“Oh, are you going to speak?” the lady from New York inquired, with her cursory laugh.
Olive had already disappeared; but Ransom heard her answer flung behind her into the room. “I am going to be hissed and hooted and insulted!”
“Olive, Olive!” Verena suddenly shrieked; and her piercing cry might have reached the front. But Ransom had already, by muscular force, wrenched her away, and was hurrying her out, leaving Mrs. Tarrant to heave herself into the arms of Mrs. Burrage, who, he was sure, would, within the minute, loom upon her attractively through her tears, and supply her with a reminiscence, destined to be valuable, of aristocratic support and clever composure. In the outer labyrinth hasty groups, a little scared, were leaving the hall, giving up the game. Ransom, as he went, thrust the hood of Verena’s long cloak over her head, to conceal her face and her identity. It quite prevented recognition, and as they mingled in the issuing crowd he perceived the quick, complete, tremendous silence which, in the hall, had greeted Olive Chancellor’s rush to the front. Every sound instantly dropped, the hush was respectful, the great public waited, and whatever she should say to them (and he thought she might indeed be rather embarrassed), it was not apparent that they were likely to hurl the benches at her. Ransom, palpitating with his victory, felt now a little sorry for her, and was relieved to know that, even when exasperated, a Boston audience is not ungenerous. “Ah, now I am glad!” said Verena, when they reached the street. But though she was glad, he presently discovered that, beneath her hood, she was in tears. It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not the last she was destined to shed.
Endnotes
Chapter I
1 (title page) The Bostonians: The title refers specifically to Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant; James described the book as “a study of one of those friendships between women which are so common in New England.” The novel was influenced by Alphonse Daudet’s L‘Évangéliste (1883) and was James’s attempt to write a “very American tale,” examining both “the situation of women” and the “agitation on their behalf.” It was meant to be a critical satire both of Boston and of the radical groups so prolific in the late nineteenth century, but the novel never reached the popularity James hoped for it, and he omitted it from his New York Edition, a single edition of his collected works. Toward the end of James’s career, Charles Scribner’s Sons offered him the opportunity to publish the twenty-four volumes under the overall title The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Edition (1907-1909), and James took on the major task of establishing his literary legacy, revising the texts extensively and adding prefaces that have since become classic texts on prose aesthetics and the art of the novel. It is therefore the only one of his great novels not reviewed in a preface. However, he said toward the end of his life, “I should have liked to review it for the Edition—it would have come out a much truer and more curious thing (it was meant to be curious from the first)” (reprinted in The Notebooks of Henry James; see “For Further Reading.” See also Geismar, Henry James and the Jacobites).
2 (p. 5) Jacobin: A Jacobin was a sympathizer with the principles of the Jacobins of the French Revolution of 1789, a group that advocated extreme democracy and absolute equality; by about 1800 the term was a nickname for any radical political reformer.
3 (p. 5) nihilist: Nihilism, a revolutionary anarchist movement in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russia, asserted a philosophy of negation, rejecting all forms of government and seeking to overthrow established order, using violence if necessary to do so.
4 (p. 6) Boeotian ignorance: Boeotia was a district in ancient Greece that in 335 B.C. rose against Alexander III and was destroyed. Boeotian has now come to mean “dull” or “stupid.”
5 (p. 7) Washington: Construction for the planned capital of Washington, D.C. (originally designed by Pierre L’Enfant) began in 1793, but the city remained a fairly isolated area. During the American Civil War (1861-1865), Washington was a major source of operations for the Union side, and its population nearly doubled with the influx of tens of thousands of freed slaves, forever changing the city’s racial makeup.
Chapter II
1 (p. 11) had plunged the country into blood and tears: The American Civil War (1861-1865) began with the secession of eleven southern states from the Union. The divide was over differing interpretations of the U.S. Constitution: the southern, or Confederate, states fought for their states’ rights, which would include, among other issues, a lower tariff for the exportation of their cotton crop to Europe and the continuation of slavery. The North, however, favored the federal expansion of powers: the development of railroads and canals, high tariffs for the protection of northern manufacturers, free farming in the frontier states (which threatened the old slave-holding plantation owners in the South), and, most importantly, the abolition of slavery. Though the North triumphed, the casualties were disastrous, and close to 1 million soldiers from the North and South combined were injured or killed. Olive would have seen Basil as part of the movement that had caused the deaths of her two brothers. Two of James’s own brothers fought in the war.
2 (p. 12) Charles Street: Olive Chancellor lives on Charles Street in Beacon Hill, on a property that overlooks the Back Bay across the Charles River. She is well-to-do but not one of the very wealthy who were then building enormous homes in the Back Bay neighborhood (see chapter III, note 1).
Chapter III
1 (p. 16) Back Bay: The Back Bay was created by a dam that ran from Boston’s Beacon Street to the town of Brookline and created a marshy area at the mouth of the Charles River. In the years 1851-1882 it was filled in and developed with boulevards and large homes built by the wealthy.
2 (p. 17) Bohemianism: A bohemian is a gypsy of society—that is, a person, such as an artist or writer, who leads a vagabond or unconventional life outside the accepted norms of a society to which he is otherwise fit to belong.
3 (p. 18) Miss Birdseye: (See Introduction.) Miss Birdseye might have been based on Elizabeth Peabody (1804-1894), an American Transcendentalist and social reformer devoted to education. She was the sister-in-law of Horace Mann (1796-1859) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), and she helped Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) establish his Transcendentalist Temple School in Boston. Miss Birdseye’s resemblance to Miss Peabody, particularly “in her displaced spectacles” (p. 32), outraged readers; James denied the comparison and was dismayed by it. (See Edel, Henry James: 1882-1895, The Middle Years.)
4 (p. 19) Abolitionists: Abolitionism began in the United States during the American Revolution in the 1780s to end the institution of slavery and the slave trade. In 1833 William Lord Garrison founded the American Anti-Slavery Society, which called for the immediate outlawing of slaves. Slavery was finally abolished after the Civil War with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
5 (p. 20) seance: Seances were very popular in the nineteenth century, and both James’s father and his brother William were practitioners (see Introduction). Seance comes from the French word for “meeting,” but in occultism, such a meeting is conducted by a medium who works to communicate with spirits of the dead.
Chapter IV
1 (p. 24) Mary J. Prance: Dr. Prance resembles Katharine Peabody Loring, the longtime companion and caretaker of James’s invalid sister, Alice. Loring cared for Alice during the writing of The Bostonians. (See Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative.)
2 (p. 25) Short-Skirts League: The name of this group is reminiscent of Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818-1894), a social reformer and lecturer who defended pantaloons—loose-fitting trousers, usually above the ankle in length—as a way of dress for women (she wore hers under a short skirt). Such garments came to be called “bloomers.”
3 (p. 25) phalansteries: In a scheme devised by Charles Fourier (1772-1832) for the reorganization of society (see Introduction), a phalanstery (from the French phalanstère) was a self-contained structure or group of structures occupied by a cooperat
ive social community known as a phalanx; each phalanx consisted of about 1,800 persons who lived together as one family and held property in common.
4 (p. 28) take the flowing bowl from every man: This is a reference to the progressive temperance movements and religious revivalism of the nineteenth century (often abolitionist groups) that lobbied for the moderation or complete prohibition of alcohol consumption. In 1846 temperance campaigner Neal Dow helped lead the nation’s first prohibition law through the Maine Legislature. Between 1846 and 1855, thirteen states passed their own versions of Maine’s prohibition law, and in 1874 the influential Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was founded in Cleveland, Ohio. Prohibition became part of federal law after World War I, with the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919.
5 (p. 28) Amariah: Amariah was the name James originally intended to give to Verena’s father, Selah Tarrant (see The Notebooks of Henry James, p. 67).
6 (p. 29) a mesmeric healer: Mesmerism was a therapeutic system popularized by German physician F. A. Mesmer (1733-1815); Mesmer believed that magnets had curative properties for pain. Significant particularly to the nineteenth-century Spiritualists was his treatment that involved inducing a hypnotic state in a patient through a force Mesmer called “animal magnetism,” which he believed to be an actual substance in the body and that he claimed could be channeled and transmitted between people. Though patients with a variety of self-proclaimed ailments flocked to his healing sessions—and he did seem to have incredible public success—a scientific committee established in 1784 concluded that Mesmer’s claims could not be substantiated. Nonetheless, his techniques appealed to a broad swath of the public, prompting numerous other late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century practitioners to follow his lead, work that led to the modern use of hypnosis. Hypnosis, though similar in its trancelike qualities, induces a state of consciousness in which a person purportedly loses the power of voluntary action and responds to suggestion or direction in order to access suppressed memories or to correct certain behaviors.
Chapter V
1 (p. 31) Roxbury: Roxbury, a southern residential section of Boston, was at the time of the novel considered a different city. West Roxbury was the site of the Fourier-inspired Brook Farm utopian communal living experiment (see chapter IV, note 3).
Chapter VI
1 (p. 38) cotton-States: The Confederate states (see chapter II, note 1) were originally South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, and eventually included Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Missouri and Kentucky were represented, but they never officially seceded.
Chapter VII
1 (p. 48) “I’ve got no atmosphere; there’s very little of the Indian summer about me!”: By atmosphere, Mrs. Farrinder and Verena mean an overall or dominant effect of a work of art or emotional appeal. Thus, Mrs. Farrinder is using “Indian summer” metaphorically, as a period of flourish toward the end of one’s life.
2 (p. 50) a company of mountebanks: A mountebank is a charlatan, a boastful and unscrupulous person who, in this case, hawks quack medicines to potential customers by enticing them with various entertainments.
Chapter VIII
1 (p. 53) the detested carpet-bagger: The derogatory term carpetbagger (literally, one who carries all his or her belongings in a bag made of carpet) refers to a northerner immigrating to the southern states after the American Civil War (1861-1865) seeking private gain, political or otherwise, from the results of the North/South conflict.
2 (p. 53) the horrible period of reconstruction: The reconstruction period (1865-1877) following the American Civil War was marked by political corruption and the North’s essential desertion of the South’s thousands of liberated slaves, who were still terribly oppressed as they struggled to develop working skills for their new lives.
Chapter IX
1 (p. 63) Cambridge: Cambridge is in Middlesex County, in eastern Massachusetts, on the north bank of the Charles River opposite Boston. It was organized as a town in 1636, when it became the site of Harvard College. The town was named for Cambridge, England, in 1638. The James family moved there at the end of the Civil War. Olive would have walked there easily via the West Boston (now Longfellow) Bridge
Chapter X
1 (p. 65) vendor of lead-pencils: After the War of 1812, an embargo prevented the importation of pencils from Europe, and Americans first began manufacturing their own. In 1821 Charles Dunbar (brother-in-law of Henry David Thoreau) discovered a deposit of plumbago, or graphite (the mineral actually used as the core of “lead” pencils), in New England. As a result, the Thoreau Pencil Company, named after Henry’s father, John, came to be known as the maker of the finest pencils in America. Henry himself worked for the company, developing pencils (mixing graphite with clay as the Germans had done) and machinery for his father.
2 (p. 65) Cayuga community: This Cayuga community is an allusion to those radical religious groups that first began within the Anglican Communion in the nineteenth century. It is also similar to the utopian Oneida Community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886) in New York.
3 (p. 65) spiritual picnics and vegetarian camp-meetings: Camp meetings were religious revival gatherings that were especially popular in America during the nineteenth century with various Protestant denominations. As many as 10,000 attendees camped in forest areas and participated in constant three- to four-day church sessions, which often emphasized sudden conversion experiences and thus earned a wild reputation. Many of these groups advocated vegetarianism. Although vegetarianism goes back to ancient times, it took on tremendous force as a progressive moral and political movement in the nineteenth century, propelled by a belief in the equality of all living beings and that to eat meat was barbarous. In the United States, William Metcalfe, an English clergyman and physician, established a vegetarian church in Philadelphia in 1817 and was a founder of the American Vegetarian Society in 1850. In 1893 a vegetarian congress took place at the World’s Fair in Chicago, boasting members such as Bronson Alcott, Upton Sinclair, and George Bernard Shaw.
Chapter XI
1 (p. 71) lady-editors of newspapers advocating new religions: This is likely a direct reference to Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), who founded Christian Science in 1879, the monthly Christian Science Journal in 1883, the weekly Christian Science Sentinel in 1898, and the Christian Science Monitor in 1908. However, James is also making a wider gesture toward the proliferation of religions in the late nineteenth century, many of which emerged from millennial fear and Adventism and the apocalyptic prophecies of William Miller (who predicted Christ’s return in the year 1844), loosely including Christian Science and Joseph Smith’s Mormonism, but even more specifically the religion founded by Ellen G. White (1827-1915), Seventh-Day Adventism (formally incorporated in 1863). White herself was a health advocate (her vegetarian beliefs were the origin for modern-day cereal) and an active abolitionist before the Civil War.
2 (p. 77) marriage-tie: In the spirit of Charles Fourier, free love was a cause for certain radical movements that advocated women’s rights (including suffrage) and saw marriage as restrictive. One of its promoters, Victoria Woodhull, was the first woman to run for president (1872).
3 (p. 78) Joan of Arc: Joan of Arc (1412?-1431) was a peasant girl who saved France from English domination when she was only seventeen years old. Directed by heavenly visions of Saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret, she dressed as a boy and rode to Chinon to clear the way for the coronation of the French Dauphin. Equipped with a shield and a banner, Joan planned the retrieval of Orléans and inspired the French army to break the English siege of that city. They were successful, and the Dauphin was crowned as King Charles VII. Joan continued fighting for France but was eventually captured and sold to the English, who harassed and tortured her. French clerics who supported the English tried her for witchcraft and heresy—the latter because she claimed direct inspiration from God, in what they saw as a rejection of church hierarchy. At the
end of the trial she recanted but was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment; subsequently she retracted her statement and was burned alive as a relapsed heretic. Joan was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1920.
4 (p. 79) “Faust”: Written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Faust is the story of a man who, in the pursuit of knowledge, makes a pact with Mephistopheles, trading his soul for ultimate experience.