Abstract
This article reassesses Henry James’s attitude to the historical novels of Walter Scott in light of James’s observation, made early on in the First World War, that the current global situation “makes Walter Scott, him only, readable again”. Scott’s novels were strongly associated for James with young readers and a juvenile, escapist mode of reading; and yet close attention to James’s comments on Scott in his criticism, notebooks and correspondence, and examination of a recurring image of children as readers and listeners to oral stories in the work of both authors, indicate that James engaged with Scott’s presentation of the historical and personal past more extensively and in more complex ways than have hitherto been suspected. Scott’s example as a novelist and editor notably informs James’s practice in several late works: the family memoir Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), the New York Edition of his novels and tales (1907–1909), and the unfinished, posthumously published novel The Sense of the Past (1917).
Highlights
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In a letter to Edith Wharton dated 9 November 1914 Henry James wrote of the difficulty he found in getting “back to work” on fictional composition in the early months of the First
Edition and James’s in the New York Edition, once more touching on the care of children and returning us to a now-familiar narrative scene, can be found in the reason Scott gives in the Advertisement to the Magnum Opus Edition for not making substantial narrative revisions to his novels, not attempting “to alter the tenor of the stories, the character of the actors, or the spirit of the dialogue”: In the most improbable fiction, the reader still desires some air of vraisemblance, and does not relish that the incidents of a tale familiar to him should be altered to suit the taste of critics, or the caprice of the author himself
Summary
By the time James came to write Notes of a Son and Brother, Scott’s meaning for him was shaped in part by his exemplary status as a collecting, republishing, revising and preface-writing author, and by James’s own recent, prolonged and laborious experience of assembling a collected edition of his own works: the 24-volume New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry
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