(In the stacks of the Dartmouth College library, I found twenty-five feet of shelf space devoted to the writings of Henry James, with another twenty feet holding books about him.) By the end of the decade during which these essays were written, James would emerge, at thirty-seven, as the mature literary master he would remain for the second half of his life.

For readers of these Jamesian postcards, then and now, there is welcome relief from the news of the day. The tribulations of war and politics and revolution almost never intrude, and when they do, it is only in a passing reference or offhand phrase. At his Lake George hotel in 1870, relaxing with the New York papers, he is “reading of the great deeds of Prussia and the confusion of France” while listening to a German American marching band. “What an omen for the Prussian future!” he marvels. “Their simple Teutonic presence seemed a portent.” (How much of a portent he could not know.) In Paris in 1872, “after a busy, dusty, weary day in the streets, staring at charred ruins and finding in all things a vague aftertaste of gunpowder,” he attends a Molière comedy at the Théâtre Français. The magnificence of the performance prompts him to feel “a sort of languid ecstasy of contemplation and wonder—wonder that the tender flower of poetry and art should bloom again so bravely over blood-stained garments and fresh-made graves.” (He is alluding to the brutal suppression of the Paris Commune the year before.) But we are not on an earnest fact-finding trip in these essays. We’re not down and out in Paris and London. No, we are up and away in Saratoga and Venice (and Paris and London too). We are traveling for pleasure, and pleasure is what James gives us—pleasure in the places he takes us and, above all, the pleasure of his company.

To travel with James in these pages is to take an unhurried vacation with a thoroughly seasoned, supremely cultivated, acutely intelligent companion. Our guide is a curious, engaged observer not only of landscapes and streets and cathedrals but also of paintings and plays and the characteristics—national, social, and individual—of the people we encounter at his side. This is a book to read slowly, the better to absorb its sights and sounds, its insights and reflections—a book of walks, with now and then a ride in a horse-drawn carriage, hooves rattling on cobblestones. Word by word, phrase by phrase, James’s long, purposefully meandering, beautifully detailed sentences will guide you around the curves of a country road, up the steps of a moldering castle, into the quiet of a rural inn or the bustle of a grand hotel. Take the advice of your traveling companion:

To walk in quest of any object that one has more or less tenderly dreamed of—to find your way—to steal upon it softly—to see at last, if it is church or castle, the tower-tops peeping above elms or beeches—to push forward with a rush, and emerge, and pause, and draw that first long breath which is the compromise between so many sensations—this is a pleasure left to the tourist even after the broad glare of photography has dissipated so many of the sweet mysteries of travel.

So pack your bags. Don’t forget your pocket watch, your deerstalker hat or bonnet, and your steamship tickets. Here’s your Baedeker. Bon voyage!

a Henry James, “Mr. Walt Whitman,” Nation 1 (November 16, 1865): 1:625–626.

b Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 599.

c Henry James to Manton Marble, October 10, 1903, in Henry James: Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 348.

d Edel, Henry James, 119–120.

INTRODUCTION: A LITTLE TOUR WITH HENRY JAMES

Michael Anesko

MOST PEOPLE WHO KNOW SOMETHING OF HENRY JAMES might also know that, shortly before his death in 1916, he succumbed to a series of debilitating strokes. In their wake, for weeks he drifted in and out of consciousness, but often still capable of speech. While his faithful amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, remained with him, she dutifully recorded the words he spoke—as she had for years, seated at a Remington typewriter while he dictated the texts of his late fiction and much of his voluminous correspondence. In the latter of these fragmentary transcripts from his subconscious, Henry James transported himself back to France—even assuming the name of Napoléone—and declared his ambition to renovate certain apartments of the Louvre and the Tuileries, a grand project that would possess “a majesty unsurpassed by any work of the kind yet undertaken” in the First Empire.a In the strange meandering of his stricken brain, Henry James was completing a lifetime circuit of travel, for his very earliest memoryb was of sitting in a carriage—at two years of age—waggling his small feet under a flowing robe and taking in “the admirable aspect of the Place and the Colonne Vendôme,”c a monument erected in 1810 to commemorate Napoleon Bonaparte’s crushing victories at Austerlitz and Jena. Paris, of course, would provide the setting for some of the Master’s finest work—The Ambassadors (1903), perhaps most notably—but, almost from the beginning, his long shelf of stories and novels mapped out a crisscrossing itinerary of transatlantic scope, often in tandem with his own peripatetic adventures.

Not long after James’s birth in a house off Washington Square in New York City, his restless father (and namesake) took the family abroad for two years, first to Paris and then to London. The Jameses then spent the next ten years back in the United States, sometimes in Albany—where the paternal grandfather had made a vast fortune—but mostly on the island of Manhattan, whose bustling streets, theaters, and museums afforded the growing boy a prime urban spectacle. Ever wary of our native fixation on business and moneymaking, the elder Henry James still wanted to give his children (as he told Ralph Waldo Emerson) “a better sensuous education” than they were likely to receive in America,d and so he packed the family off again to Europe and distributed his brood, at various times, among schools in Geneva, London, Paris, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Bonn or hired tutors to proctor them at home as they moved from place to place. Suckled thus in cosmopolitanism, young Henry James was never weaned.

At the age of twenty-six, Henry James Jr. (as he was then known) had already begun a literary career by writing short fiction and noticing current books for periodicals such as the North American Review, The Atlantic, and The Nation. At this point, he made his first solo trip abroad, deliberately choosing to follow an itinerary of his own making. His parents and older brother, William, had wanted him to absorb the rigors of German philosophy (and the tortuosities of the German language), but instead, after spending several months in England, France, and Switzerland, young Henry James crossed the Alps on foot and descended into Italy—a country and a culture still foreign to him, as his parents had never ventured there on any of the family’s previous European forays. Voluminous letters back to Cambridge chart the progress of his travels—as well as his burgeoning enthusiasm. Upon reaching the Eternal City, he gushed, “At last—for the first time—I live! It beats everything: it leaves the Rome of your fancy—your education—nowhere.