Henry James’s The Bostonians, published 125 years ago today, sparks a scandal

The Bostonians proved one of the most troubling of Henry James’s publishing efforts. It first appeared in thirteen installments in The Century magazine (February 1885–February 1886), but by the time of the last installment James’s American publisher, James R. Osgood and Company, had gone bankrupt. Scrambling to recover his losses, James had his English publisher, Macmillan & Co., bring out the first edition in London on February 15, 1886. The American edition appeared a month later.

In his novels of the late 1880s—The Bostonians, The Tragic Muse, and The Princess Casamassima—James turned to political topics for the first time and soon discovered that his readers did not follow. Richard Watson Gilder, publisher of The Century, was reportedly alarmed to find his subscribers falling away. Many found James’s portrait of his two main characters, a Boston feminist and her young protégé, scandalously close to the well-known “Boston marriage” of Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett (although James’s biographers claim he drew more from observing his sister Alice’s relationship with Katharine Loring). Even his brother William chided Henry for creating a “portrait from life” in basing the character of Miss Birdseye on the veteran abolitionist Elizabeth Peabody, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sister-in-law.

Henry found these attacks “harsh and unfair” and protested (perhaps too much) that he had “not seen Miss Peabody in 20 years” and had created Miss Birdseye “from my moral consciousness, like every person I have ever drawn.” Yet he was dismayed at the book’s reception, as he later wrote to William in October 1885:

I fear The Bostonians will be, as a finished work, a fiasco, as not a word, echo or comment on the serial (save your remarks) have come to me (since the row about the first number) from any quarter whatever. The deathly silence seems to indicate that it has fallen flat. I hoped much of it, and shall be disappointed—having got no money for it, I hoped for a little glory.

William reassured his brother of the novel’s success after he was able to read it as a book. His assessment echoed that of many contemporary reviewers:

Never again shall I attack one of your novels in the magazine. . . . The truth [is] that it is superlatively well done, provided one admits that method of doing such a thing at all. Really the datum seems to me to belong rather of the region of fancy, but the treatment to that of the most elaborate realism. One can easily imagine the story cut out and made into a bright, short, sparkling thing of a hundred pages, which would have been an absolute success. But you have worked it up by dint of descriptions and psychologic commentaries into near 500—charmingly done for those who have the leisure and the peculiar mood to enjoy that amount of miniature work—but perilously near to turning away the great majority of readers who crave more matter and less art.

Mark Twain famously declared that “I would rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven than read [The Bostonians].” Later critics developed a keener appreciation. In his essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” Edmund Wilson wrote:

The first hundred pages of The Bostonians, with the arrival of the young Southerner in Boston and his first contacts with the Boston reformers, is, in its way, one of the most masterly things that Henry James ever did.

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• Sarah Orne Jewett, “unsurpassed chronicler and interpreter of women’s lives”
• Moved by a story, Henry James writes to Edith Wharton for the first time
• Henry James as a fictional character
• The Art of the Interview: Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Henry James

Related LOA works: Henry James: Complete Novels; Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 40s (includes “The Ambiguity of Henry James”)

Henry James as a fictional character

Updated below (9/24)

This month’s publication of What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James & Jack the Ripper, by Paula Marantz Cohen, renews our wonder at the enduring appeal of Henry James as a fictional character. James of course would not approve. In 1914 he admonished his nephew:

My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the postmortem exploiter.... I have long thought of launching, by provision in my will, a curse not less explicit than Shakespeare's own on any such as try to move my bones.

Nor would contemporary accounts of how he spoke seem to recommend him. Here is 25-year-old Virginia Woolf describing in a letter her meeting with the 64-year-old James in 1907:

Henry James fixed me with his staring blank eye, it is like a child’s marble, and said, “My dear Virginia, they tell me—they tell me—they tell me—that you—as indeed being your father’s daughter nay your father’s grandchild—the descendant I may say of a century—of a century—of quill pens and ink—ink—ink-pots, yes, yes, yes, they tell me—ahm m m—that you, that you, that you write in short.”

Yet, as Cynthia Ozick wrote in 1986: “Mysteriously, with the passing of each new decade, James becomes more and more our contemporary—it is as if our own sensibilities are only just catching up with his.” One of James’s fictionalizers, David Lodge, thinks this new subgenre could be seen either “as a sign of decadence and exhaustion in contemporary writing, or as a positive and ingenious way of coping with the ‘anxiety of influence’.” J. Russell Perkin concurs and believes that “Henry James is an exemplary hero as man of letters: he combines an oeuvre of Victorian amplitude with a modernist sense of artist vocation.”

Whatever the reason, we count no fewer than seven other novels since 2002 featuring James himself or a James-inspired character:

• Felony: The Private History of “The Aspern Papers” (2002), by Emma Tennant, examines how James’s long and mysterious relationship with the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson affected his writing and considers the possibility that James was responsible for Woolson’s suicide.
• The Master (2004), by Colm Tóibín, opens with the failure of James's play Guy Domville in 1895 and ends with his move to a new home in Rye, England in 1899.
• Author, Author (2004), by David Lodge, imagines Henry James in his deathbed in 1915, reviewing and reliving scenes from his life.
• The first of the three stories in The Pagoda in the Garden (2005), by Wendy Lesser, features Charlotte, a successful novelist similar to Edith Wharton, who visits her revered mentor, the James-like Roderick, at his country estate near Cambridge in 1901.
• The Typewriter’s Tale (2005), by Michael Heyns, recreates the social circle around James and Wharton, through the eyes of his typist Frieda Wroth. (Heyns wrote an article for Prospect Magazine about his difficulties finding a publisher because of the “spate of novels about Henry James.”)
• In Lions at Lamb House (2007), by Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., William James, concerned about his younger brother’s eccentricities, asks Sigmund Freud to visit him in Rye in 1908.
• The whimsical mash-up The James Boys: A Novel Account of Four Desperate Brothers (2008), by Richard Liebmann-Smith, conjures Henry and Williams James aboard a train stopped in Missouri by robbers Frank and Jesse James, who turn out to be their long-lost brothers Rob and Wilky.

And this list omits The Line of Beauty (2004) by Alan Hollinghurst and A Jealous Ghost (2005) by A. N. Wilson, novels in which the main characters are obsessed with Henry James.

Update (9/24): Two readers reminded us of two other works of fiction that feature Henry James as a character (and we belatedly remembered a third, or should we say eleventh?):

• Nicholas Birns (New School professor; The Tropes of Tenth Street): In Henry James’ Midnight Song (1993), by Carol de Chellis Hill, Edith Wharton and Henry James become entangled in a series of murders, one of them at the home of Sigmund Freud, in fin de siècle Vienna.
• Larry Dark (director, The Story Prize): In the title story of Dictation: A Quartet (2004), by Cynthia Ozick, the two secretaries who take dictation from Henry James and Joseph Conrad in London conspire to fool the world with a literary joke.
• Henry James turns in cameo appearances in the opening and closing scenes of Hotel de Dream (2007), by Edmund White, which recreates the last days of writer Stephen Crane in 1900.

Related LOA works: Henry James: Complete Stories; Henry James: Essays on Literature, American Writers & English Writers (includes his essay on Constance Fenimore Woolson)

William James: Not afraid of dying, but annoyed to be doing it so soon

Jonathan Rée appreciates William James for being “just about the only philosopher who didn’t end up as either a pettifogging nit-picker or an overbearing egomaniac with delusions of genius.”

If [William James’s] works have not been as widely read as they deserve, they have been able, from time to time, to strike lights in the lives of others — most notably Ludwig Wittgenstein, who of all the great philosophers was always the hardest to please. Bertrand Russell allowed himself to be thoroughly vexed in 1912, when Wittgenstein kept praising Varieties of Religious Experience and telling him that ‘it does me a lot of good.’

Related LOA works: William James: Writings 1878–1899; William James: Writings 1902–1910