Flack delivers a chilling and visionary speech to Francie, which he expanded for the (wordier, less punchy) New York edition of 1908, to give this mildly terrifying manifesto:

There are ten thousand things to do that haven’t been done, and I’m going to do them. The society-news of every quarter of the globe, furnished by the prominent members themselves—oh they can be fixed, you’ll see!—from day to day and from hour to hour and served up hot at every breakfast-table in the United States: that’s what the American people want and that’s what the American people are going to have … I’m going for the inside view, the choice bits, the chronique intime, as they say here; what the people want’s just what ain’t told, and I’m going to tell it … That’s about played out, anyway, the idea of sticking up a sign of “private” and “hands off” and “no thoroughfare” and thinking you can keep the place to yourself.

Well, yow. So Henry James Nostradamus’d People magazine and TMZ and actually much of the way we live now.

There were two other events that precipitated this funny novel. James’s notebooks suggest that Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel, was a model for Mr. Flack, after he sold out a family friend by means of a published conversation. James always claimed that he couldn’t abide interviews, but he did subject himself to at least four—including his last with Julian himself in Los Angeles, years later, when James was sixty-two. While James was cautious and perhaps even slick with him, he does give this memorable line about life in America: “These telephones—they pursue one everywhere. At the slightest pretext, one flies to the telephone, on no pretext—for the mere purpose of chatter!” (Whereas now we just text at the table.)

A third incident, according to Allan Burns, writing in the Henry James Review in 1995, was James being sold out himself: “He was invited to dine by ‘the terrible Mrs. Sherwood,’ who ‘then wrote a fearful letter about it (I having gone, all unconscious) to the American journals, which she afterwards sent me as if I should be delighted to see it.’ ” Catty!

James’s objection to all this interviewing was not some stodgy absurdity. At the time, “interviewing” was the hot new industry-disrupting business plan for the media: writing in the Henry James Review in 2007, Matthew Rubery tells us that it was “not practiced in America until the 1860s or in England until the 1880s.”

(Still, this newfangled scheme was slow to dominate. In 1888, the New-York Daily Tribune, like other city papers, was crammed with words and news—and, even then, long columns were spent in (so sorry) “aggregation.” On page 4, the “Talk of the Day” ran beneath the “Personal” column—deaths, retirements, etc. From May 5, 1888: “Freight cars from the North still come into Chicago covered in snow.” “Senator Ingalls climbed the Tall Sycamore of the Wabash yesterday,” attributed to the Washington Critic. Then, a joke about a hobo’s dog—it’s about the dog eating steak, and essentially reads like a joke about, it seems, “welfare queens”—but of course it’s so hard to tell from here.)

Newspapers were (and are?) a great business, but they were always desperate to get a leg up. When the New York Times began in 1851, already hundreds upon hundreds of New York newspapers had risen and died—and William Randolph Hearst only bought his first New York newspaper in 1895. In the battle to stay ahead, publications competed—for example, to see who could obtain the fastest boat, so as to get the news quickest from the ships arriving from Europe and scurry it back to the typesetter. In this competition, New York papers were engineering what was seen as a war on society.

“Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops,’ ” wrote Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, in a rather overwrought attack on the press in an age when “personal gossip attains the dignity of print.” This is what Henry James saw as the new “devouring publicity of life, the extinction of all sense between public and private.”

While America was beginning this slide into celebrity tabloidism, and the first New York Social Register—a European import done up in a truly American style—came into being in 1886, it was also the case that in both America and England compulsory education had begun to spread literacy further among the non-rich. So staunch advocacy journalism about the “lower classes” was being put forward at the same time that these growing audiences of women and non-rich people were discovered to be opportunities for new journalism products. Tit-Bits, a silly blog of a thing, was founded in 1881; the idea for a publication filled with small news and notes and humor for ladies came about, recounts Margaret Beetham in A Magazine of Her Own? (1996), because a bigwig newspaper editor read items from the real, big-boy paper to his wife, and she just enjoyed it ever so much.

Magazines were introducing reporters’ bylines, to make stars of reporters; newspapers would follow. Oscar Wilde—Henry James’s theatrical competitor, in at least one sense of the phrase—had taken the editorship of The Lady’s World in 1887, changing the title to The Woman’s World, and was trying to give women the “inside view.” “The creation of stars … began more hesitantly in the press but celebrity interviews, portraits of writers and pictures of their ‘homes’ were soon a staple of the magazines,” writes Beetham.

It was certainly not all fluff and fur capes, although the original manner of “the interview” was what we would call exceedingly friendly. Following in a decent tradition of English muckraking, also in 1887 Nellie Bly published “Ten Days in a Mad-House”—originally in the New York World, no less. “[G]irl stunt reporting became a recognizable genre in the popular press of the late 1880s and early 1890s,” according to Jean Marie Lutes’ 2006 history Front Page Girls.

This all sounds like a great deal of amazing fun, but when Hearst burst onto the market in 1895 with his New York Journal, the papers promptly became louder, bolder, more crime-obsessed, more graphic, and of course more tabloid—tabloid in a manner nearly identical to the one we know today. Unfortunately, at the same time, the papers also became far less true. What James and others feared certainly came to pass. For better—the media now, for instance, does not necessarily solely serve to protect the interests of the rich—and for worse, but mostly for capitalism, we absolutely discarded many of the old notions of privacy.

With all this in mind, you can see James playing little games about newspapers throughout The Reverberator. He introduces a ghostly observer-narrator, for seemingly no reason; he pairs off people who, essentially, interview each other; notions about consent and privacy and the presence of light—his sign for publicity—are everywhere.

When James reworked The Reverberator for the 1908 New York edition, he coarsened Flack, much as he revised the lady-interviewer character of Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady. “James remakes Henrietta as inhuman,” Lutes summarized; he took her from comic foil to evil symbol.

But by then, both the journalists quite probably deserved it.

“In the United States … the publication in the newspapers of the most intimate details of private life is taken as a matter of course,” wrote a reviewer of The Reverberator, from the foreign planet of England, in the Westminster Review. “In not a few instances the notice of the press is courted rather than resented.”

Reviews of The Reverberator were all over the map. It would be fascinating to have read the book back then, when a newspaper’s ability to scandalize didn’t seem so far-off, and when all the book’s jokes were fresh—just a few have necessarily gone missing along the way, though much of the big hilarity remains. Even contemporaneously, a number of the original reviews were not amused—and a few seemed revealing of the reviewer.

The New York Times gave it a pretty solid and dismissive pan. Robert Bridges in Time came a bit later, noted these bad reviews, and suggested a reason: “Perhaps the severe criticisms of the press were not a little prompted by the prickings of the editorial conscience, which in its rare moments of introspection discovers how hard it is for the man of best intentions to publish a wide-awake newspaper and not violate some of the conventions by ‘invading the sanctities of the home.’”

Months later, in The Nation, one Annie M.R.