Pierre A. Walker

Editing the Complete Letters of Henry James

In the late 1980s and early 1990s scholars began to enjoy more access than ever before to Henry James’s letters.1 As a result, two significant principles about Henry James’s letters became clear: 1) that about 75 percent of James’s nearly 10,500 extant letters had not been published; and 2) that the editors of the published letters, as a result of their editing methods, routinely omitted two classes of information from the original letters. In fact, the first principle was a consequence of the second. The first class of omitted information consists of whole letters and thus the information about James’s life contained within them.2 The second class includes meaningful details of James’s style and language that were present as James drafted his own letters but were omitted from the edited letter texts as a result of the editorial method itself. Among these details are the material or graphic features of the letter artifacts that reveal some of James’s habits as a writer and thinker as he wrote his letters. Thus we have designed The Complete Letters of Henry James to overcome these omissions. Two concepts were most important in our design. First, we included the complete sweep of James’s extant letters. Second, we used plain-text editing to refocus attention on the elements of the original documents themselves, not what we imagined James had wanted to write but did not.

Adina: Henry James's Roman Allegory of Power and the Representation of the Foreign

Leonardo Buonomo, in his study of pre-1870 American representations of Italy, argues that American writers of the period were, for many reasons, hard pressed to write about Italy as it really was: “the impression is, at times, that what is depicted by certain American writers is not a country inhabited by real people, with concrete . . . problems and needs. It is rather a gigantic picture, or a stage where a performance is continually held for the sake of a foreign audience” (15). In other words, what these writers represent is not something real but something literary. As part of his far-ranging study of nineteenth-century tourism and travel writing, James Buzard argues (173–77) that guidebooks presented only one side of Continental Europe and therefore excluded any representation of the more prosaic—but certainly very real—parts of everyday European life. Naturally, tourists traveling great distances had no special wish to visit “‘butchers’ stalls, grocers’ shops, [and] pedlars’ booths,’” but at the same time any attempt to experience and represent authentic foreign life would be doomed if it excluded “such mundane presences” (174). The problem of representing the foreign other, then, becomes complex and problematic, and it is because of this, according to Buzard, that so much of Henry James’s writing “describing the desired American behaviour towards Europe . . . would be ambivalent to the core” (223). On the one hand, “‘Europe’ hovers . . . before James as a ‘poetic or fairy precinct’” (196), but on the other, his early travel writing “registered a conflict of perspectives between a ‘visitor’s’ or ‘tourist’s’ viewpoint that gives priority to aesthetic (picturesque, poetical) appearance and an ‘engaged’ perspective that puts a premium on local, pragmatic (prosaic)