M. Dent,* who was also an exceedingly poor bookbinder in London in the mid-1880s. As an apprentice he was paid 12s. 6d. (in decimal currency 62½p) a week, and his bare lodgings cost 14s. (70p). His brother helped him or he could not have survived. His working hours were 8.00 a.m. to 8.00 p.m., and he often worked overtime (for which he was paid) till 10.00 p.m., after which he had an hour’s walk home. He was desperately lonely. Nevertheless like Hyacinth he squeezed in a few social hours and, being of a very different character from Hyacinth, married at twenty-one, when his apprenticeship was finished and he could earn, as presumably Hyacinth does throughout most of the book, 28s. (£1.40p) a week. A little later Dent even managed a trip to Italy, which had the same blissfully enlightening effect upon what he calls his sordid struggle for a living as Medley Park, Paris and Venice had upon Hyacinth. The trip to Italy cost some £13 or £14, which shows again how accurate is James’s assessment of the financial possibilities of Hyacinth’s own life-enhancing visit to Paris and Venice.

III

There is much that is mysterious or uncertain in the novel, and Hyacinth is a very different character from J. M. Dent (who became the famous publisher of the Everyman Library and much else). James gives us a central character who registers with great sensitivity the bafflingly complex web of life’s contradictions in which he struggles like a fly. The point of view from which the story is told is in general that of Hyacinth himself, and much that is obscure to him in the narrative remains obscure to us. How significant, for example, is the international revolutionary network? It exists, but how extensively? How strong, how widely rooted in the people is it? We can guess, but we do not know. What are the Princess’s motives? She gives us hints, and we hear her discussed by her aged companion, Madame Grandoni, with her alienated husband Prince Casamassima, where for once the narrative is not focused through Hyacinth’s own perceptions. Even here we have only Madame Grandoni’s assessment of Christina’s springs of action (p. 259). The Princess is beautiful, energetic, clever and bored. She takes up the ‘cause’ of the people because it is not as banal as her normal social life. There is something spiritually wanton about her, which is part of her wilful, irresponsible charm. Her irrationality is part of her nature. She comes to the hero like the medieval Lady Fortuna, beautiful and unreliable, arbitrarily to give and to take away.

As James says in the Preface to the New York Edition of 1909, ‘one can never tell everything’. Many things in the novel we pick up from hints and suggestions, as Rose Muniment construes the love of Lady Aurora for Paul Muniment, and as we eventually construe the fact that Paul and the Princess appear to become lovers, as well as conspirators in a serious political plot. When James writes in his Preface of how characters float up in his mind, and he has to think about them, it is as if they have a real objectivity and a real mystery for him, which he is anxious to do justice to for the reader’s sake. And indeed this is surely also how we really do ‘know’ – or do not know – people in real life.