Bostonians Read Online
| 1908 | James publishes the story “The Jolly Corner,” an oblique commentary on the America he has left behind. |
| 1910 | In January James becomes very ill. He is nursed by his brother William and William’s wife, Alice, and the three return to North America. William, also ill, dies shortly thereafter. James visits New York, where he receives psychiatric care. |
| 1911 1 | In August he returns to England. |
| 1914 | James begins work on two novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, which he will not complete before his death. |
| 1915 | James’s health deteriorates. He becomes a British subject. |
| 1916 | On New Year’s Day he receives the Order of Merit. On February 28 Henry James dies. His ashes are taken to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be buried in American soil, near his brother William. |
| 1917 | Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past are published in their unfinished state. |
Introduction
“It is not that I have anything strange or new to relate,” the twenty-eight-year-old Henry James wrote to American arts scholar and Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton in 1872. “In fact when one sits down to sum up Cambridge life plume en main, the strange thing seems its aridity” (Selected Letters, p. 91; see “For Further Reading”). In 1913, two weeks before his seventieth birthday, James would use the same word, this time as an adjective, to describe the city in which his family had settled in Massachusetts. By then he had been living in England for many years, and in a letter to his sister-in-law Alice, he declared a visit to America impossible. He could not, he explained, spend the summer in “utterly arid and vacuous Cambridge” (Selected Letters, p. 407). I am interested in this repetition because, despite the image of desiccation, twelve years after the first letter and twenty-nine years before the second, Henry James began an entire novel devoted to that “arid” part of the world and called it The Bostonians.
Although Henry James, Junior, was born in New York City and spent a good part of his childhood en route from one European city to another as he, his siblings, and mother followed the restless Continental wanderings of Henry James, Senior, Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, would become deeply familiar places for the novelist. During the academic year 1862-1863, Henry, Jr., studied law at Harvard University before giving it up for a life of writing. His family moved to Boston in 1864 and shortly thereafter settled permanently in Cambridge at 20 Quincy Street. But long before the family’s relocation, the ideas of New England had been running in the senior Henry James’s blood. The James children grew up in an atmosphere of idealism, reform, and new thought. Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists, including Margaret Fuller, William Ellery Channing, and Bronson Alcott were all friends of the family. Henry, Sr., was also an ardent advocate of immediate emancipation for the slaves and sent his two younger sons, Garth Wilkinson (“Wilky”) and Robertson (“Bob”), to the Concord Academy, where Thoreau had taught and where three of Emerson’s children were enrolled, as was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian. Under the direction of Franklin Sanborn, a fund-raiser and active conspirator in the stand his fellow abolitionist John Brown took at Harper’s Ferry in what was then Virginia, the school was more than an experiment in coeducation; it was a locus of feverish ideology. Both Wilky and Bob James left school to fight for the Union cause. Wilky enlisted at age seventeen and, not long after, joined the first regiment of black troops—the 54th regiment—as adjutant to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. On May 28, 1863, accompanied by rousing fanfare, the 54th marched out of Boston. By the end of July that same year, nearly half of that regiment’s men and most of its officers had been killed during the assault on Fort Wagner in Charleston Bay, South Carolina. Wilky James was badly injured but survived. After the war, he and Robertson, subsidized by their father, became the owners of a plantation in Florida that employed black laborers. The venture failed, but their effort remains a testament not only to the idealism of the brothers but to the hopes of the world that played a crucial role in shaping them—zealous, high-minded New England.
There were other ideas wafting about the James household—imported ones. A disciple of both Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the Swedish natural scientist turned mystic, and François-Marie-Charles Fourier (1772-1837), the French social philosopher, Henry, Sr., embraced a miasmic coupling of spiritual enlightenment (Swedenborg believed he had found a key to an angelic reading of the Scriptures) and a utopian vision of a new society in which human beings freed from repression and inhibition could release their true passionate selves and lead orderly, harmonious lives in communities known as phalanxes.
As in every age, rigorous intellectual ideas mingled with more dubious notions. In both Europe and the United States, a rage for Mesmerism—a method of hypnosis and suggestion practiced by German physician F.
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