The Field Marshal, His Lady, and the Exquisite, Meticulous Dreamer: The Friendship of Henry James and Lord and Lady Wolseley Alan G. James A Weekend in Warwickshire—Enter Henry James Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Lord Wolseley, 1897. Courtesy East Sussex County Council. At first sight it may seem curious that Henry James and Garnet Wolseley, Britain’s foremost soldier of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, became good friends. For the basis of the attraction is not self-evident. Edmund Gosse, an intimate of both men, noted the paradox: “It might be supposed that there was little in common between the active soldier and the exquisite and meticulous dreamer.” “On the contrary,” he declared, “their mutual esteem was persistent. . . . Their admiration, each for the other, was continuous” (Aspects 284). Gosse maintained that James made a thousand acquaintances and a dozen durable friendships (Aspects 26). Of his friendships none was more lasting than the one he formed with Wolseley and his wife which spanned nearly four decades. This seemingly unlikely friendship began during James’s first summer in England. In late July 1877, Major General Sir Garnet Joseph Wolseley, “the supreme master of irregular warfare in an expanding empire” (Lehmann 9), and his wife Louisa were spending the weekend at Merevale, Warwickshire home of Stratford and Alice Trevelyan Dugdale, when Henry James arrived on the scene. “Mr. James an American novelist . . . joined our party here,” Wolseley noted in his diary of Saturday, July 28, 1877. James was charmed by Merevale, “a glorious old place,” and by the Wolseleys. “Staying there,” he wrote to his mother, “was Sir Garnet Wolseley, the victor of the Ashantees, a couple of years since [1874], and proprietor of a very charming wife with whom I became quite ‘thick’” (6 Aug. 1877; HJL 2: 128). [End Page 43] How it transpired that James was invited to Merevale is obscure. But it would be a fair guess that George Trevelyan, historian and Liberal party politician, who met James in January 1877, introduced him to his sister and brother-in-law, and that the Dugdales, like other cultivated people who had met James, thought the young (then aged 34) American author, whose company was in demand by London hostesses, would add agreeable literary tone to their houseparty. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Lady Wolseley, c. 1895. Courtesy East Sussex County Council. The Wolseleys evidently enjoyed James’s company, for a few months later, around January 1878, they invited him to dine with military friends at their London home in Portman Square. To his brother William, James admiringly pictured the Wolseleys. “Sir Garnet is a very handsome, well-mannered and fascinating little man [5’7”] with rosy dimples and an eye of steel [he lost the other in the Crimean War]; an excellent specimen of the cultivated British soldier.” Lady Wolseley, he reported “is pretty, and has the air, the manners, the toilets and the taste, of an American” (28 Jan. 1878; HJL 2: 149). To try to delineate James’s relationships with the Wolseleys is to confront difficulties familiar to those who write about his personal connections. As he did with so much of his correspondence, James destroyed virtually every letter the Wolseleys wrote to him; one only from each survives. And since the Wolseleys’ papers shed only limited light on their relationship with James, this picture of a unique friendship is less than full-faceted. Perforce, it is largely, but not exclusively, in James’s mirror that the images of this happy association are reflected. Nonetheless, from James’s letters to the Wolseleys (over 100 at Hove Central Library, Sussex), one can infer much about their friendship. For many of his letters mirror the Wolseleys’ acts of kindness, expressions of their esteem, interest and concern. The Wolseleys were sophisticated, accomplished people of character and personality. Even among illustrious Victorian contemporaries, they could be called eminent. So it should not be surprising that James was attracted to them and they to him. Shared values and interests exerted a stronger pull than obvious differences in background, temperament, and vocation. The dynamic of their “disinterested commerce” was their liking so many...