ABSTRACT
These passages from James (1843–1916) were written later than the period to which this anthology has been confined. My excuse for including them—apart from the eminence of his name, the charm of his writing, and the felicity (as an envoi to this book) of the final sentence quoted here—must be that they come from his autobiographies, and recall responses from the 1850s and 1860s. Notable in (a) is the admixture, in James’s (as in other readers’) imaginative apprehension of Dickens, of memories of dramatizations and the original illustrations; elsewhere, for instance, he recalls one of his teachers as ‘remaining with me a picture of somebody in Dickens, one of the Phiz if not the Cruikshank pictures’ (Autobiography, ed. Frederick W. Dupee (1956), 117). (b) is a useful reminder of the effect that serialization had, in sophisticated circles as well as among more common readers (‘I…could take the general civilized participation in the process for a sort of basking in the light of distinction’, ibid., 252, referring to ‘the prolonged “coming-out” of The Newcomes’, 1853–5). Inevitably, when establishing his own stand as a fiction-writer, James reacted strongly against Dickens’s methods (see No. 131), but his later criticism has many generous references to him. In 1880, he declined to write the ‘English Men of Letters’ volume on Dickens, preferring to cherish his memories rather than to overhaul them critically (see (a)). See Ford, ch. xi, and H. Blair Rouse, ‘Dickens and Henry James,’ Nineteenth-Century Fiction, v (1950), 151–7.
