In his Introduction Leon Edel writes: "British royalty
dazzled America--it does still--but the British class structure and British
manners were viewed with a certain distance and chill. It was one way in which
the children of New England asserted their independence." Henry was a
child of New England. Does he view British class and manners with enough
distance and chill?
It is important to remember that Henry James’s grandfather
came from Ireland and his father Henry James’s senior spent time in England
before the Civil War. The James’s family roots were deeply imbedded in the soil
and British history went back over a thousand years. British royalty could be
traced to “Egbert (Ecgherht) was the first monarch to establish a stable and
extensive rule over all of Anglo-Saxon England in 827 A.D.”[1]
James would have undoubtedly learned much about English and European history
from his parents’s lengthy trips to Europe, his tutors, and his education in
private schools where he learned several languages.
With this travel background and education, he wrote several short stories which
were published. In 1869, he again travelled to England where he met Charles
Darwin and George Eliot. American history was relatively recent and it is
understandable that as the United States went through the wrenching experience
of challenging slavery, fighting the Civil War, recovering from the war during
Reconstruction, and focusing on material expansion in the Gilded Age, materials
for a young writer searching for his own identity were more likely to be found in
England and Europe. He would be
attracted to the greater artistic freedom and scientific awareness that was
capturing the attention of the British social and intellectual classes.
His view of British class and manners may have been more
focused on how they could help in the development of the characters for his
stories and he would have the opportunity to search out, meet, and discuss
literary ideas with some of the established writers, like Turgenev, Flaubert, and
Zola who had already explored character development.
[1]
Ben Johnson, “Kings and Queens of England & Britain”, http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/KingsQueensofBritain
That's right, he was soaking up characters and scenes for literary purposes, and literature was his life. I think one reason Henry is so esteemed by so many contemporary writers is due to that intense devotion to craft, and to the implicit permission it grants imaginative thinkers to live in their creative imaginations. When Henry encouraged young writers to "live all you can," I think that must be a big part of what he meant. Otherwise, the statement comes off as a "do as I say, not as I do"-and that, any parent can tell you, never works.
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