"Singularly like a bad illustration": The Appearance of Henry James's "The Real Thing" in the Pot-Boiler Press

Abstract

When Henry James has the narrator of the short story "The Real Thing" (1892) say he is the kind of artist "who worked in black and white, for magazines, and for storybooks," James is making an implicit joke that readers commonly miss (RT, 309). "The Real Thing" first appeared for British audiences in a semimonthly periodical entitled Black and White, and it appeared accompanied by simple, single-color illustrations, which were known as paintings in "black-and-white." The story's original readers heard someone say he "worked in black and white" while they read an illustrated magazine called Black and White. The narrator's casual remark that Mrs. Monarch looked "singularly like a bad illustration" appeared on the same pages that showed actual illustrations and another comment from later in the story, that "in those days there were few serious workers in black-and-white," subtly make light of both the magazine's title and the artistic medium (RT, 312, 338-39). "The Real Thing," as it has come down to modern readers a century after its composition, then, is only half of the story's original text. The first readers of James's tale found it to be a combination of the words of James's narrator, an artist in black-and-white, and the paintings of an actual artist, who was faced with the task of illustrating James's story in Black and White.