Abstract
In April 1903, Henry James wrote to his brother William of his plans to visit the United States for the first time in twenty years. He was worried about the expense of traveling around the United States for any length of time; nonetheless, he was convinced that he should not make his trip any shorter than six months. “I say 6 months,” Henry explained, “because I want and need the material and impressions that only that time would give me.”1
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Notes
Henry to William James, April 10, 1903, in William James, The Correspondence of William James, 3 vols., ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 3: 231.
William to Henry James, May 3, 1903, in ibid., 3: 232–33.
Henry to William James, May 13, 1903, in ibid., 3: 234.
James traveled to Italy in 1877, 1880, 1881, 1886–87, 1888, 1889, 1892, 1894, 1899, and 1907. Natalia Wright, American Novelists in Italy: The Discoverers—Allston to James (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), 205.
Henry to William James, May 24, 1903, in The Correspondence of William James, 3: 237–38.
David Cressy, “The Vast and Furious Ocean: The Passage to Puritan New England,” New England Quarterly 57 (1984): 511–32.
Peter Stanford, “Steam & Speed, Part I: How Steamships Paddled out of the Shallows into the Ocean World,” Sea History 64 (1992–1993): 14. Some of this discussion appeared previously in “Planned Serendipity: American Travelers and the Transatlantic Voyage in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Social History 38 (2004): 365–83, which I coauthored with Whitney Walton. Quoted with permission from the Journal of Social History.
Ibid.
Melvin Maddocks, The Great Liners, Seafarer Series (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life, 1982), 29.
Ibid., 19.
Francis E. Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, 1840–1973: A History of Shipping and Financial Management (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1975), 40.
Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1975), 1: 322.
Jean L. McKechnie, ed., Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (New York: Publishers Guild, 1967), 1942.
Charles Dickens, American Notes (New York: Modern Library, 1996), 3–23.
For fare prices, see Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, 40, 64, 88. For the rates of inflation and their effect on prices, see Scott Derks, ed., The Value of a Dollar, 1860–1989 (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1994), 2.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrims Progress (New York: Signet Classic, 1980), 27.
Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), 906.
Isabella Gardner to unspecified correspondent, January 7, 1884, in Morris Carter, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 80.
Dennis Miller Bunker to Isabella Stewart Gardner, March 2, 1888, Archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
See Stanford, “Steam and Speed, Part I,” 18. For Henry Adams’s appreciation of these changes, see Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1979), 278.
Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915 (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 156, 161.
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (New York: Penguin, 1986), 118.
George Santayana, “The Philosophy of Travel,” Virginia Quarterly Review 40 (1964): 1–10.
Ibid.
Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 20. Isabella Stewart Gardner saw her trip of 1875 to the Holy Land in Palestine as a voyage that copied the spirit of the ancient Christian pilgrimages. See Carter, Fenway Court, 42–45.
For a discussion of travel in the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, please see the historiographic discussion at the end of this book. See also my article (cowritten with Whitney Walton), “Planned Serendipity: American Travelers and the Transatlantic Voyage in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Social History 38 (2004): 365–83.
Ernest Samuels writes that the “RMS Teutonic bore Adams ‘wobbling’ out to sea on February 3, 1892. He was dismayed to notice the social decline in first class. His two hundred fellow passengers seemed somehow all to be Jews.” Samuels, Henry Adams, 278.
James to Perry, September 29, 1867, in Leon Edel, ed., Henry James: Selected Letters (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1987), 15.
James’s advocacy of mixing many cultures also sounds reminiscent of Randolph Bourne’s “Transnational America,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916): 86–97.
Howells to Charles Eliot Norton, July 14, 1887, in William Dean Howells, Selected Letters, 6 vols., ed. Robert C. Leitz, et al. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979–1983), 3: 191.
Saint Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 2 vols., ed. Homer Saint Gaudens (New York: The Century Company, 1913), 1: 244–46.
William Dean Howells, The Lady of the Aroostook (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1879), 231.
William James to Charles Eliot Norton, May 4, 1902, in Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1920), 2: 166.
Kenneth Lynn, William Dean Howlls: An American Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Javanovich, 1970), 129.
Thomas Sergeant Perry, Selections from the Letter of Thomas Sergeant Perry, ed. Edward Arlington Robinson (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929), 50.
John La Farge, An Artist’s Letters from Japan (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 9, 35.
Ibid., 17.
Ibid., 35, 42.
Ibid., 3.
Henry James, The Ambassadors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 31.
The biographer of the James family, R. W. B. Lewis, writes that Henry Adams reacted to the piece by calling it “pure autobiography.” Lewis adds that Adams “meant that Story as treated was a paradigm for the generation of prewar Bostonians who embarked on their professions—sculptor, statesman, philosopher—in perfect ignorance of the difficulties to be met. But to a degree William Wetmore Story was literally a first run-through of Henry’s autobiography.” R. W. B. Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 525.
Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903), 1: 4.
Ibid., 1: 12.
Ibid., 1: 4.
Ibid., 1: 8.
Ibid., 1: 27–33, 98, 114; see also Henry James, Henry James, Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1987), 50–53, 99–101.
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© 2008 Mark Rennella
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Rennella, M. (2008). The “Poetry of Motion”: The Effect of Travel on the Lives and Thought of the Boston Cosmopolitans. In: The Boston Cosmopolitans. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611214_2
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