origin. But a
literary event of 1852 highlighted a specifically New World condition of historic
significance. Within months of its serial appearance in an abolitionist magazine,
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been adapted for the stage and it
would continue to be successfully performed in numerous different versions into
14
1843 –1855
the twentieth century. Probably more people saw it onstage than read it as a novel,
and its themes and characters became part of the national identity and its language.
With its vivid evocation of the conditions of the enslaved people of the South, the
work made such a social and political impact that it influenced events leading to the
Civil War of 1861–1865. On a more personal level, Henry saw so many different
performances of the play in the company of his brother William that he attributes
to it his faculty of ‘conscious criticism’, a means of comparing and assessing which
would eventually, as he says, throw him ‘into the critical arms of Matthew Arnold’.
Despite registering some detectably crude moments, Henry’s impression was of ‘a
story rich and harmonious’ (SBO, pp. 133, 134).
The subtitle of Stowe’s work is ‘Life among the Lowly’ and there was a point in
these years when James’s experience touched briefly on such lives. A neighbouring
family, the Norcoms, recently arrived from Kentucky, had ‘two pieces of precious
property’ in their household: Aunt Sylvia (pronounced ‘An’silvy’) and her son Davy
were enslaved servants. James wonders if they had ever read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The
‘light-brown lad’ (his father presumably a white Master) and his mother with her
‘vivid turban’, were ‘a joy’ to get to know, Davy adding ‘a pictorial lustre that none
of us could emulate’. The owning of slaves in New York City was not that unusual
at this time, but mother and son did not stay long: belying young Henry’s innocent
impression of happiness, the two, taking advantage of this northern stay, fled sud-
denly into the night, to become part of that dangerous fugitive movement by
which the enslaved sought liberty. ‘I don’t remember their going, nor any pangs of
parting; I remember only knowing with wonderment that they had gone, that
obscurity had somehow engulfed them’ (SBO, p. 198).
This was a brief, scarcely understood encounter for James with the ‘peculiar
institution’ that would divide the nation. It occurred a good decade before the out-
break of Civil War and the catastrophic, internecine conflict between North and
South, but the Norcom family itself was notable for its different southern ways and
lavish hospitality: ‘the sausage-mill kept turning and the molasses flowing for all
who came’ (p. 195). Henry has only to look at the scar on his hand to recall one of
their sons, Reggie, who accidentally crushed his fingers in the hinge of a closing
door.There was another boy, too, a few years older than Henry, and so not available
as a friend, to whom he had been drawn, ‘the slim, the sallow, the straight-haired
and dark-eyed Eugene’, on whose fate he speculates. Was he a victim of that war?
James is haunted by ‘some dark but pitying vision’ which sees him ‘stretched stark
after a battle’ (p. 198). James never learnt what happened to Eugene, but one source
states that he had died in 1864 at the age of 27, a victim not of war but of consump-
tion and that the family came not from Kentucky, as James has it, but North
Carolina. Eugene was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, or New York City in 1837
(information varies), and became a bookkeeper.16
15
Henry James’s earliest surviving letter (written before summer 1855) charm-
ingly indicates that his theatrical interests were met to some degree within his
close domestic circle. It was sent from Paris to a boyhood friend and neighbour
in New York, Edgar Van Winkle: ‘Dear Eddy / As I heard you were going to try
to turn the club into a Theatre. And as I was asked w’ether I wanted to belong
here is my answer. I would like very much to belong / Yours Truly / H James’.
Though Henry’s younger siblings are hardly mentioned in A Small Boy (it was
doubtless too shaming to play with younger children), brother William plays an
important, even dominant part, always one step ahead and gone before his
younger brother could catch him up. They played with neighbouring boys of the
street (many with the surnames of the city’s wealthiest families) and staged their
own shows, dramas for which it seems Henry provided the text on folded sheets
of stationer’s ruled paper specially purchased on Sixth Avenue, the final quarter
sheet left blank for an illustration of the scene; he relished the paraphernalia and
conventions of the drama, the entrances, exits and indication of ‘business’ to be
enacted. As for performance (which took place in one of their attics), he habitu-
ally remained in the wings, short of an improvised costume to wear, while
William, ‘in fantastic garb’, fronted the public as the ‘constant comic star’ (SBO,
pp. 203, 199). At such times Henry seems passive, an observer rather than protag-
onist, and the content of these dramas is neither disclosed nor even perhaps
remembered. It is the situation, the excitement, which matter. He would go on
experimenting with the drama in his adult life until compelled to admit defeat in
a traumatic and public experience in a professional London theatre. There is a
similarly compelling gap in his account of preparing ‘a romance’, with school-
friend Louis De Coppet who, by his name, accent and culture represented the
allure of France and, indeed, embodied Europe (his family was a combination of
Swiss-French and American): his was ‘the toy hammer that drove in the very
point of the golden nail’ (p. 32). Once again, the pleasure derived from peripheral
matters – the ‘business’ of planning how to publish their work – leaves no time
for anything to be created.
William is shown occupying centre-stage in these theatrical ventures and,
indeed, he was the most influential figure in his brother’s early life: clever and enter-
taining, and showing great talent, he is considered superior in every way, confirmed
by his superior place at school. At home, Henry is his quiet and loving observer, as
William ‘sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especially under the lamplight
of the Fourteenth Street back parlour … always at the stage of finishing off, his head
dropped from side to side and his tongue rubbing his lower lip’. So much of this
volume is about observing, gaining impressions, ‘gaping’, so clearly an apprentice-
ship for novel-writing. Henry casts himself humbly and consistently as ‘the imita-
tive, the emulative’:William ‘drew because he could, while I did so in the main only
because he did’ (SBO, pp. 167, 205).
16
1843 –1855
Early Life and Experiences
If the provision of Henry James’s formal education seems woefully careless and
inadequate, family circumstances allowed for other opportunities which enabled
the children to meet some of the most influential thinkers and writers of the time.
In November 1852 William Makepeace Thackeray began a lucrative American tour
in which he delivered his series of lectures on ‘English Humourists of the Eighteenth
Century’. He opened in Boston, travelling as far south as Savannah, Georgia, but he
spent considerable time in New York, where he was entertained by the James family.
Young Henry was horrified (though Thackeray was fond of children) to find him-
self summoned by the celebrity visitor with the words ‘Come here, little boy, and
show me your extraordinary jacket’ (p. 74). He was drawn into the library where
the British guest appeared ‘enormously big’ (indeed, six feet three inches) and ‘the
hand of benevolence’ was laid on his shoulder. The nine-year-old was wearing the
jacket which appears in the Mathew Brady daguerreotype with its nine visible but-
tons, and so Thackeray named him ‘Buttons’, which probably meant little to Henry
but which, in England, signified the uniformed pageboy or servant in a hotel. The
memory stayed with him, and so did the jacket. It was still in James’s possession
when he came to dictate his memoirs five decades later and he rushed off to find it
to show to his temporary typist, Miss Lois Barker.17
In these years the works on philosophical and theological topics published by
Henry James Sr included Moralism and Christianity; or Man’s Experience and Destiny
(1850), Lectures and Miscellanies (1852), The Church of Christ Not an Ecclesiasticism
(1854) and The Nature of Evil, Considered in a Letter to the Rev. Edward Beecher, D.D.
(1855). He also began giving public lectures at such venues as the Stuyvesant
Institute, the meeting place, too, for the Swedenborgian Society in New York. In
March 1842 Henry Sr had heard Ralph Waldo Emerson lecture and was immedi-
ately enthused, indeed infatuated, by his person and ideas, describing him as ‘a soul
full of doors and windows, a well-ventilated soul, open to every breeze that blows,
and without any dark closets receptive of ancestral political and ecclesiastical trum-
pery’;18 he rapidly introduced himself to this Transcendentalist who urged men and
women to find ‘an original relation to the universe’.19 An intense, at times troubled
relationship between the two men developed, and Emerson became a frequent
guest in the James household, one of the bedrooms being designated ‘Mr. Emerson’s’.
Horace Greeley, editor of the increasingly influential New-York Tribune (‘a new
morning Journal of Politics, Literature, and General Intelligence’) and a supporter
of Emerson, shared similar interests, providing space over a number of years for
Henry Sr’s sometimes contentious letters and articles on such subjects as, for in-
stance, ‘free love’. A little younger, the abolitionist journalist Charles Anderson
Dana, a contributor to the Transcendentalist Harbinger magazine, had joined the staff
of the Tribune, and shared Henry Sr’s sympathies with the Fourierist movement,
17
a group advocating idealistic social experimentation and female equality. George

Ripley who, like Emerson, had resigned his church ministry, had been instrumental
in the founding of the Transcendental community at Brook Farm in Massachusetts,
and Bronson Alcott who had established another short-lived community also
belonged to this circle which gathered around Emerson. Henry Sr’s relations with
all of them would have difficult moments, principally because of his strongly
expressed and often-changing views; his temperament seems reflected in his writing
style – brilliant, unpredictable, and often large-spirited.
When Henry was taken by his father to the offices of the New-York Tribune on
Nassau Street in Lower Manhattan he found it ‘a wonderful world indeed, with
strange steepnesses and machineries and noises and hurrying bare-armed, bright-
eyed men, and amid the agitation clever, easy, kindly, jocular, partly undressed gen-
tlemen (it was always July or August) some of whom I knew at home’ (SBO, p. 63).
His later journalistic experience would leave him forever disillusioned with the
newspaper world, partly because of its perceived shallowness and sensationalism, but
also because it was a profession for which he had himself shown little aptitude.
It was during this visit that his father was handed a new work written by one of
the Tribune’s reporters, Solon Robinson. Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated
was published in 1854 and is dedicated to Horace Greeley ‘and his co-laborers’. A
collection of vignettes which first appeared in the Tribune depicting the poverty,
dangers and deprivation experienced by children living in the notorious Five Points
district of Lower Manhattan, it tells the stories of such girls as ‘Little Katy’,‘Madalina’,
‘The Ragpicker’s Daughter’ and ‘Wild Maggie’. Little Katy sells hot corn on the
Manhattan streets, singing,‘Hot corn! Hot corn! / Here’s your lily-white corn. / All
you that’s got money / Poor me that’s got none – / Buy my lily-white corn / And
let me go home’. Its publishers claimed to offer ‘works intended to promote tem-
perance and virtue, to lift up the lowly, to expose to open day the hidden effects
produced by Rum, to give narratives of misery suffered by the poor in this city’.20
Young Henry was immediately interested, only to be informed that this was no
work for ‘an innocent child’: its pages remained closed to him. In fact, he was just a
year or two younger than his fictional counterparts, but the moment serves as an
emblem of social division and the disparities between privilege and poverty. Hot
Corn, sensational and sentimental in the style of popular journalism of the time,
presents that other dark and squalid world which has no place in A Small Boy and
Others. As he records, he was fobbed off with another work which quickly became
a best-seller, a ‘romance … on every one’s lips’ (SBO, p. 66), Maria Susanna
Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854). This improving fiction in which virtue is
rewarded as an orphan girl from Boston’s streets finds happiness through her own
enduring goodness and love offered a sanitized version of urban reality less trou-
bling, less shocking, than the sensationalism of Hot Corn.
18
1843 –1855
Henry Sr was undoubtedly a loving if unpredictable father and even in his son’s
kindly and carefully phrased account he emerges as irrevocably impractical, even
irresponsible, having ‘a wonderful way of being essentially right without being
practically or, as it were, vulgarly, determinant…. It was in no world of close appli-
cation that our wondrous parent moved’ (NSB, pp. 41–42). His troubled past was
never referred to, but it is clear that the lives of many of the other men (predomi-
nantly men, it seems) within the extended James family were permanently blighted.
The wealth acquired from a driven, ambitious young immigrant such as William
(William of Albany, as he has become known) who had emerged as an authoritarian
father allowed his offspring the freedom, whatever safeguards he tried to impose, to
become jobless, feckless, and heavy drinkers, summed up as those ‘incoherent
Albany uncles’ (SBO, p. 147).
Henry Sr’s half-brother Robert predeceased his father, dying aged 28; John
Barber, ‘the brightest of the Albany uncles’ (NSB, p. 37), became a gambler, philan-
derer and heavy drinker, dying on 22 May 1856 in a Chicago hotel room aged 40.
Uncle Edward led a similarly troubled, alcohol-dependent life, and was dead at 38.
Howard James at 59, had had no career, and had been treated for alcoholism in a
number of asylums. Henry’s mother, Mary James, reported on 8 August 1869 that
he appeared in Albany ‘far from sober’ and ‘and about to go into the Binghamton
Asylum’.21 The novelist privately thought him ‘very good-looking’ but ‘of an almost
épouvantable [appalling] badness’, ‘most loved, most beautiful, most sacrificed of the
Albany uncles’; his son, Johnny, ‘a tormenting hoverer and vanisher,’ just as ‘luckless’,
died, probably suicidally, aged 23 (SBO, pp. 154, 157). Both Edward and Howard,
with their hats worn ‘slightly toward the nose’, are treated kindly and discreetly:
they were ‘not less than strikingly genial, but with vaguenesses, lapses, eclipses’ (p.
148). Later, another of young Henry’s cousins, Bob Temple, son of Henry Sr’s
favourite sister Catharine, makes sporadic appearances in the family’s life, getting by
as a conman and forger, and begging from his rich relations. Though in later years
he was spurned by brother William, the more emollient Henry sometimes helped
him out with money.
Henry’s uncles are mentioned in an episode described as full of ‘mystification’ in
his early life when he is taken to the Manhattan establishment of Mrs Cannon by
his father. It was a summer’s day when the two travelled back from Staten Island
where the family were holidaying – the occasion, it seems, when the famous
daguerreotype was made of father and son in the studio of Mathew Brady. Mrs
Cannon, however, ‘lurked near Fourth Street … “back of ” Broadway’, and her
establishment with ‘independent side access’ was both ‘a parlour and a shop’. It is
genteel and decorous, with Mrs Cannon getting on with her sewing – ‘a shop in
particular for the relief of gentlemen in want of pockethandkerchiefs, neckties, col-
lars, umbrellas and straw-covered bottles of the essence known in old New York as
“Cullone”’ (SBO, pp. 78–79). The term ‘particular’, in French particulier, signifies
19
Figure 1 Henry James with his father, Henry James Sr (c. 1854, daguerreotype by Mathew
Brady)
privacy. Talk with Mrs Cannon and the staff, which included Miss Maggie and Miss
Susie, would often turn to inquiries about Mr John, Mr Edward and Mr Howard:
‘their consumption of neckties and Eau de Cologne was somehow inordinate’,
though the puzzled Henry cannot help feeling that such purchases are not ‘their
only consommation’ – another French term, carrying for Anglo-Saxon readers, a
sense of sexual relief. So discreetly appointed, the place offered ‘an intimacy of
comfort that the New York Hotel couldn’t yield’. The term ‘dissimulation’ recurs
ominously. The situation was understood by all, including Mrs Cannon, Miss
Maggie and Miss Susie: ‘It was only I who didn’t understand,’ the reminiscing James
emphasizes, as if it were a scene from that sustained exploration of childhood inno-
cence and its cynical, adult exploitation, What Maisie Knew.
In a 1913 letter to his friend Howard Sturgis apropos the recently published
Small Boy and Others, James confided, ‘Uncle Edward never married – he was most
20
1843 –1855
particularly of Mrs Cannon’s’, while Uncle Gus, another uncle, ‘wasn’t of the “Mrs.
Cannon” company. He was the eldest of all and more detached and maritally, etc.
established’. The location is important, however; the area just a block west of
Broadway, Mercer Street, had become at this time well known for its brothels,22 and
James’s language consistently skirts the reality.The services of prostitutes were com-
monly available to wealthy New Yorkers at this time, so the behaviour of this gen-
eration of James brothers was not untypical. In his public writings Henry James Sr
had pronounced on the matter of sexual relations, controversially advocating free
love, and, in these years, he regarded monogamy as a form of slavery.23 Aside from
this revelation of his private pursuits – and more disturbing – is that he would take
his ten- or eleven-year-old son with him, incorporating this call into a day out
which was primarily intended to have that portrait taken – an intended gift, it
seems, for Mother who stayed at home. In fact, this was not a one-off: there were
visits ‘delightfully repeated’. If young Henry had originally been at a loss to under-
stand, he seems now to call his father to account, implicating him through the
veiled nuances and masterful indirection of his powerful late style. Such autobio-
graphical revelations transcend the scope of the standard memoir of the time.
Such uncles and cousins were, he says, the object of ‘sad vague headshakes’ as
they sank into anonymous obscurity. Their deaths seem to have become familiar
and predictable events for the growing Henry: ‘[a]ll the uncles, of whichever kin-
dred, were to come to seem sooner or later to be dying, more or less before our
eyes, of melancholy matters’ (SBO, pp. 154, 111). Cousin ‘J.J.’ (John Vanderburgh)
who had shown musical talent, left behind ghostly ‘aesthetic manifestations’ figured
poignantly as ‘the thinnest conceivable chip of stray marble, the faintest far-off
twang of old chords’ (p. 154).The settings in which these self-destructive lives were
enacted were often, nevertheless, elegant and urbane. With his family James visited,
for instance, his uncle Gus (the oldest of the uncles) and aunt Elizabeth at Linwood,
a magnificent estate at Rhinebeck situated on a bluff on the banks of the Hudson
River. Henry was especially impressed by the ‘gardens and graperies and black
ponies, to say nothing of gardeners and grooms who were notoriously and quot-
edly drole’ (SBO, p. 149). In fact, part of the place had been owned by another
uncle, John Barber James,24 who had incurred debts from gambling and so probably
had to give up Linwood. Gus’s tenure was fairly brief: by 1865 the estate had been
sold once more, he had lost much of his money in speculation and would die in a
pitiful state in 1866. Despite its grandeur and hospitality, there was an underlying
insecurity and impermanence in this home.
For Henry the occasion held other significance, too. One of his young cousins,
Marie Bay James, played up when told that it was bedtime; her mother insisted on
her ‘not making a scene’ and the phrase, a moment of ‘witchcraft’ for the observing
boy, proves, in his re-telling, to be transformative. He had not apparently witnessed
such defiance before (Marie was generally acknowledged as ‘spoilt’), and he has the
21
realization that we have choices and some autonomy in the matter of ‘scenes’: ‘we
could make them or not as we chose’. A ‘rich accession of possibilities’ attaches to
this incident, reaching as far, perhaps, in another form of ‘witchcraft’, as his own
‘scenic’ method which would characterize his fiction, allowing the dramatic scène à
faire to convey its own message freed from obvious authorial intrusion.The occasion
carried a further, more tragic significance. Henry Sr had been summoned to speak
to his sister Catharine whose husband, Robert Emmet Temple, lay dying in Albany
in the late stages of tuberculosis; she had been unwillingly removed to Linwood to
preserve her life, though she, too, was suffering from the disease. In fact, both died
in 1854, leaving nine children, the youngest no more than a year old. Henry is the
unwilling witness of the offstage scene between brother and sister: ‘Vivid to me still,
as floating across verandahs into the hot afternoon stillness, is the wail of her protest
and grief; I remember being scared and hushed by it and stealing away beyond its
reach’ (SBO, pp. 151–152). It was a sudden brush with impending mortality, a pre-
mature collision between childhood and a complicated adult tragedy.
Children lacking parents (one or both) were familiar within the extended James
family, to the extent that naïve young Henry envied such ‘blest orphans’, attributing
to ‘orphans as orphans a circumstantial charm, a setting necessarily more delightful
than our father’d and mother’d one’. Many of the characters, scenes and situations
recounted in his memoirs take on some of the features of Dickens’s fiction with its
range of parentless children. James saw his own recollecting as a formalizing,
composing medium, his imagination ‘making a scene’ of events which occurred
decades ago: ‘I see the actors move again through the high, rather bedimmed rooms
– it is always a matter of winter twilight, firelight, lamplight; each one appointed to
his or her part and perfect for the picture, which gave a sense of fulness without
ever being crowded’ (SBO, pp. 103, 107). Memory has acted to resolve life’s dis-
order into some more formal composition, each actor integrated into the scene. On
one occasion it is the young orphan Albert, son of Mrs James’s cousin, Alexander
Robertson Wyckoff. A little older than his James cousins, and inheritor of distant
land in the Beaverkill district of the Catskill mountains (about 80 miles from
Manhattan), he is considered more knowing; his future will lie, not, it seems, in
Europe, but the American West.
William and Henry were invited to take a trip with Albert, but parental permis-
sion was refused: ‘the place was in the wilderness … reached by a whole day’s rough
drive from the railroad’ and offering the ‘possibility of prowling bears’. The
household at nearby 72 West Fourteenth Street which had taken Albert in is gov-
erned by ‘Great-aunt Wyckoff ’, ‘an image of living antiquity’, who ‘signified her
wants as divinities do’ and was never heard to speak (pp. 105–107). She is cared for
by her daughter, Helen, who has also taken charge – indeed control – of Henry, her
younger brother, who is mentally impaired. The relationship is partly fictionalized
by James as sister and brother are translated into Miss Betsey Trotwood and Mr
22
1843 –1855
Dick in Dickens’s David Copperfield. It is a novel young Henry had heard read aloud
in the evenings; hoping to hear more of it, and thus avoiding bed, he had secreted
himself under a table, to be discovered only when he burst into tears of sympathy
during the pages describing the cruel Murdstones.
Mr Dick is thwarted in writing his own history because King Charles I keeps try-
ing to find his way into the volume; the impediment for cousin Henry, as rich as he is
simple and seemingly harmless, is that he is accounted untrustworthy and therefore
allowed just ten cents per day for any extraneous living costs. His sister Helen rules the
household and James notes with some pleasure how, after her death, Henry has three
years of innocent freedom, his life blooming ‘like a garden freshly watered’. A more
sinister perspective, derived not from Dickens but from Aeschylus, arises when James
recalls his cousin Albert as ‘a small New York Orestes ridden by Furies’ (SBO, pp. 125,
113), thus associating cousin Helen not with the murderous wife and mother,
Clytemnestra, but with Electra, Orestes’ decisive sister who saves him from death. He
uses the same classical allusion when describing a dominant female figure in another
part of the family, and it is clear that many of its men, impoverished, diminished or
incapable, had surrendered themselves to female dominance. If such women are sav-
iours, the men are in many respects victims, not least in their relinquishing of power in
the domestic setting.The classical comparison forms part of a retrospective assessment,
of course, but it also hints at a degree of sexual antipathy toward such women and a
corresponding affection for the men, however weak or stoical.
One further episode from Henry’s young life further illustrates (as he represents
it) some ambiguity about gender and its representation. A part of his education had
taken place in ‘the halls of Ferrero’, the elegant dancing establishment run by
Edward Ferrero, ‘in the prime of life, good-looking, romantic and moustachio’d’,
where the boy attended classes. Ferrero was much admired by the accompanying
mothers at the evening entertainments and, living up to his heroic appearance,
he would go on to raise a New York military regiment in the Civil War. Fiddlers
provided the music for dancing and Ferrero was supported by his sister Madame
Dubreuil and her husband, a baritone from the opera, ‘flushed, full-chested and
tawnily short-bearded’. The scene with its decorous, slightly flirtatious undertones
might have come from a Thackeray novel. For the school’s celebrated fancy-dress
ball Henry donned a costume curiously at odds with such embodiments of con-
ventional Victorian masculinity. He appeared in the garb of a débardeur, previously
worn by his cousin Johnny at ‘some Parisian revel’, its ‘puckered folds of dark green
relieved with scarlet and silver’ giving out ‘an exotic fragrance’ (SBO, pp. 187–191).
There was some mystery within the James family as to what a débardeur was, ‘and I
am not sure indeed that I know to this day’, he adds – a disingenuous comment,
given his knowledge of French culture and language.
A débardeur was a stevedore or unloader of goods and a version of his clothing
became popular in the Parisian masquerades of the mid-century. Thus its origins
23
signified male manual labour, but, in a transformation, it became popular with

women who, in thus cross-dressing, combined ‘working-class roughness with
female sexuality’. The outfit, ‘with its open shirt, wide cummerbund, and baggy
pants, the uniform of porters in the wine markets … licensed insolent behaviour,
an imitation of the stevedore’s Herculean and cheeky independence’.25 For André
Gide in L’Immoraliste (1902), the débardeur is classed with the tramps and sailors, ‘the
lowest dregs of humanity’, who haunt the muddy alleys and stinking booths of
Syracuse, and so the type becomes charged with erotic possibility and danger.26 In
this item of fancy-dress and its history of male sweat, transformed and sanitized into
a fashion style adopted by women, the small boy, Henry, emerges as a confused
innocent. And James allows the confusion to remain, hinting at his own feminized
self in a social setting which seems to have had no words for such a possibility.
The James family’s departure from New York on 27 June 1855, Liverpool-bound
aboard the luxuriously appointed steamship Atlantic, was inevitable.The prospect of
an extended stay in Europe had often been mooted by Henry Sr, already familiar
with that trans-Atlantic journey. In fact, he had escorted his young family (when
Henry was just six months old) to Europe in autumn 1843 and they had stayed for
a year, principally in England. The novelist claimed, later, ‘in the second year of my
life’ to remember, in Paris, being ‘[c]onveyed along the Rue St-Honoré while I
waggled my small feet’ and having admired the Colonne Vendôme in the square of
that name (SBO, p. 46). The column commemorates Napoleon Bonaparte’s cam-
paigns of 1805–1807 and the observation seems prescient since the novelist would
go on to have a lifelong fascination with the French Emperor. On their return, his
parents had talked fondly of London, Green Park and Piccadilly, and he recalls
burying his nose in new books, often printed and published in Britain, to savour
‘the English smell’. He was soon infected and ‘prematurely poisoned’ by the idea of
Europe (pp. 69, 70).When he was taken to the New York Crystal Palace (‘second of
its name’) which had opened on 14 July 1853, the first world’s fair held in America,
his bleak mood was immediately lifted. The place was ‘vast and various and dense’,
the sculptures marvellous: ‘[i]f this was Europe then Europe was beautiful indeed,
and we rose to it on the wings of wonder’. Indeed, the entire family, we are told,
kept breaking out ‘in choral wails’ at the allure of the Old World (pp. 139, 118).
This family preoccupation with Europe seems to have set in as early as 1849, as
can be seen from the list of books borrowed by Henry Sr from the New York
Society Library on Broadway which included English Civilization, Ruskin’s Seven
Lamps of Architecture, John Sanderson’s The American in Paris, Gray’s Rome, Husted’s
Italy, Tappan’s A Step from the New World.27 For many families in the James circle an
extended European stay was a matter of course, but when the time finally arrived,
the reason for going was ostensibly educational. It was judged that the boys, follow-
ing the ways of their New York peers, were becoming loud and badly behaved.
Their father refers to his ‘four stout boys’ importing ‘shocking bad manners from
24
1843 –1855
the street’ (NSB, p. 156), and William once rejected his brother’s request to play by
boasting, ‘I play with boys who curse and swear’ (SBO, p. 202).
European schools were also considered superior to what was available in New
York – though Henry Sr’s choices there were certainly flawed. His brother John
Barber had taken his son Johnny (John Vanderburgh) to Switzerland, to a school in
Vevey, and Henry had earlier consulted his friend Edmund Tweedy on possible
places in Geneva. He was seeking for his children a ‘sensuous education’ and the
opportunity to ‘absorb French and German’ (NSB, p. 156). Tutors had already
provided some language tuition and young Henry had had a brief visit to an estab-
lishment where a cousin was enrolled, Madame Reichard’s finishing school for
young ladies on Fifth Avenue, in which French only was spoken. Henry’s senses
were already alerted: ‘I sniffed it up aromatically, the superior language … it took
the form of some strong savoury soup’ (SBO pp. 153–154). The put-upon heroine
of one of James’s short stories of 1877, ‘Four Meetings’, is observed during her
Atlantic crossing: after years dreaming of Europe she sits, ‘at the side of the vessel
with her hands crossed … looking at the eastward horizon’ (CT 4: 94), the goal of
her direction of travel, exemplifying a form of devotion and a poignant sense of
destiny that would have been readily recognized by the James family. Henry, too,
was excited by the prospect of change, though he was unaware (as probably his
father was, too) that the family would never again make their home in New York.
25
2
Europe and Newport: In Search
of a ‘Sensuous Education’
(1855 –1861)
When Henry and Mary James with their five children, Aunt Kate and a French
maid left America in 1855, the plan was to spend time in Switzerland for the
sake of the children’s education. Doubtless, exposure to Europe, its history and
culture, would form part of this experience, though there seem to have been no
longer-term or definite aims. In the event, the next five years entailed relentless
change and travel, largely reflecting Henry Sr’s restlessness and indecisiveness.
Most of the children were placed in schools in Switzerland by the late summer
(though Henry was convalescing from malaria and Alice had a governess), yet by
October the family had left for Paris en route to London where they would stay
until early summer 1856. Paris was their home for the following year. Much of
summer and autumn 1857 was spent in Boulogne-sur-Mer in the Pas-de-Calais
region of northern France. Having just settled back in Paris in October, they
soon returned to Boulogne, a cheaper option after the recent major stock market
crash in America. Here they remained until late May 1858 when they again
crossed the Atlantic to take up residence in Newport, Rhode Island. But after
just over a year on the eastern seaboard, the family returned to Europe in
October 1859. They lived in Geneva until summer 1860 when, having travelled
through Germany and France, they went back to America and to Newport once
more. Henry Jr was seventeen by the end of this peripatetic phase. In his auto-
biography he makes a significant simplification, conflating these two European
trips into one. It is a revision of history designed to serve not himself but his
father. In a conversation of 1913 he confessed to his nephew Harry his acute
The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister.
© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
26
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VII.
—Je n’ai pas besoin de vous dire quelle était ma famille, vous la
connaissez; ma mère, puis des parens éloignés, voilà tout. J’avais
quelque fortune.
—Hélas! oui, interrompis-je, et plût au ciel que vous eussiez été
pauvre!
—Mon père, continua Pauline sans paraître remarquer le
sentiment qui m’avait arraché mon exclamation, laissa en mourant
quarante mille livres de rentes à peu près. Comme je suis fille
unique, c’était une fortune. Je me présentai donc dans le monde
avec la réputation d’une riche héritière.
—Vous oubliez, dis-je, celle d’une grande beauté, jointe à une
éducation parfaite.
—Vous voyez bien que je ne puis pas continuer, me répondit
Pauline en souriant, puisque vous m’interrompez toujours.
—Oh! c’est que vous ne pouvez pas dire comme moi tout l’effet
que vous produisîtes dans ce monde; c’est que c’est une partie de
votre histoire que je connais mieux que vous-même; c’est que, sans
vous en douter, vous étiez la reine de toutes les fêtes. Reine à la
couronne d’hommages, invisible à vos seuls regards. C’est alors que
je vous vis. La première fois, ce fut chez la princesse de Bel.... Tout
ce qu’il y avait de talens et de célébrités était réuni chez cette belle
exilée de Milan. On chanta; alors nos virtuoses de salon
s’approchèrent tour à tour du piano. Tout ce que l’instrumentation a
de science et le chant de méthode se réunirent d’abord pour
charmer cette foule de dilettanti, étonnés toujours de rencontrer
dans le monde ce fini d’exécution que l’on demande et qu’on trouve
si rarement au théâtre; puis quelqu’un parla de vous et prononça
votre nom. Pourquoi mon cœur battit-il à ce nom que j’entendais
pour la première fois? La princesse se leva, vous prit par la main, et
vous conduisit presque en victime à cet autel de la mélodie: dites-
moi encore pourquoi, en vous voyant si confuse, eus-je un sentiment
de crainte comme si vous étiez ma sœur, moi qui vous avais vue
depuis un quart d’heure à peine. Oh! je tremblai plus que vous, peut-
être, et certes vous étiez loin de penser que, dans toute cette foule, il
y avait un cœur frère de votre cœur, qui battait de votre crainte et
allait s’enivrer de votre triomphe. Votre bouche sourit, les premiers
sons de votre voix, tremblans et incertains, se firent entendre; mais
bientôt les notes s’échappèrent pures et vibrantes; vos yeux
cessèrent de regarder la terre et se fixèrent vers le ciel. Cette foule
qui vous entourait disparut, et je ne sais même si les
applaudissemens arrivèrent jusqu’à vous, tant votre esprit semblait
planer au-dessus d’elle; c’était un air de Bellini, mélodieux et simple,
et cependant plein de larmes, comme lui seul savait les faire. Je ne
vous applaudis pas, je pleurai. On vous reconduisit à votre place au
milieu des félicitations; moi seul n’osai m’approcher de vous; mais je
me plaçai de manière à vous voir toujours. La soirée reprit son
cours, la musique continua d’en faire les honneurs, secouant sur son
auditoire enchanté ses ailes harmonieuses et changeantes; mais je
n’entendis plus rien: depuis que vous aviez quitté le piano, tous mes
sens s’étaient concentrés en un seul. Je vous regardais. Vous
souvenez-vous de cette soirée?
—Oui, je crois me la rappeler, dit Pauline.
—Depuis, continuai-je, sans penser que j’interrompais son récit,
depuis, j’entendis encore une fois, non pas cet air lui-même, mais la
chanson populaire qui l’inspira. C’était en Sicile, vers le soir d’un de
ces jours comme Dieu n’en a fait que pour l’Italie et la Grèce; le
soleil se couchait derrière Girgenti, la vieille Agrigente. J’étais assis
sur le revers d’un chemin; j’avais à ma gauche, et commençant à se
perdre dans l’ombre naissante, toute cette plage couverte de ruines,
au milieu desquelles ses trois temples seuls restaient debout. Au
delà de cette plage, la mer, calme et unie comme un miroir d’argent;
j’avais à ma droite la ville se détachant en vigueur sur un fond d’or,
comme un de ces tableaux de la première école florentine, qu’on
attribue à Gaddi, ou qui sont signés de Cimabue ou de Giotto.
J’avais devant moi une jeune fille qui revenait de la fontaine, portant
sur sa tête une de ces longues amphores antiques à la forme
délicieuse; elle passait en chantant, et elle chantait cette chanson
que je vous ai dite. Oh! si vous saviez quelle impression je ressentis
alors! Je fermai les yeux, je laissai tomber ma tête dans mes mains:
mer, cité, temples, tout disparut, jusqu’à cette fille de la Grèce, qui
venait comme une fée de me faire reculer de trois ans et de me
transporter dans le salon de la princesse Bel... Alors je vous revis;
j’entendis de nouveau votre voix; je vous regardai avec extase; puis
tout-à-coup une profonde douleur s’empara de mon âme, car vous
n’étiez déjà plus la jeune fille que j’avais tant aimée, et qu’on
appelait Pauline de Meulien: vous étiez la comtesse Horace de
Beuzeval. Hélas!... hélas!
—Oh! oui, hélas! murmura Pauline.
Nous restâmes tous deux quelques instans sans parler, Pauline
se remit la première.
—Oui, ce fut le beau temps, le temps heureux de ma vie,
continua-t-elle. Oh! les jeunes filles, elles ne connaissent pas leur
félicité; elles ne savent pas que le malheur n’ose toucher au voile
chaste qui les enveloppe et dont un mari vient les dépouiller. Oui, j’ai
été heureuse pendant trois ans; pendant trois ans ce fut à peine si
ce soleil brillant de mes jeunes années s’obscurcit un jour, et si une
de ces émotions innocentes que les jeunes filles prennent pour de
l’amour y passa comme un nuage. L’été, nous allions dans notre
château de Meulien; l’hiver, nous revenions à Paris. L’été se passait
au milieu des fêtes de la campagne, et l’hiver suffisait à peine aux
plaisirs de la ville. Je ne pensais pas qu’une vie si pure et si sereine
pût jamais s’assombrir. J’avançais joyeuse et confiante; nous
atteignîmes ainsi l’automne de 1830.
Nous avions pour voisine de villégiature madame de Lucienne,
dont le mari avait été grand ami de mon père; elle nous invita un
soir, ma mère et moi, à passer la journée du lendemain à son
château. Son mari, son fils et quelques jeunes gens de Paris s’y
étaient réunis pour chasser le sanglier, et un grand dîner devait
célébrer la victoire du moderne Méléagre. Nous nous rendîmes à
son invitation.
Lorsque nous arrivâmes, les chasseurs étaient déjà partis; mais
comme le parc était fermé de murs, nous pouvions facilement les
rejoindre; d’ailleurs, de temps en temps, nous devions entendre le
son du cor, et en nous rendant vers lui nous pouvions prendre tout le
plaisir de la chasse sans en risquer la fatigue; monsieur de Lucienne
était resté pour nous tenir compagnie, à sa femme, à sa fille, à ma
mère et à moi; Paul, son fils, dirigeait la chasse.
A midi, le bruit du cor se rapprocha sensiblement; nous
entendîmes sonner plus souvent le même air: monsieur de Lucienne
nous dit que c’était l’à vue; que le sanglier se fatiguait, et que, si
nous voulions, il était temps de monter à cheval; dans ce moment,
un des chasseurs arriva au grand galop, venant nous chercher de la
part de Paul, le sanglier ne pouvant tarder à faire tête aux chiens.
Monsieur de Lucienne prit une carabine qu’il pendit à l’arçon de sa
selle; nous montâmes à cheval tous trois et nous partîmes. Nos
deux mères, de leur côté, se rendirent à pied dans un pavillon autour
duquel tournait la chasse.
Nous ne tardâmes point à la rejoindre, et quelle qu’ait été ma
répugnance d’abord à prendre part à cet événement, bientôt le bruit
du cor, la rapidité de la course, les aboiemens des chiens, les cris
des chasseurs, nous atteignirent nous-mêmes, et nous galopâmes,
Lucie et moi, moitié riant, moitié tremblant, à l’égal des plus habiles
cavaliers. Deux ou trois fois nous vîmes le sanglier traverser des
allées, et chaque fois les chiens le suivaient plus rapprochés. Enfin il
alla s’appuyer contre un gros chêne, se retourna et fit tête à la
meute. C’était au bord d’une clairière sur laquelle donnaient
justement les fenêtres du pavillon; de sorte que madame de
Lucienne et ma mère se trouvèrent parfaitement pour ne rien perdre
du dénoûment.
Les chasseurs étaient placés en cercle à quarante ou cinquante
pas de distance du lieu où se livrait le combat; les chiens, excités
par une longue course, s’étaient jetés tous sur le sanglier, qui avait
presque disparu sous leur masse mouvante et tachetée. De temps
en temps, un des assaillans était lancé à huit ou dix pieds de
hauteur, et retombait en hurlant et tout ensanglanté; puis il se rejetait
au milieu de la meute, et, tout blessé qu’il était, revenait contre son
ennemi. Ce combat dura un quart d’heure à peine, et plus de dix ou
douze chiens étaient déjà blessés mortellement. Ce spectacle
sanglant et cruel devenait pour moi un supplice, et le même effet
était produit, à ce qu’il paraît, sur les autres spectateurs, car
j’entendis la voix de madame de Lucienne qui criait:—Assez, assez!
je t’en prie, Paul, assez.—Aussitôt Paul sauta en bas de son cheval,
sa carabine à la main, fit quelques pas à pied vers le sanglier,
l’ajusta au milieu des chiens et fit feu.
Au même instant, car ce qui se passa fut rapide comme un éclair,
la meute s’ouvrit, le sanglier blessé passa au milieu d’elle, et avant
que madame de Lucienne elle-même eût eu le temps de jeter un cri,
il était sur Paul; Paul tomba renversé, et l’animal furieux, au lieu de
suivre sa course, s’arrêta acharné sur son nouvel ennemi.
Il y eut alors un silence terrible; madame de Lucienne, pâle
comme la mort, les bras tendus vers son fils, essayait de parler et
murmurait d’une voix presque inintelligible: Sauvez-le! sauvez-le!
Monsieur de Lucienne, qui était le seul armé, prit sa carabine et
voulut ajuster l’animal; mais Paul était dessous, la plus légère
déviation de la balle, et le père tuait le fils. Un tremblement convulsif
s’empara de lui; il vit son impuissance, et, laissant tomber son arme,
il courut vers Paul en criant: Au secours! au secours! Les autres
chasseurs le suivirent. Au même instant, un jeune homme s’élança à
bas de cheval, sauta sur le fusil, et de cette voix ferme et puissante
qui commande: Place! cria-t-il. Les chasseurs s’écartèrent pour
laisser passer le messager de mort qui devait arriver avant eux. Ce
que je viens de vous dire s’était passé en moins d’une minute.
Tous les yeux se fixèrent aussitôt sur le tireur et sur le terrible but
qu’il avait choisi; quant à lui, il était ferme et calme, comme s’il eût
eu sous les yeux une simple cible. Le canon de la carabine se leva
lentement de terre; puis, arrivé à une certaine hauteur, le chasseur
et le fusil devinrent immobiles comme s’ils étaient de pierre; le coup
partit, et le sanglier blessé à mort roula à deux ou trois pas de Paul,
qui, débarrassé de son adversaire, se releva sur un genou, son
couteau de chasse à la main. Mais c’était inutile, la balle avait été
guidée par un œil trop sûr pour qu’elle ne fût pas mortelle. Madame
de Lucienne jeta un cri et s’évanouit, Lucie s’affaissa sur son cheval
et serait tombée, si l’un des piqueurs ne l’eût soutenue: je sautai à
bas du mien et je courus vers madame de Lucienne; quant aux
chasseurs, ils étaient tous autour de Paul et du sanglier mort, à
l’exception du tireur, qui, le coup parti, reposa tranquillement sa
carabine contre le tronc d’un arbre.
Madame de Lucienne revint à elle dans les bras de son fils et de
son mari: Paul n’avait qu’une légère blessure à la cuisse, tant s’était
passé rapidement ce que je viens de vous raconter. La première
émotion effacée, madame de Lucienne regarda autour d’elle: elle
avait toute sa gratitude maternelle à exprimer à un homme; elle
cherchait le chasseur qui avait sauvé son fils. Monsieur de Lucienne
devina son intention et le lui amena. Madame de Lucienne lui saisit
la main, voulut le remercier, fondit en larmes, et ne put prononcer
que ces mots: Oh! Monsieur de Beuzeval!....
—C’était donc lui? m’écriai-je.
—Oui, c’était lui. Je le vis ainsi pour la première fois, entouré de
la reconnaissance d’une famille entière et de tout le prestige de
l’émotion que m’avait causée cette scène dont il avait été le héros.
C’était un jeune homme pâle, et plutôt petit que grand, avec des
yeux noirs et des cheveux blonds. Au premier aspect, il paraissait à
peine avoir vingt ans; puis, en regardant plus attentivement, on
voyait quelques légères rides partir du coin de la paupière en
s’élargissant vers les tempes, tandis qu’un pli imperceptible lui
traversait le front, indiquant, au fond de son esprit ou de son cœur, la
présence habituelle d’une pensée sombre; des lèvres pâles et
minces, de belles dents et des mains de femme complétaient cet
ensemble, qui, au premier abord, m’inspira plutôt un sentiment de
répulsion que de sympathie, tant était froide, au milieu de l’exaltation
générale, la figure de cet homme qu’une mère remerciait de lui avoir
conservé son fils.
La chasse était finie: on revint au château. En rentrant au salon,
le comte Horace de Beuzeval s’excusa de ne pouvoir rester plus
longtemps; mais il avait un engagement pris pour dîner à Paris. On
lui fit observer qu’il avait quinze lieues à faire et quatre heures à
peine pour arriver à temps; le comte répondit en souriant que son
cheval avait pris à son service l’habitude de ces sortes de courses,
et donna ordre à son domestique de le lui amener.
Ce domestique était un Malais que le comte Horace avait ramené
d’un voyage qu’il avait fait dans l’Inde pour recueillir une succession
considérable, et qui avait conservé le costume de son pays.
Quoiqu’il fût en France depuis trois ans, il ne parlait que sa langue
maternelle, dont le comte savait quelques mots à l’aide desquels il
se faisait servir; il obéit avec une promptitude merveilleuse, et à
travers les carreaux du salon nous vîmes bientôt piaffer les deux
chevaux, sur la race desquels tous ces messieurs se récrièrent:
c’était en effet, autant que j’en pus juger, deux magnifiques animaux;
aussi le prince de Condé avait eu le désir de les avoir; mais le comte
Horace avait doublé le prix que l’altesse royale voulait y mettre, et il
les lui avait enlevés.
Tout le monde reconduisit le comte jusqu’au perron. Madame de
Lucienne semblait n’avoir pas eu le temps de lui exprimer toute sa
reconnaissance, et elle lui serrait les mains en le suppliant de
revenir. Le comte le promit en jetant un regard rapide qui me fit
baisser les yeux comme un éclair, car, je ne sais pourquoi, il me
sembla qu’il m’était adressé; lorsque je relevai la tête, le comte était
à cheval, il s’inclina une dernière fois devant madame de Lucienne,
nous fit un salut général, adressa de la main un signe d’amitié à
Paul, et lâchant la bride à son cheval, qui l’emporta au galop, il
disparut en quelques secondes au tournant du chemin.
Chacun était resté à la même place, le regardant en silence; car
il y avait dans cet homme quelque chose d’extraordinaire qui
commandait l’attention. On sentait une de ces organisations
puissantes que souvent la nature, comme par caprice, s’amuse à
enfermer dans un corps qui semble trop faible pour la contenir: aussi
le comte paraissait-il un composé de contrastes. Pour ceux qui ne le
connaissaient pas, il avait l’apparence faible et languissante d’un
homme atteint d’une maladie organique; pour ses amis et ses
compagnons, c’était un homme de fer, résistant à toutes les fatigues,
surmontant toutes les émotions, domptant tous les besoins: Paul
l’avait vu passer des nuits entières, soit au jeu, soit à table; et le
lendemain, tandis que ses convives de table ou de jeu dormaient,
partir, sans avoir pris une heure de sommeil, pour une chasse ou
pour une course avec de nouveaux compagnons, qu’il lassait
comme les premiers, sans que la fatigue se manifestât chez lui
autrement que par une pâleur plus grande et une toux sèche qui lui
était habituelle, mais qui, dans ce cas, devenait plus fréquente.
Je ne sais pourquoi j’écoutai tous ces détails avec un intérêt
infini; sans doute la scène dont j’avais été témoin, le sang-froid dont
le comte avait fait preuve, l’émotion toute récente que j’avais
éprouvée, étaient cause de cette attention que je prêtais à tout ce
qu’on racontait de lui. Au reste, le calcul le plus habile n’eût rien
inventé de mieux que ce départ subit, qui laissait en quelque sorte le
château désert, tant celui qui s’était éloigné avait produit une
immense impression sur ses habitans.
On annonça que le dîner était servi. La conversation,
interrompue pendant quelque temps, reprit au dessert une nouvelle
activité, et, comme pendant toute l’après-midi, le comte en fut l’objet;
alors, soit que cette constante attention pour un seul parût à
quelques-uns désobligeante pour les autres, soit qu’en effet
plusieurs des qualités qu’on lui accordait fussent contestables, une
légère discussion s’éleva sur son existence étrange, sur sa fortune,
dont la source était inconnue, et sur son courage, que l’un des
convives attribuait à sa grande habileté à manier l’épée et le pistolet.
Paul se fit alors tout naturellement le défenseur de celui qui lui avait
sauvé la vie. L’existence du comte Horace était celle de presque
tous les hommes à la mode; sa fortune venait de la succession d’un
oncle de sa mère, qui était resté quinze ans dans l’Inde. Quant à son
courage, c’était, à son avis, la chose la moins contestable; car non-
seulement il avait fait ses preuves dans quelques duels dont il était
toujours sorti à peu près sain et sauf, mais encore en d’autres
circonstances. Paul alors en raconta plusieurs, dont une surtout se
grava profondément dans mon esprit.
Le comte Horace, en arrivant à Goa, trouva son oncle mort; mais
un testament avait été fait en sa faveur, de sorte qu’aucune
contestation n’eut lieu, et quoique deux jeunes Anglais, parens du
défunt, car la mère du comte était Anglaise, se trouvassent héritiers
au même degré que lui, il se vit seul en possession de l’héritage qu’il
venait réclamer. Au reste, ces deux jeunes Anglais étaient riches;
tous deux au service et occupant des grades dans l’armée
britannique en garnison à Bombay. Ils reçurent donc leur cousin,
sinon avec affection, du moins avec politesse, et, avant son départ
pour la France, ils lui offrirent avec leurs camarades, officiers du
régiment où ils servaient, un dîner d’adieu que le comte Horace
accepta.
Il était plus jeune de quatre ans à cette époque, et en paraissait à
peine dix-huit, quoiqu’il en eût réellement vingt-cinq; sa taille
élégante, son teint pâle, la blancheur de ses mains, lui donnaient
l’apparence d’une femme déguisée en homme. Aussi, au premier
coup d’œil, les officiers anglais mesurèrent-ils le courage de leur
convive à son apparence. Le comte, de son côté, avec cette rapidité
de jugement qui le distingue, comprit aussitôt l’effet qu’il avait
produit, et certain de l’intention railleuse de ses hôtes, se tint en
garde, résolu à ne pas quitter Bombay sans y laisser un souvenir
quelconque de son passage. En se mettant à table, les deux jeunes
officiers demandèrent à leur parent s’il parlait anglais; mais, quoique
le comte connût cette langue aussi bien que la nôtre, il répondit
modestement qu’il n’en entendait pas un mot, et pria ces messieurs
de vouloir bien, lorsqu’ils désireraient qu’il y prît part, soutenir la
conversation en français.
Cette déclaration donna une grande latitude aux convives, et,
dès le premier service, le comte s’aperçut qu’il était l’objet d’une
raillerie continue. Cependant il dévora tout ce qu’il entendit, le
sourire sur les lèvres et la gaîté dans les yeux; seulement ses joues
devinrent plus pâles, et deux fois ses dents brisèrent les bords du
verre qu’il portait à sa bouche. Au dessert, le bruit redoubla avec le
vin de France, et la conversation tomba sur la chasse; alors on
demanda au comte quel genre de gibier il chassait en France, et de
quelle manière il le chassait. Le comte, décidé à poursuivre son rôle
jusqu’au bout, répondit qu’il chassait tantôt en plaine et avec le chien
d’arrêt la perdrix et le lièvre, tantôt au bois et à courre, le renard et le
cerf.
—Ah! ah! dit en riant un des convives, vous chassez le lièvre, le
renard et le cerf! Eh bien! nous, ici, nous chassons le tigre.
—Et de quelle manière? dit le comte Horace avec une bonhomie
parfaite.
—De quelle manière? répondit un autre; mais montés sur des
éléphans, et avec des esclaves, dont les uns, armés de piques et de
haches, font face à l’animal, tandis que les autres nous chargent nos
fusils, et que nous tirons.
—Ce doit être un charmant plaisir, répondit le comte.
—Il est malheureux, dit l’un des jeunes gens, que vous partiez si
vite, mon cher cousin... nous aurions pu vous le procurer.
—Vrai, reprit Horace, je regrette bien sincèrement de manquer
une pareille occasion; et s’il ne fallait pas attendre trop longtemps, je
resterais.
—Mais, répondit le premier, cela tombe à merveille. Il y a
justement à trois lieues d’ici, dans un marais qui longe les
montagnes et qui s’étend du côté de Surate, une tigresse et ses
petits. Des Indiens à qui elle a enlevé des moutons nous en ont
prévenus hier seulement; nous voulions attendre que les petits
fussent plus forts, afin de faire une chasse en règle, mais puisque
nous avons une si bonne occasion de vous être agréables, nous
avancerons l’expédition d’une quinzaine de jours.
—Je vous en suis tout-à-fait reconnaissant, dit en s’inclinant le
comte; mais est-il bien certain que la tigresse soit où on la croit?
—Il n’y a aucun doute.
—Et sait-on précisément à quel endroit est son repaire?
—C’est facile à voir en montant sur un rocher qui domine le
marais; ses chemins sont tracés au milieu des roseaux brisés, et
tous aboutissent à un centre, comme les rayons d’une étoile.
—Eh bien! dit le comte en remplissant son verre et en se levant
comme pour porter une santé,—à celui qui ira tuer la tigresse au
milieu de ses roseaux, entre ses deux petits, seul, à pied, et sans
autre arme que ce poignard! A ces mots, il prit à la ceinture d’un
esclave un poignard malais, et le posa sur la table.
—Êtes-vous fou? dit un des convives.
—Non, messieurs, je ne suis pas fou, répondit le comte avec une
amertume mêlée de mépris, et la preuve, c’est que je renouvelle
mon toast. Écoutez donc bien, afin que celui qui voudra l’accepter
sache à quoi il s’engage en vidant son verre: A celui, dis-je, qui ira
tuer la tigresse au milieu de ses roseaux, entre ses deux petits, seul,
à pied, et sans autre arme que ce poignard!
Il se fit un moment de silence, pendant lequel le comte interrogea
successivement tous les yeux, qui tous se baissèrent.
—Personne ne répond? dit-il avec un sourire; personne n’ose
accepter mon toast... personne n’a le courage de me faire raison...
Eh bien! alors, c’est moi qui irai... et si je n’y vais pas, vous direz que
je suis un misérable, comme je dis que vous êtes des lâches.
A ces mots, le comte vida son verre, le reposa tranquillement sur
la table, et, s’avançant vers la porte:—A demain, Messieurs, dit-il, et
il sortit.
Le lendemain, à six heures du matin, il était prêt pour cette
terrible chasse, lorsque ses convives entrèrent dans sa chambre. Ils
venaient le supplier de renoncer à son entreprise, dont le résultat ne
pouvait manquer d’être mortel pour lui. Mais le comte ne voulut rien
entendre. Ils reconnurent d’abord qu’ils avaient eu tort la veille; que
leur conduite était celle de jeunes fous. Le comte les remercia de
leurs excuses, mais refusa de les accepter. Ils lui offrirent alors de
choisir l’un d’eux, et de se battre avec lui, s’il se croyait trop offensé
pour que la chose pût se passer sans réparation. Le comte répondit
avec ironie que ses principes religieux lui défendaient de verser le
sang de son prochain; que, de son côté, il retirait les paroles amères
qu’il avait dites; mais que, quant à cette chasse, rien au monde ne
pouvait l’y faire renoncer. A ces mots, il invita ces messieurs à
monter à cheval et à le suivre, les prévenant, au reste, que s’ils ne
voulaient pas l’honorer de leur compagnie, il n’irait pas moins
attaquer la tigresse tout seul. Cette décision était prononcée d’une
voix si ferme, et paraissait tellement inébranlable, qu’ils ne tentèrent
même plus de l’y faire renoncer, et que, montant à cheval de leur
côté, ils vinrent le rejoindre à la porte orientale de la ville, où le
rendez-vous avait été donné.
La cavalcade s’achemina en silence vers l’endroit indiqué;
chacun des cavaliers s’était muni d’un fusil à deux coups ou d’une
carabine. Le comte seul était sans armes; son costume,
parfaitement élégant, était celui d’un jeune homme du monde qui va
faire sa promenade du matin au bois de Boulogne. Tous les officiers
se regardaient avec étonnement, ne pouvant croire qu’il conserverait
ce sang-froid jusqu’à la fin.
En arrivant sur la lisière du marais, les officiers firent un nouvel
effort pour dissuader le comte d’aller plus avant. Au milieu de la
discussion, et comme pour leur venir en aide, un rugissement se fit
entendre, parti de quelques centaines de pas à peine; les chevaux,
inquiets, piaffèrent et hennirent.
—Vous voyez, messieurs, dit le comte, il est trop tard, nous
sommes reconnus, l’animal sait que nous sommes là; et je ne veux
pas, en quittant l’Inde, que je ne reverrai probablement jamais,
laisser une fausse opinion de moi, même à un tigre. En avant,
messieurs!—Et le comte poussa son cheval pour gagner, en
longeant les marais, le rocher du haut duquel on dominait les
roseaux où la tigresse avait mis bas.
En arrivant au pied du rocher, un second rugissement se fit
entendre, mais si fort et si rapproché, que l’un des chevaux fit un
écart et que son cavalier manqua d’être désarçonné; tous les autres,
l’écume à la bouche, les naseaux ouverts et l’œil hagard,
frissonnaient et tremblaient sur leurs quatre pieds comme s’ils
venaient de sortir de l’eau glacée. Alors les cavaliers descendirent,
les montures furent confiées aux domestiques, et le comte, le
premier, commença de gravir le point élevé du haut duquel il
comptait examiner le terrain.
En effet, du sommet du rocher il suivait des yeux, aux roseaux
brisés, la trace du terrible animal qu’il allait combattre; des espèces
de chemins, larges de deux pieds à peu près, étaient frayés dans les
hautes herbes, et chacun, comme l’avaient dit les officiers,
aboutissait à un centre, où les plantes, tout-à-fait battues, formaient
une clairière. Un troisième rugissement, qui partait de cet endroit,
vint dissiper tous les doutes, et le comte sut où il devait aller
chercher son ennemi.
Alors le plus âgé des officiers s’approcha de nouveau du comte;
mais celui-ci, devinant son intention, lui fit froidement signe de la
main que tout était inutile. Puis il boutonna sa redingote, pria l’un de
ses cousins de lui prêter l’écharpe de soie qui lui serrait la taille pour
s’envelopper le bras gauche; fit signe au Malais de lui donner son
poignard, se le fit assurer autour de la main avec un foulard mouillé;
alors, posant son chapeau à terre, il releva gracieusement ses
cheveux, et, par le chemin le plus court, s’avança vers les roseaux,
au milieu desquels il disparut à l’instant, laissant ses compagnons
s’entre-regardant épouvantés, et ne pouvant croire encore à une
pareille audace.
Quant à lui, il s’avança lentement et avec précaution par le
chemin qu’il avait pris, et qui était tracé si directement qu’il n’y avait
à s’écarter ni à droite ni à gauche. Au bout de deux cents pas à peu
près, il entendit un rauquement sourd, qui lui annonçait que son
ennemie était sur ses gardes, et que, s’il n’avait point été vu encore,
il était déjà éventé; cependant il ne s’arrêta qu’une seconde, et
aussitôt que le bruit eut cessé, il continua de marcher. Au bout de
cinquante pas à peu près, il s’arrêta de nouveau; il lui semblait que,
s’il n’était pas arrivé, il devait au moins être bien près, car il touchait
à la clairière, et cette clairière était parsemée d’ossemens, dont
quelques-uns conservaient encore des lambeaux de chair sanglante.
Il regarda donc circulairement autour de lui, et, dans un enfoncement
pratiqué dans l’herbe et pareil à une voûte de quatre ou cinq pieds
de profondeur, il aperçut la tigresse couchée à moitié, la gueule
béante et les yeux fixés sur lui; ses petits jouaient sous son ventre
comme de jeunes chats.
Ce qui se passa dans son âme à cette vue, lui seul peut le dire;
mais son âme est un abîme d’où rien ne sort. Quelque temps la
tigresse et lui se regardèrent immobiles; et, voyant que, de peur de
quitter ses petits sans doute, elle ne venait pas à lui, ce fut lui qui
alla vers elle.
Il en approcha ainsi jusqu’à la distance de quatre pas; puis,
voyant qu’enfin elle faisait un mouvement pour se soulever, il se rua
sur elle. Ceux qui regardaient et écoutaient entendirent à la fois un
rugissement et un cri; ils virent pendant quelques secondes les
roseaux s’agiter; puis le silence et la tranquillité leur succédèrent:
tout était fini.
Ils attendirent un instant pour voir si le comte reviendrait; mais le
comte ne revint pas. Alors ils eurent honte de l’avoir laissé entrer
seul, et se décidèrent, puisqu’ils n’avaient pas sauvé sa vie, à
sauver du moins son cadavre. Ils s’avancèrent dans le marais tous
ensemble et pleins d’ardeur, s’arrêtant de temps en temps pour
écouter, puis se remettant aussitôt en chemin; enfin ils arrivèrent à la
clairière et trouvèrent les deux adversaires couchés l’un sur l’autre:
la tigresse était morte, et le comte évanoui. Quant aux deux petits,
trop faibles pour dévorer le corps, ils léchaient le sang.
La tigresse avait reçu dix-sept coups de poignard, le comte un
coup de dent qui lui avait brisé le bras gauche, et un coup de griffe
qui lui avait déchiré la poitrine.
Les officiers emportèrent le cadavre de la tigresse et le corps du
comte; l’homme et l’animal rentrèrent à Bombay couchés à côté l’un
de l’autre, et portés sur le même brancard. Quant aux petits tigres,
l’esclave malais les avait garrottés avec la percale de son turban, et
ils pendaient aux deux côtés de sa selle.
Lorsqu’au bout de quinze jours le comte se leva, il trouva devant
son lit la peau de la tigresse avec des dents en perles, des yeux en
rubis et des ongles d’or; c’était un don des officiers du régiment dans
lequel servaient ses deux cousins.
VIII.
Ces récits firent une impression profonde dans mon esprit. Le

courage est une des plus grandes séductions de l’homme sur la
femme: est-ce à cause de notre faiblesse et parce que, ne pouvant
rien par nous-mêmes, il nous faut éternellement un appui? Aussi,
quelque chose que l’on eût dite au désavantage du comte Horace, le
seul souvenir qui resta dans mon esprit fut celui de cette double
chasse, à l’une desquelles j’avais assisté. Cependant ce n’était pas
sans terreur que je pensais à ce sang-froid terrible auquel Paul
devait la vie. Combien de combats terribles s’étaient passés dans ce
cœur avant que la volonté fût arrivée à comprimer à ce point ses
pulsations, et un bien long incendie avait dû dévorer cette âme avant
que sa flamme ne devînt toute cendre et que sa lave ne se changeât
en glace.
Le grand malheur de notre époque est la recherche du
romanesque et le mépris du simple. Plus la société se dépoétise,
plus les imaginations actives demandent cet extraordinaire, qui tous
les jours disparaît du monde pour se réfugier au théâtre ou dans les
romans; de là, cet intérêt fascinateur qu’exercent sur tout ce qui les
entoure les caractères exceptionnels. Vous ne vous étonnerez donc
pas que l’image du comte Horace, s’offrant à l’esprit d’une jeune fille
entourée de ce prestige, soit restée dans son imagination, où si peu
d’événemens avaient encore laissé leur trace. Aussi, lorsque,
quelques jours après la scène que je viens de vous raconter, nous
vîmes arriver deux cavaliers par la grande allée du château, et qu’on
annonça monsieur Paul de Lucienne et monsieur le comte Horace
de Beuzeval, pour la première fois de ma vie je sentis mon cœur
battre à un nom, un nuage me passa sur les yeux, et je me levai
avec l’intention de fuir; ma mère me retint, ces messieurs entrèrent.
Je ne sais ce que je leur dis d’abord; mais certes je dus paraître
bien timide et bien gauche; car lorsque je levai les yeux, ceux du
comte Horace étaient fixés sur moi avec une expression étrange et
que je n’oublierai jamais: cependant, peu à peu j’écartai cette
préoccupation et je redevins moi-même, alors je pus le regarder et
l’écouter comme si je regardais et j’écoutais Paul.
Je lui retrouvai la même figure impassible, le même regard fixe et
profond qui m’avait tant impressionnée, et de plus une voix douce
qui, comme ses mains et ses pieds, paraissait bien plus appartenir à
une femme qu’à un homme; cependant, lorsqu’il s’animait, cette voix
prenait une puissance qui semblait incompatible avec les premiers
sons qu’elle avait proférés: Paul, en ami reconnaissant, avait mis la
conversation sur un sujet propre à faire valoir le comte: il parla de
ses voyages. Le comte hésita un instant à se laisser entraîner à
cette séduction d’amour-propre: on eût dit qu’il craignait de
s’emparer de la conversation et de substituer le moi aux généralités
banales des premières entrevues; mais bientôt le souvenir des lieux
parcourus se présenta à sa mémoire, la vie pittoresque des contrées
sauvages entra en lutte avec l’existence monotone des pays civilisés
et déborda sur elle; le comte se retrouva tout entier au milieu de la
végétation luxuriante de l’Inde et des aspects merveilleux des
Maldives. Il nous raconta ses courses dans le golfe du Bengale, ses
combats avec les pirates malais; il se laissa emporter à la peinture
brillante de cette vie animée, où chaque heure apporte une émotion
à l’esprit ou au cœur; il fit passer sous nos yeux les phases tout
entières de cette existence primitive, où l’homme dans sa liberté et
dans sa force, étant, selon qu’il veut l’être, esclave ou roi, n’a de
liens que son caprice, de bornes que l’horizon, et lorsqu’il étouffe sur
la terre, déploie les voiles de ses vaisseaux, comme les ailes d’un
aigle, et va demander à l’Océan la solitude et l’immensité: puis, il
retomba d’un seul bond au milieu de notre société usée, où tout est
mesquin, crimes et vertus, où tout est factice, visage et âme, où,
esclaves emprisonnés dans les lois, captifs garrottés dans les
convenances, il y a pour chaque heure du jour de petits devoirs à
accomplir, pour chaque partie de la matinée des formes d’habits et
des couleurs de gants à adopter, et cela sous peine de ridicule,
c’est-à-dire de mort: car le ridicule, en France, tache un nom plus
cruellement que ne le fait la boue ou le sang.
Je ne vous dirai pas ce qu’il y avait d’éloquence amère, ironique
et mordante contre notre société dans cette sortie du comte: c’était
véritablement, aux blasphèmes près, une de ces créations de
poètes, Manfred ou Karl Moor; c’était une de ces organisations
orageuses se débattant au milieu des plates et communes
exigences de notre société; c’était le génie aux prises avec le
monde, et qui, vainement enveloppé dans ses lois, ses convenances
et ses habitudes, les emporte avec lui, comme un lion ferait de
misérables filets tendus pour un renard ou pour un loup.
J’écoutais cette philosophie terrible, comme j’aurais lu une page
de Byron ou de Goëthe: c’était la même énergie de pensée,
rehaussée de toute la puissance de l’expression. Alors cette figure si
impassible avait jeté son masque de glace; elle s’animait à la
flamme du cœur, et ses yeux lançaient des éclairs; alors cette voix si
douce prenait successivement des accens éclatans et sombres;
puis, tout-à-coup, enthousiasme ou amertume, espérance ou
mépris, poésie ou matière, tout cela se fondait dans un sourire
comme je n’en avais point vu encore, et qui contenait à lui seul plus
de désespoir et de dédain que n’aurait pu le faire le sanglot le plus
douloureux.
Après une visite d’une heure, Paul et le comte nous quittèrent.
Lorsqu’ils furent sortis, nous nous regardâmes un instant ma mère et
moi, en silence, et je me sentis le cœur soulagé d’une oppression
énorme: la présence de cet homme me pesait comme celle de
Méphistophélès à Marguerite: l’impression qu’il avait produite sur
moi était si visible, que ma mère se mit à le défendre sans que je
l’attaquasse; depuis longtemps elle avait entendu parler du comte,
et, comme sur tous les hommes remarquables, le monde émettait
sur lui les jugemens les plus opposés. Ma mère, au reste, le
regardait d’un point de vue complétement différent du mien: tous ces
sophismes émis si hardiment par le comte lui paraissaient un jeu
d’esprit, et voilà tout; une espèce de médisance contre la société,
comme tous les jours on en dit contre les individus. Ma mère ne le
mettait donc ni si haut ni si bas que je le faisais intérieurement; il en
résulta que cette différence d’opinion que je ne voulais pas
combattre me détermina à paraître ne plus m’occuper de lui. Au bout
de dix minutes, je prétextai un léger mal de tête, et je descendis
dans le parc; là rien ne vint distraire mon esprit de sa préoccupation,
et je n’avais pas fait cent pas, que je fus forcée de m’avouer à moi-
même que je n’avais pas voulu parler du comte afin de mieux penser
à lui. Cette conviction m’effraya; je n’aimais pas le comte cependant,
car, à l’annonce de sa présence, mon cœur eût certes plutôt battu de
crainte que de joie; pourtant je ne le craignais pas non plus, ou
logiquement je ne devais pas le craindre, car enfin en quoi pouvait-il
influer sur ma destinée? Je l’avais vu une fois par hasard, une
seconde fois par politesse, je ne le reverrais peut-être jamais; avec
son caractère aventureux et son goût des voyages, il pouvait quitter
la France d’un moment à l’autre, alors son passage dans ma vie
était une apparition, un rêve, et voilà tout; quinze jours, un mois, un
an écoulés, je l’oublierais. En attendant, lorsque la cloche du dîner
retentit, elle me surprit au milieu des mêmes pensées et me fit
tressaillir de sonner si vite: les heures avaient passé comme des
minutes.
En rentrant au salon, ma mère me remit une invitation de la
comtesse M..., qui était restée à Paris malgré l’été, et qui donnait, à
propos de l’anniversaire de la naissance de sa fille, une grande
soirée, moitié dansante, moitié musicale. Ma mère, toujours
excellente pour moi, voulait me consulter, avant de répondre.
J’acceptai avec empressement: c’était une distraction puissante à
l’idée qui m’obsédait; en effet, nous n’avions que trois jours pour
nous préparer, et ces trois jours suffisaient si strictement aux
préparatifs du bal, qu’il était évident que le souvenir du comte se
perdrait, ou du moins s’éloignerait dans les préoccupations si
importantes de la toilette. De mon côté, je fis tout ce que je pus pour
arriver à ce résultat: je parlai de cette soirée avec une ardeur que ne
m’avait jamais vue ma mère; je demandai à revenir le même soir à
Paris, sous prétexte que nous avions à peine le temps de
commander nos robes et nos fleurs, mais en effet parce que le
changement de lieu devait, il me le semblait du moins, m’aider
encore dans ma lutte contre mes souvenirs. Ma mère céda à toutes
mes fantaisies avec sa bonté ordinaire: après le dîner nous
partîmes.
Je ne m’étais pas trompée; les soins que je fus obligée de
donner aux préparatifs de cette soirée, un reste de cette insouciance
joyeuse de jeune fille, que je n’avais pas perdue encore, l’espoir d’un
bal, dans une saison où il y en a si peu, firent diversion à mes
terreurs insensées, et éloignèrent momentanément le fantôme qui
me poursuivait. Le jour désiré arriva enfin; il s’écoula pour moi dans
une espèce de fièvre d’activité que ma mère ne m’avait jamais
connue; elle était tout heureuse de la joie que je me promettais.
Pauvre mère!
Dix heures sonnèrent, j’étais prête depuis vingt minutes, je ne
sais comment cela c’était fait: moi, toujours en retard, c’était moi qui,
ce soir-là, attendais ma mère. Nous partîmes enfin; presque toute
notre société d’hiver était revenue comme nous à Paris pour cette
fête. Je retrouvai mes amies de pension, mes danseurs d’habitude,
et jusqu’à ce plaisir vif et joyeux de jeune fille, qui, depuis un an ou
deux déjà, commençait à s’amortir.
Il y avait un monde fou dans les salons de danse; pendant un
moment de repos, la comtesse M.... me prit par le bras, et pour fuir
la chaleur étouffante qu’il faisait, m’emmena dans les chambres de
jeu; c’était en même temps une inspection curieuse à faire; toutes
les célébrités artistiques, littéraires et politiques de l’époque étaient
là; j’en connaissais beaucoup déjà, mais cependant quelques-unes
encore m’étaient étrangères. Madame M... me les nommait avec une
complaisance charmante, accompagnant chaque nom d’un
commentaire que lui eût souvent envié le plus spirituel feuilletoniste,
quand tout-à-coup, en entrant dans un salon, je tressaillis en laissant
échapper malgré moi ces mots: —Le comte Horace!
—Eh bien! oui, le comte Horace, me dit madame M... en souriant;
le connaissez vous?
—Nous l’avons rencontré chez madame de Lucienne, à la
campagne.
—Ah! oui, reprit la comtesse, j’ai entendu parler d’une chasse,
d’un accident arrivé à monsieur de Lucienne fils, n’est-ce pas? En ce

The Life of Henry James A Critical Biography Peter Collister Full Chapter

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The Life of Henry James: A Critical

Biography Peter Collister

This acclaimed series offers informative and durable biographies of important

Also in this series

The Life of Robert Browning The Life of William Shakespeare

The Life of Joseph Conrad The Life of William Wordsworth

The Life of William Faulkner The Life of George Eliot

The Life of Walter Scott The Life of Daniel Defoe

those ‘willing and prepared hearers’.

Part I The Early Years 1

Part II Independence and Europe 71

Part III The Lure of the Theatre 181

Part IV The Later Years 269

Letter Details 395

The literature on Henry James, biographical and critical, is enormous and my

I have included translations only of less familiar French words or phrases.

AS The American Scene, ed. Peter Collister (Cambridge: Cambridge

This is one, sensationally sinister version of the biographical enterprise, though

highly original in its avoidance of the ponderousness of many Victorian memoirs,

The Early Years

The James Family

Doubtless, however servanted and supported, the weight of organizing travel

The ‘Dispensaries of Learning’

learning’ and receiving no ‘throb of assurance or success’ (pp. 169, 158).Though we

New York City: Art and Theatre

Early Life and Experiences

a group advocating idealistic social experimentation and female equality. George

signified male manual labour, but, in a transformation, it became popular with

Ces récits firent une impression profonde dans mon esprit. Le

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Part II Independence and Europe 71

Part III The Lure of the Theatre 181

Part IV The Later Years 269

Letter Details 395