Brewer, 1980; W. J. Tilley, The Background of The Princess Casamassima, University of Florida Monographs, Humanities No. 5, 1960.

The story is intrinsically moving, with great depths. At the same time James enfolds it in a wealth of observation and meditation, wit and compassion. The pace of narration is not fast, and the book is to be read steadily, not rapidly.

At every re-reading the density of the texture and the force of the narrative grow upon one. Much that may seem mysterious on a first reading becomes clearer on closer attention, just as the wealth of detail within a great painting becomes clearer the longer it is looked at. The aim of this introduction is to sketch out some of the major structures and sources of this remarkable novel which is set, unusually for James, in the London of the poor, ‘the huge tragic city, where unmeasured misery lurked beneath the dirty night’(p. 293).

II

The range of characters portrayed in the novel is as wide as that of Dickens, but much more generally convincing. Both the rich and the poor are justly rendered with a sure and delicate touch. James’s strength is not in realistic imitation, copious evocation of local detail, though his sense of the reality of the background is very sure. His main strength, his principal interest, lies in his rendering of the quality of character in delicate effects. Conrad’s comment that James is the historian of ‘fine consciences’ was never better illustrated. A leading example is that of Miss Pynsent. What other novelist could so effectively portray this humble, not very adept, poor dressmaker, and make us see, without sentimentality, the shining quality of her character? An instance is when she is visited by the robustly attractive Millicent Henning, once a little guttersnipe from a dissolute family in Lomax Place where Miss Pynsent still lives. Millicent remarks on the decline in Miss Pynsent’s humble dressmaking business. This decline is due to Miss Pynsent’s remorse at taking Hyacinth to see his mother dying in prison, thus revealing his origins to him and burdening him with what he feels is a shameful secret.

[Millicent’s] allusion to her shrunken industry seemed to Miss Pynsent very cruel; but she reflected that it was natural one should be insulted if one talked to a vulgar girl. She judged this young lady in the manner of a person who was not vulgar herself, and if there was a difference between them she was right in feeling it to be in her favour. Miss Pynsent’s ‘cut’, as I have intimated, was not truly fashionable, and in the application of gimp and the distribution of ornament she was not to be trusted; but morally, she had the best taste in the world. (p. 97)

Such moral taste is itself a beauty, and sets the tone of the book. By these high standards the broken-down old fiddler, Mr Vetch, and M. Poupin, the foolish exiled French Communist bookbinder, such an artist at his work, are fully worthy of our sympathy and admiration. M. Poupin has ‘an extraordinary decency of life and a worship of proper work’ (p. 124). Paul Muniment, the worker at a wholesale chemist’s who becomes Hyacinth’s mentor and best friend, is not an artist like Mr Vetch and M. Poupin. He has a scientific mind, tries to avoid emotion, and is an advanced and ruthless revolutionary who wishes not to abolish prisons, but to imprison ‘the correct sort’. As remarked on at Hyacinth’s first encounter with him at Poupin’s, his face denoted ‘a kind of joyous moral health’ (p.