ABSTRACT
In James’s review of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend , the Victorian novelist is censured for failing “to become a moralist as well as an artist.” For James, we know, a novel’s “moral sense” stems organically from “the amount of life concerned in producing it” (“The Art of Fiction”), but he also defended, apropos of Scott, what he dubbed “the novel irresponsible,” the pure child of undidactic storytelling. His relation to Dickens is therefore marked by repressed admiration to the nonmoral exceptionality of his precursor’s narrative world. In this chapter, I examine The Ivory Tower as an unfulfilled rewriting of Our Mutual Friend aimed at vindicating the moral victory of personal freedom over an infrastructure of “figures, monstruous, fantastic” (The Ivory Tower).
