A Textual Note to John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman

Abstract

THE recent death of John Fowles brought to my mind a somewhat amusing story he told me in a correspondence we had back in 1987/8. At the time I was working on The French Lieutenant's Woman for York Notes and using the First English Edition of the novel, published by Jonathan Cape (1969). In Chapter 59 I came across a reference that completely puzzled me. It is at the point in the story when Charles goes to America, in the vain hope of finding Sarah there. We are told that when Charles arrived in Boston he was made welcome: … he had shaken hands with a senator, no less; and with the wrinkled claw of one even greater, if less hectoringly loquacious—old Nathaniel Lodge, who had heard the cannon on Bunker Hill from his nurse's room in Beacon Street. An even greater still … [At this point he goes on to talk about Henry James].