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The Princess Casamassima
Mark Twain once famously said "there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past and can't be restored." Well, over recent years, The British Library, working with Microsoft has embarked on an ambitious programme to digitise its collection of 19th century books. There are now 65,000 titles available (that's an incredible 25 million pages) of material ranging from works by famous names such as Dickens, Trollope and Hardy as well as many forgotten literary gems , all of which can now be printed on demand and purchased right here on Amazon. Further information on The British Library and its digitisation programme can be found on The British Library website.
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First published October 1, 1885
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About the author
Henry James
4,124Ìýbooks3,779ÌýfollowersHenry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.
His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".
James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.
His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".
James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."
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July 21, 2019How do you choose what to read next? Based on a glowing review you've read? Or because the book featured on a prize list perhaps? Because you've always wanted to read it or because you've always felt you should read it? Do you choose with excitement and enthusiasm or is it a stressful process? Are there stacks of books calling for your attention from different sources, shops, libraries, advanced review copy providers? And if you are an ebook person who has lists of titles you can easily call up, how do you choose among them? Do you just pick the last one you added, the most recent fascination? Do you worry about the ones that are destined to move down the list, get buried in the pile, pass their 'ideal moment' date? Does the process of choosing what to read next make you anxious?
I'm a person who always has a lot of books lying about waiting to be read so I sometimes find the choice of what to read quite difficult. Unless of course the last book I read pointed very strongly towards another. When that happens I'm always grateful as it solves my dilemma in the short term and can lead to an unexpected discovery, sometimes a string of unexpected discoveries which I wouldn't have made otherwise. Yet I'm always aware of the alternative path I might have taken if I'd chosen one book instead of another in the first place. Such are the anxieties of the obsessive reader.
However, for the last couple of months, choosing the next book to read has been rendered completely stress free because I've been reading book after book by Henry James, and more or less in the order I've been acquiring them. When I'm halfway through the last one, I get another, and so on, the choosing getting even simpler as less titles remain to be read, resulting in the current string of stress-free discoveries getting longer and longer.
But what was it that triggered the choice of the massively unpopular Henry James in the first place, and what other potential reading path have I missed by sticking perversely with this one?
The answer to that question leads to the kind of coincidence that is a common occurrence in my reading life. Last year I spent months reading books by authors who have been dead for a long time so in the autumn I decided for a change to read some books by authors who are still living. I bought a bunch of recent titles by Ian McEwan, Deborah Levy, Graeme Macrae Burnet, David Szalay, Robert Seethaler, and Mathew Kneale to start me off on the contemporary path. Barely half way through that list, I stumbled on by Henry James while packing books for a house move and I began reading it. The satisfaction I got from HJ's book reminded me of what I'd been missing in the books I'd been reading.
However, I went back to the contemporary authors when I'd finished the James book and began to read David Szalay's . In the first chapter I discovered a character who was reading 'The Ambassadors' and not enjoying it much, and I soon discovered that I was not really enjoying the book that character found himself in!
That odd coincidence caused me to rethink my foray into contemporary writers; why was I forcing myself to read them? In a democratic poll, they would all earn lots of votes I'm certain, but my personal reading taste leans towards the idiosyncratic rather than towards the democratic. When I'd finished the six, I had issues with five of them - not a good return for my investment. And note that, like many people on this reading site, when I use the word investment, I'm thinking of Time and Energy rather than Money. The money spent was the equivalent of a couple of coffees out per week but the weeks I spent reading those books I can't write off so easily. The obvious solution was to abandon the contemporary path and go back to what had given me most satisfaction. I bought another Henry James, and another, and another, and here I am on the fifteenth and enjoying myself immensely. My anxiety over what to read next has had a huge break.
All of this is rather a tangent to .
But it's right on target too because the Princess herself is a tangent to the book that is named after her, just as she is a tangential character in the previous Henry James book I read, .
On the other hand, like the process that has lead me to review this book, the idiosyncratic Princess can also be seen as central to the book she encapsulates in that she existed without it but it couldn't exist without her. If that seems incongruous and perverse, it only adds to the relevance of this non-review*. The Princess is incongruous and perverse, just as my decision to renege on following the path of contemporary fiction in favour of resurrecting everything Henry James ever wrote can be seen as out of step with the times and more than a little unreasonable. Henry James created no other character quite like the Princess Casamassima. She is a fitting reward for choosing the reading path I'm currently following. We deserve each other.
*I dreamt I wrote a review of this book the other night. It was a very complicated review full of what I thought (in my dream) were extraordinary insights (I was a little bowled over by them when I woke up too!) But the dream review was based on the book having a radically different ending to the one that was eventually revealed in the final pages. So even if I could remember the review word for word (I feel so robbed that I can't, so disposessed), I couldn't really use it.
A few stray notions stayed with me however: democracy, resurrection, perversity, idiosyncrasy, the radical, the dispossessed.
I tried to work them into this non-review for better or for worse...
I'm a person who always has a lot of books lying about waiting to be read so I sometimes find the choice of what to read quite difficult. Unless of course the last book I read pointed very strongly towards another. When that happens I'm always grateful as it solves my dilemma in the short term and can lead to an unexpected discovery, sometimes a string of unexpected discoveries which I wouldn't have made otherwise. Yet I'm always aware of the alternative path I might have taken if I'd chosen one book instead of another in the first place. Such are the anxieties of the obsessive reader.
However, for the last couple of months, choosing the next book to read has been rendered completely stress free because I've been reading book after book by Henry James, and more or less in the order I've been acquiring them. When I'm halfway through the last one, I get another, and so on, the choosing getting even simpler as less titles remain to be read, resulting in the current string of stress-free discoveries getting longer and longer.
But what was it that triggered the choice of the massively unpopular Henry James in the first place, and what other potential reading path have I missed by sticking perversely with this one?
The answer to that question leads to the kind of coincidence that is a common occurrence in my reading life. Last year I spent months reading books by authors who have been dead for a long time so in the autumn I decided for a change to read some books by authors who are still living. I bought a bunch of recent titles by Ian McEwan, Deborah Levy, Graeme Macrae Burnet, David Szalay, Robert Seethaler, and Mathew Kneale to start me off on the contemporary path. Barely half way through that list, I stumbled on by Henry James while packing books for a house move and I began reading it. The satisfaction I got from HJ's book reminded me of what I'd been missing in the books I'd been reading.
However, I went back to the contemporary authors when I'd finished the James book and began to read David Szalay's . In the first chapter I discovered a character who was reading 'The Ambassadors' and not enjoying it much, and I soon discovered that I was not really enjoying the book that character found himself in!
That odd coincidence caused me to rethink my foray into contemporary writers; why was I forcing myself to read them? In a democratic poll, they would all earn lots of votes I'm certain, but my personal reading taste leans towards the idiosyncratic rather than towards the democratic. When I'd finished the six, I had issues with five of them - not a good return for my investment. And note that, like many people on this reading site, when I use the word investment, I'm thinking of Time and Energy rather than Money. The money spent was the equivalent of a couple of coffees out per week but the weeks I spent reading those books I can't write off so easily. The obvious solution was to abandon the contemporary path and go back to what had given me most satisfaction. I bought another Henry James, and another, and another, and here I am on the fifteenth and enjoying myself immensely. My anxiety over what to read next has had a huge break.
All of this is rather a tangent to .
But it's right on target too because the Princess herself is a tangent to the book that is named after her, just as she is a tangential character in the previous Henry James book I read, .
On the other hand, like the process that has lead me to review this book, the idiosyncratic Princess can also be seen as central to the book she encapsulates in that she existed without it but it couldn't exist without her. If that seems incongruous and perverse, it only adds to the relevance of this non-review*. The Princess is incongruous and perverse, just as my decision to renege on following the path of contemporary fiction in favour of resurrecting everything Henry James ever wrote can be seen as out of step with the times and more than a little unreasonable. Henry James created no other character quite like the Princess Casamassima. She is a fitting reward for choosing the reading path I'm currently following. We deserve each other.
*I dreamt I wrote a review of this book the other night. It was a very complicated review full of what I thought (in my dream) were extraordinary insights (I was a little bowled over by them when I woke up too!) But the dream review was based on the book having a radically different ending to the one that was eventually revealed in the final pages. So even if I could remember the review word for word (I feel so robbed that I can't, so disposessed), I couldn't really use it.
A few stray notions stayed with me however: democracy, resurrection, perversity, idiosyncrasy, the radical, the dispossessed.
I tried to work them into this non-review for better or for worse...
January 5, 2020
When did the American neurotic paranoia about left-wing politics and an ill-defined 'socialism' begin? Earlier than we might think according to this novel which James was working on in the 1880s. Known rather simplistically as James' political novel, this deals awkwardly with revolutionary politics and anarchism/communism/socialism (because they're undifferentiated in this book and similar narratives) in London, and even clunkily includes a terrorist assassination plot - the last thing we'd expect from James!
And, to be frank, it doesn't work. A gaping hole exists at the heart where we'd expect political ideology to sit: instead, these revolutionary anarchists are shown to be shambling idiots, for the most part, and even the (mostly foreign, natch) arch conspirators never discuss either their intellectual ideas or the required outcome of their plots. At a time when Marx was still alive in London, when there was a ferment of radical ideas and working men's clubs, when artisan unions were providing education for their members and agitating for suffrage (many working men didn't have the vote), when poverty, disease and starvation afflicted a large proportion of the population, when workers' rights were being fought for (Hyacinth, as a book-binder has no paid holidays), none of this is ever discussed by our so-called revolutionaries. They are cartoonish figures of merely wanton destruction, a kind of frightening display of anarchy for its own sake, rather than being harnessed to social developments, many of which we have benefited from and now take for granted as rights.
James shows his socialist conspirators as merely being about a kind of nihilist destruction, negative, aimless and brutal. And if they're not that, then there's the political dilettante-ism of the Princess herself who finds revolution so much less boring than other social engagements in her 50-bedroom houses... The questions of social injustice and economic inequality are shown to be resolved in this book by the selfless voluntary charity of the wealthy (Lady Aurora) and the determined refusal to acknowledge class differentiation and legitimate suffering by the supremely irritating Rose Muniment, who lies in bed with her unusable legs and spine and claims doggedly that she's happy as she is... and that if she's happy, then no-one else can have anything of which to complain. Ha, all social problems solved!
Hyacinth Robinson himself is a small though interesting figure, almost impotent politically and sexually in the way he is superseded by other men. The illegitimate son of a French communard, he's drawn unthinkingly into a radical group by a desire for paternal inheritance as well as a kind of homosocial hero-worship for Paul Muniment. His real love, so Jamesian, is aesthetic beauty - and his final rejection of politics is because all those nasty socialists want to destroy all the beauty in the world!
I'm sort of making this sound sillier than it is because the political overlay irritated me for being so underwritten and reactionary. It's perfectly possible to pretty much ignore the political content as politics and simply see it as a plot device to expose and explore Hyacinth's own self-division and conscience. That said, the introduction to the Penguin edition I read documents real acts of terrorism in London at the time James was thinking about this book: usually bombings by Irish nationalists.
The writing is psychologically dense but linguistically less so than James' later books, and there are interesting plays on mythic/fairy tale arcs where a beautiful woman can be both quest-prize and obstacle. It's interesting, too, to see James experimenting with subject matter: there are certainly shades of Dickens, Balzac and Zola here, with their interests in social conditions and inheritance, and I wondered if James had read Dostoevsky's . It's a striking (ha!) contrast, too, to Elisabeth Gaskell's 'industrial' novels that offer more sympathetic approaches to the politics of poverty, economic inequality and worker's rights.
So this is probably my least favourite James novel to date: his uninterrogated prejudices against, even terror of, social progress impede and stultify the book leaving it politically one-sided and unrepentantly reactionary.
And, to be frank, it doesn't work. A gaping hole exists at the heart where we'd expect political ideology to sit: instead, these revolutionary anarchists are shown to be shambling idiots, for the most part, and even the (mostly foreign, natch) arch conspirators never discuss either their intellectual ideas or the required outcome of their plots. At a time when Marx was still alive in London, when there was a ferment of radical ideas and working men's clubs, when artisan unions were providing education for their members and agitating for suffrage (many working men didn't have the vote), when poverty, disease and starvation afflicted a large proportion of the population, when workers' rights were being fought for (Hyacinth, as a book-binder has no paid holidays), none of this is ever discussed by our so-called revolutionaries. They are cartoonish figures of merely wanton destruction, a kind of frightening display of anarchy for its own sake, rather than being harnessed to social developments, many of which we have benefited from and now take for granted as rights.
James shows his socialist conspirators as merely being about a kind of nihilist destruction, negative, aimless and brutal. And if they're not that, then there's the political dilettante-ism of the Princess herself who finds revolution so much less boring than other social engagements in her 50-bedroom houses... The questions of social injustice and economic inequality are shown to be resolved in this book by the selfless voluntary charity of the wealthy (Lady Aurora) and the determined refusal to acknowledge class differentiation and legitimate suffering by the supremely irritating Rose Muniment, who lies in bed with her unusable legs and spine and claims doggedly that she's happy as she is... and that if she's happy, then no-one else can have anything of which to complain. Ha, all social problems solved!
Hyacinth Robinson himself is a small though interesting figure, almost impotent politically and sexually in the way he is superseded by other men. The illegitimate son of a French communard, he's drawn unthinkingly into a radical group by a desire for paternal inheritance as well as a kind of homosocial hero-worship for Paul Muniment. His real love, so Jamesian, is aesthetic beauty - and his final rejection of politics is because all those nasty socialists want to destroy all the beauty in the world!
I'm sort of making this sound sillier than it is because the political overlay irritated me for being so underwritten and reactionary. It's perfectly possible to pretty much ignore the political content as politics and simply see it as a plot device to expose and explore Hyacinth's own self-division and conscience. That said, the introduction to the Penguin edition I read documents real acts of terrorism in London at the time James was thinking about this book: usually bombings by Irish nationalists.
The writing is psychologically dense but linguistically less so than James' later books, and there are interesting plays on mythic/fairy tale arcs where a beautiful woman can be both quest-prize and obstacle. It's interesting, too, to see James experimenting with subject matter: there are certainly shades of Dickens, Balzac and Zola here, with their interests in social conditions and inheritance, and I wondered if James had read Dostoevsky's . It's a striking (ha!) contrast, too, to Elisabeth Gaskell's 'industrial' novels that offer more sympathetic approaches to the politics of poverty, economic inequality and worker's rights.
So this is probably my least favourite James novel to date: his uninterrogated prejudices against, even terror of, social progress impede and stultify the book leaving it politically one-sided and unrepentantly reactionary.
October 22, 2016
I chose this (early in my acquaintance with James) for the plot: Henry James does radical London. I stayed for the style�
I understand this is his ‘middle period�, without the tortuosity of his late; still with traits you either like or don’t. For me it was word-perfect � only a suspicion of waffling three-quarters through. The thing I most often dispense with in a book is description of places and objects; I read that James didn’t believe in physical description (other than persons) for its own sake, not unless it conveys a mood of his novel or its inhabitants. For me, there was not a word wasted in his gorgeous descriptions of a gloomy London; and there was no extraneous detail to clutter you as you fleet through the pages. Wordy? This author is not wordy. He spends his words on inwardness and conversations, and since I believe this is where words should be spent, I read smoothly and absorbed. He has pretty juxtapositions of words, too; sentences that make me know I have to come back and read this again. Anyway, I doubt he can do a plot I’m going to be as intrigued by.
It’s a political thriller, and has been accused of an attempt to be sensational. But revolutionary terrorism was an issue of the day, and I am so glad James decided to turn his hand to it. The ‘reluctant revolutionary� type I know from Russian fiction, and one introduction tells me he took a real-life example in a volunteer assassin who had qualms and botched his job.
Hyacinth is torn between a love of the fine things that an unfair society creates, and sympathy for the misery of the bulk of London’s people. Perhaps these were the terms then. It seems to Hyacinth (and probably to James) that if we blow up the aristocracy we’ll be left with the ugly and vulgar. But I do not mean his working-class heroes are ugly or vulgar or stupid; they are rather fine, with a mix of the humane and the inhumanely-committed. In what tugs Hyacinth to the noble houses, this novel gave me a new insight into aristocracy-appreciation. But not because they have better people; they don’t, in the novel. Hyacinth’s attachment is about things, the artistry. His naïve ideas about noble people are shot through, and he never becomes a turncoat from his cause, he just� becomes confused.
The novel has two slumming noblewomen, who identify themselves with the people’s cause. I imagine James was more at home in writing them (though he does a fair job at everyone, if you ask me). One is awkward, endearing, genuinely selfless; the other, the princess of the title, at different times comes across as a tourist in search of sensation, a spy afraid for her class, or a real and dangerous revolutionary. It is James� indirectness not to solve what she is � as he doesn’t solve Hyacinth’s divided loyalties.
I liked Hyacinth, the more as we go on, and his puzzles, although the terms have changed (in that the non-aristocratic world is creative, too), were meaningful to me. I liked the intelligent women, and the unsatirised eccentricity of cast like Mr Vetch and the French communist couple. I enjoy how James conceals major scenes, so that we piece them in by gradual stages after the fact, the more effectively for our imaginations. I enjoy how conversations go nowhere or speeches reach no certain conclusion, as in life.
Lastly, I want to note that James� queer sensibilities (rampant, for instance, in ‘The Turn of the Screw�) are to be found here. I can’t be more explicit, I just decided along the way this a queer-friendly text.
I understand this is his ‘middle period�, without the tortuosity of his late; still with traits you either like or don’t. For me it was word-perfect � only a suspicion of waffling three-quarters through. The thing I most often dispense with in a book is description of places and objects; I read that James didn’t believe in physical description (other than persons) for its own sake, not unless it conveys a mood of his novel or its inhabitants. For me, there was not a word wasted in his gorgeous descriptions of a gloomy London; and there was no extraneous detail to clutter you as you fleet through the pages. Wordy? This author is not wordy. He spends his words on inwardness and conversations, and since I believe this is where words should be spent, I read smoothly and absorbed. He has pretty juxtapositions of words, too; sentences that make me know I have to come back and read this again. Anyway, I doubt he can do a plot I’m going to be as intrigued by.
It’s a political thriller, and has been accused of an attempt to be sensational. But revolutionary terrorism was an issue of the day, and I am so glad James decided to turn his hand to it. The ‘reluctant revolutionary� type I know from Russian fiction, and one introduction tells me he took a real-life example in a volunteer assassin who had qualms and botched his job.
Hyacinth is torn between a love of the fine things that an unfair society creates, and sympathy for the misery of the bulk of London’s people. Perhaps these were the terms then. It seems to Hyacinth (and probably to James) that if we blow up the aristocracy we’ll be left with the ugly and vulgar. But I do not mean his working-class heroes are ugly or vulgar or stupid; they are rather fine, with a mix of the humane and the inhumanely-committed. In what tugs Hyacinth to the noble houses, this novel gave me a new insight into aristocracy-appreciation. But not because they have better people; they don’t, in the novel. Hyacinth’s attachment is about things, the artistry. His naïve ideas about noble people are shot through, and he never becomes a turncoat from his cause, he just� becomes confused.
The novel has two slumming noblewomen, who identify themselves with the people’s cause. I imagine James was more at home in writing them (though he does a fair job at everyone, if you ask me). One is awkward, endearing, genuinely selfless; the other, the princess of the title, at different times comes across as a tourist in search of sensation, a spy afraid for her class, or a real and dangerous revolutionary. It is James� indirectness not to solve what she is � as he doesn’t solve Hyacinth’s divided loyalties.
I liked Hyacinth, the more as we go on, and his puzzles, although the terms have changed (in that the non-aristocratic world is creative, too), were meaningful to me. I liked the intelligent women, and the unsatirised eccentricity of cast like Mr Vetch and the French communist couple. I enjoy how James conceals major scenes, so that we piece them in by gradual stages after the fact, the more effectively for our imaginations. I enjoy how conversations go nowhere or speeches reach no certain conclusion, as in life.
Lastly, I want to note that James� queer sensibilities (rampant, for instance, in ‘The Turn of the Screw�) are to be found here. I can’t be more explicit, I just decided along the way this a queer-friendly text.
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April 13, 2025On December 4, 2024 Luigi Mangione On Ivy League graduate has shot dead a CEO of a health insurance company. What has this to do with Princess Casamassima and Henry James? The public reaction to this event as well as the current state in the “revolutionary� United States has influenced my reading experience of this 19th century novel. We will come back to how and why. But let’s travel to the 19th century for a time being. James seemingly was inspired by Turgenev’s . "Inspiration" went as far as the skeleton of the plot, the characterisation and even some scenes. Nevertheless, It is an original psychologically astute and elegantly written work.
The social wondering of the main protagonist has also reminded me of . Like Flaubert’s Paris, James’s London is much more than a backdrop of the novel. Having arrived in London to settle down, James walked miles in many different areas of the big city not ignoring its squalid sites. And his perspective was uniquely fresh: it was not a view of a seasoned Londoner who might not have noticed the peculiarities of her daily backdrop rushing somewhere; but also it was not an impression of a casual visitor who would not venture beyond Oxford street. James has successfully lent his observations to his characters, predominantly to the main one, Hyacinth Robinson. In the introduction he mentioned: I arrived so at the history of little Hyacinth Robinson—he sprang up for me out of the London pavement.
And that is how we eventually getting to know Hyacinth through his extensive walks: sometimes with the other characters, but often alone looking around and contemplating numerous dilemmas in his mind. Just to give you a feeling of this side of the novel, here is a view from the window:
Living in London a century and half later, i still intimately know this view with its raws of little chimneys like broken teeth on the roofs; and experience first hand of this feeling of everything “sunk into quietness� on July evening after a hot day.
In some of my previous experiences with James, i felt occasionally that he forced his authorial will on a character or created an artificial situation testing the limits of reader’s suspension of disbelief. I could not for example believe in motivation of Isabel Archer. However, i did not face this problem here. You might blame James for certain sentimentality. But all the characters in this novel seemed alive to me: as a bonus, none was created as "a villain", and none was "a hero" either. Refreshingly there were no perfect “types�. To a large extent, the novel has managed to maintain this delicious ambiguity that i love so much in a good realistic piece of fiction, when not everything is spelled out and the reader is left free to develop her own ideas; make additional assumptions or plainly loudly argue with the characters. I cannot say i could not occasionally hear an acerbic and witty voices of James himself behind his characters. But he did not dominate them; nothing seemed shoehorned into the novel for the benefit of the writer’s argument or at least not obviously so.
Apart from “tormented�, “finely aware� Hyacinth, the cast was very strong with women. Christina Light, the Princess Casamassima of the title is interesting if slightly vogue creation. In the introduction, James tells of her story:
Apparently James has already written about the Princess in . But this wondrous description of his inspiration has reminded me of a brilliant contemporary author , especially his novel . For Murnane the characters are creatures as real as people in everyday life. And when he writes he just meets them in his imagination. In Inland, his protagonist was visited by a “personage� of a very young woman. The closest person to this girl from “this world� has died a century before. I thought such a concept of a character was pretty unique. But now i am sure that its precursor has to be Henry James. Even more fascinating, in Inland Murnane mentioned an episode from the beginning of when a ghost of Cathy Earnshaw appeared to the narrator exactly “pressing her pale face, in the other dark, to lighted windows.� Did James think of Emily Bronte? Did Murnane think of James? Who knows. However, such serendipitous parallels between the texts are always very stimulating and a delight to "catch".
On the surface, Christina Light cannot be further from Cathy Earnshaw. When Hyacinth meets her, she is a princess estranged from her aristocratic Italian husband bored by the life of luxury and looking for a new distraction from it. This distraction is appeared to be an interest in the lower classes and the project of improving their lives. Hyacinth for her is the one of the first representatives of these “exotic� people. However, as book progresses the Princess’s resemblance to Cathy has become somewhat more likely as she becomes more impulsive, radicalised with underground politics seemingly blinded by passions and loosing any ability of rational thought.
Another charismatic female presence in Hyacinth’s life is the young working class childhood friend of his, Millicent Henning. She is outgoing, generous and kind-hearted. She enjoyed the relationship with Hyacinth, but at the same time he cannot be quite sure she is totally honest with him. The Hyacinth’s view of her as a representative of “the masses� is somewhat ambivalent:
Initially i found this observation a bit condensing, but after finishing the novel and learning the whole story, I've reconsidered my view. I think this ambivalence and the ambiguity of the total impression does underscore the complexity of her character. The element of generalisation James allows himself through Hyacinth in the paragraph above is more nuanced than simply making fun of the working class people. This is true especially considering Hyacinth's own peculiar background. Unusually for himself, James has populated this novel with quite a few characters from the poorer strata of the society. And like their richer counterparts or even more so they could not be classified into “good� and “bad� people here. That was quite refreshing as i expected him to get himself into a trap of easy categorisation, especially with his love for the “types�.
I felt even more comfortable with my view when i’ve read an essay by Lionell Trilling penned in 1948 about this novel:
Coming back to Millicent, for what it’s worth, she was my favourite character in the novel in spite of her evident weaknesses for good dresses and her general view what good life was all about. She, the Princess and Hyacinth form a romantic triangle of a sorts, however seemingly platonic and fragile. Still it brings the one of the delicious axis of tension in the novel.
Unusually for James, it seems this novel was designed to be politically zeitgeisty. Among other issues the society of the last half of the 19th centuries was preoccupied with the “social question�, the dire state of living/working conditions for the poor and how to improve it, including by political rights and representations but also by the revolutionary means. These concerns were quite widely reflected in the realistic tradition of the literature. Certainly both of James’s older friends Flaubert and Turgenev in different ways addressed these ideas in their novels. Very likely this inspired James. But the reality of the 70s and 80s was also quite turbulent in terms of radical politics and plain terrorism. There were new social movements. Marxism has started to get a fraction. The defenders of working class has got some political representation. However also there was a widespread network of conspiratorial secret societies devoted to the radical acts of destroying current institutions across Europe and Russia. Many of them were inspired by anarchism in its most radical terror form. According to Trilling:
James novel deals with this kind of radical underground “politics�. Hyacinth and the Princess have become entangled in the one of these societies with unsurprisingly consequential results. There is also a whole bunch of important smaller characters involved with this side of the story. The novel also touches upon the charitable activities by the representatives the higher classes, but it limits “social question� to these two elements without trying to deal with the wider picture of the labour movement, budding marxism or ideological debates in the society, etc. Some blamed James for that. I thought focusing on a radical fringe with its uncompromisingly ruthless “black&whiteness� the novel gave enough scope for thoughts. The one of the ideologue of this was Bakunin who did not believe in mass politics and considered that about a hundred of true revolutionaries is enough to destroy the system. They just need to destroy key individuals representing hateful institutions, bomb some properties and this “rehearsal� would instigate the real change towards equality without the state as an instrument of persecution of the masses.
James’s main character has found himself trapped between the conflicting observations and tormented by thoughts and urges that he was not able to reconcile or act upon. On the one hand he saw suffering and injustice:
This incisively expressed and sadly still universal sentiment has reminded me of W. H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts (1938) that was also penned in the turbulent times:
Realising this, Hyacinth got himself pledged to the course of revolutionary violence. But later he has started to have doubts about the methods and even the parts of philosophy of total destruction propagated by his revolutionary bosses. Through his eyes, James juxtaposes the benefits of social progress versus destroying “high achievements of the civilisation�:
Hoffendahl also would send his emissaries to physically destroy and terrorise individuals, the representatives of the institutions such as heads of the states, judges, the aristocracy etc. Of course to our modern eyes, this image of dividing the palaces into little pieces might sound as an exaggeration in order to win the argument. Also I would think that huge inequality of opportunities not “jealousy� might be the underlying cause for necessary redistribution. However, Hyacinth’s fears in this respect are not totally baseless. James’s generation has witnessed Paris Commune as well as earlier revolutions. In Sentimental Education Flaubert gave a portrait of rampage that was taking place in a Palace during the Commune. Later it was the time of Russian revolution that in many ways confirmed what Hyacinth anticipated about literal “cut up the ceilings into strips�.
Eventually, confused disillusioned and powerless, Hyacinth gave a bleak indictment to the whole situation akin A plague o' both your houses! :
He seemed again to be coming back to the idea of total cleansing act of “deluge or annihilation�. It is not clear by this stage of his thinking which forces would make it happen and to which affect. He is disillusioned with his anarchist friends. But this act of romantic and full destruction seemed to him the only possibility of the new beginning or a deserved final ending. His thoughts seem to achieve almost religious apocalyptic height.
It is probably not surprising that James has rendered the vision of such an individual in the last few decades of the 19th century. Is it more surprising though that similar flavour of ideas seem to gain fraction nowadays. Anarchism ideology in its different forms is gaining the ground again both from the left and from the right. The majority of the discourse is much more nuanced. David Graeber and James C Scott are popular thinkers inclining towards a sophisticated vision of anarchism. But some more destructive ideas penetrate into the collective conscience from powerful fringes. When Luigi Mangione has assassinated the UnitedHealthcare CEO, he gained a huge fan base on-line who justified his actions on the basis of unfairness of the US healthcare system the CEO represented in their eyes. Some of them assigned to Luigi a status of saint: “Saint Luigi, Patron Saint of Healthcare Access for All�. That is a left wing fringe. On the right of the political spectrum the current US administration is actively involved in the rapid destruction of existing system of government on many fronts. I do not need to go deep into this here. I just say one name: Elon Musk. But he is far from being alone. Often these efforts are logically incoherent akin the best revolutionary romanticism:
Writes Adam Gopnik in his in The New Yorker.
But let’s come back to “Princess Casimassima�. Weirdly, if you want a distraction from news scrolling, this novel offers quite good opportunity: big and credible cast of characters, engrossing flowing narrative and the atmosphere - all at your disposal.
The social wondering of the main protagonist has also reminded me of . Like Flaubert’s Paris, James’s London is much more than a backdrop of the novel. Having arrived in London to settle down, James walked miles in many different areas of the big city not ignoring its squalid sites. And his perspective was uniquely fresh: it was not a view of a seasoned Londoner who might not have noticed the peculiarities of her daily backdrop rushing somewhere; but also it was not an impression of a casual visitor who would not venture beyond Oxford street. James has successfully lent his observations to his characters, predominantly to the main one, Hyacinth Robinson. In the introduction he mentioned: I arrived so at the history of little Hyacinth Robinson—he sprang up for me out of the London pavement.
And that is how we eventually getting to know Hyacinth through his extensive walks: sometimes with the other characters, but often alone looking around and contemplating numerous dilemmas in his mind. Just to give you a feeling of this side of the novel, here is a view from the window:
Hyacinth, after a moment, placed himself beside her, looking out with her at the dusky multitude of chimney-pots and the small black houses, roofed with grimy tiles. The thick, warm air of a London July floated beneath them, suffused with the everlasting uproar of the town, which appeared to have sunk into quietness, but again became a mighty voice, as soon as one listened for it; here and there, in poor windows, glimmered a turbid light, and high above, in a clearer, smokeless zone, a sky still fair and luminous, a faint silver star looked down.
Living in London a century and half later, i still intimately know this view with its raws of little chimneys like broken teeth on the roofs; and experience first hand of this feeling of everything “sunk into quietness� on July evening after a hot day.
In some of my previous experiences with James, i felt occasionally that he forced his authorial will on a character or created an artificial situation testing the limits of reader’s suspension of disbelief. I could not for example believe in motivation of Isabel Archer. However, i did not face this problem here. You might blame James for certain sentimentality. But all the characters in this novel seemed alive to me: as a bonus, none was created as "a villain", and none was "a hero" either. Refreshingly there were no perfect “types�. To a large extent, the novel has managed to maintain this delicious ambiguity that i love so much in a good realistic piece of fiction, when not everything is spelled out and the reader is left free to develop her own ideas; make additional assumptions or plainly loudly argue with the characters. I cannot say i could not occasionally hear an acerbic and witty voices of James himself behind his characters. But he did not dominate them; nothing seemed shoehorned into the novel for the benefit of the writer’s argument or at least not obviously so.
Apart from “tormented�, “finely aware� Hyacinth, the cast was very strong with women. Christina Light, the Princess Casamassima of the title is interesting if slightly vogue creation. In the introduction, James tells of her story:
Nothing would doubtless beckon us on further, with a large leisure, than such a chance to study the obscure law under which certain of a novelist’s characters, more or less honourably buried, revive for him by a force or a whim of their own and “walk� round his house of art like haunting ghosts, feeling for the old doors they knew, fumbling at stiff latches and pressing their pale faces, in the outer dark, to lighted windows.
Apparently James has already written about the Princess in . But this wondrous description of his inspiration has reminded me of a brilliant contemporary author , especially his novel . For Murnane the characters are creatures as real as people in everyday life. And when he writes he just meets them in his imagination. In Inland, his protagonist was visited by a “personage� of a very young woman. The closest person to this girl from “this world� has died a century before. I thought such a concept of a character was pretty unique. But now i am sure that its precursor has to be Henry James. Even more fascinating, in Inland Murnane mentioned an episode from the beginning of when a ghost of Cathy Earnshaw appeared to the narrator exactly “pressing her pale face, in the other dark, to lighted windows.� Did James think of Emily Bronte? Did Murnane think of James? Who knows. However, such serendipitous parallels between the texts are always very stimulating and a delight to "catch".
On the surface, Christina Light cannot be further from Cathy Earnshaw. When Hyacinth meets her, she is a princess estranged from her aristocratic Italian husband bored by the life of luxury and looking for a new distraction from it. This distraction is appeared to be an interest in the lower classes and the project of improving their lives. Hyacinth for her is the one of the first representatives of these “exotic� people. However, as book progresses the Princess’s resemblance to Cathy has become somewhat more likely as she becomes more impulsive, radicalised with underground politics seemingly blinded by passions and loosing any ability of rational thought.
Another charismatic female presence in Hyacinth’s life is the young working class childhood friend of his, Millicent Henning. She is outgoing, generous and kind-hearted. She enjoyed the relationship with Hyacinth, but at the same time he cannot be quite sure she is totally honest with him. The Hyacinth’s view of her as a representative of “the masses� is somewhat ambivalent:
She summed up the sociable, humorous, ignorant chatter of the masses, their capacity for offensive and defensive passion, their instinctive perception of their strength on the day they should really exercise it; and as much as any of this, their ideal of something smug and prosperous, where washed hands, and plates in rows on dressers, and stuffed birds under glass, and family photographs, would symbolize success.
Initially i found this observation a bit condensing, but after finishing the novel and learning the whole story, I've reconsidered my view. I think this ambivalence and the ambiguity of the total impression does underscore the complexity of her character. The element of generalisation James allows himself through Hyacinth in the paragraph above is more nuanced than simply making fun of the working class people. This is true especially considering Hyacinth's own peculiar background. Unusually for himself, James has populated this novel with quite a few characters from the poorer strata of the society. And like their richer counterparts or even more so they could not be classified into “good� and “bad� people here. That was quite refreshing as i expected him to get himself into a trap of easy categorisation, especially with his love for the “types�.
I felt even more comfortable with my view when i’ve read an essay by Lionell Trilling penned in 1948 about this novel:
That James should create poor people so proud and intelligent as to make it impossible for anyone, even the reader who has paid for the privilege, to condescend to them, so proud and intelligent indeed that it is not wholly easy for them to be “good,� is, one ventures to guess, an unexpressed, a never-to-be-expressed reason for finding him “impotent in matters sociological.� We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
Coming back to Millicent, for what it’s worth, she was my favourite character in the novel in spite of her evident weaknesses for good dresses and her general view what good life was all about. She, the Princess and Hyacinth form a romantic triangle of a sorts, however seemingly platonic and fragile. Still it brings the one of the delicious axis of tension in the novel.
Unusually for James, it seems this novel was designed to be politically zeitgeisty. Among other issues the society of the last half of the 19th centuries was preoccupied with the “social question�, the dire state of living/working conditions for the poor and how to improve it, including by political rights and representations but also by the revolutionary means. These concerns were quite widely reflected in the realistic tradition of the literature. Certainly both of James’s older friends Flaubert and Turgenev in different ways addressed these ideas in their novels. Very likely this inspired James. But the reality of the 70s and 80s was also quite turbulent in terms of radical politics and plain terrorism. There were new social movements. Marxism has started to get a fraction. The defenders of working class has got some political representation. However also there was a widespread network of conspiratorial secret societies devoted to the radical acts of destroying current institutions across Europe and Russia. Many of them were inspired by anarchism in its most radical terror form. According to Trilling:
Of the many assassinations or attempts at assassination that fill the annals of the late years of the century, not all were anarchist, but those that were not were influenced by anarchist example. In 1878 there were two attempts on the life of the Kaiser, one on the King of Spain, one on the King of Italy; in 1880 another attempt on the King of Spain; in 1881 Alexander II of Russia was killed after many attempts; in 1882 the Phoenix Park murders were committed, Lord Frederick Cavendish, Secretary for Ireland, and Undersecretary Thomas Burke being killed by extreme Irish nationalists; in 1883 there were several dynamite conspiracies in Great Britain and in 1885 there was an explosion in the House of Commons; in 1883 there was an anarchist plot to blow up, all at once, the Emperor Wilhelm, the Crown Prince, Bismarck, and Moltke. These are but a few of the terroristic events of which James would have been aware in the years just before he began The Princess Casamassima, and later years brought many more.
James novel deals with this kind of radical underground “politics�. Hyacinth and the Princess have become entangled in the one of these societies with unsurprisingly consequential results. There is also a whole bunch of important smaller characters involved with this side of the story. The novel also touches upon the charitable activities by the representatives the higher classes, but it limits “social question� to these two elements without trying to deal with the wider picture of the labour movement, budding marxism or ideological debates in the society, etc. Some blamed James for that. I thought focusing on a radical fringe with its uncompromisingly ruthless “black&whiteness� the novel gave enough scope for thoughts. The one of the ideologue of this was Bakunin who did not believe in mass politics and considered that about a hundred of true revolutionaries is enough to destroy the system. They just need to destroy key individuals representing hateful institutions, bomb some properties and this “rehearsal� would instigate the real change towards equality without the state as an instrument of persecution of the masses.
James’s main character has found himself trapped between the conflicting observations and tormented by thoughts and urges that he was not able to reconcile or act upon. On the one hand he saw suffering and injustice:
People go and come, and buy and sell, and drink and dance, and make money and make love, and seem to know nothing and suspect nothing and think of nothing; and iniquities flourish, and the misery of half the world is prated about as a ‘necessary evil,� and generations rot away and starve, in the midst of it, and day follows day, and everything is for the best in the best of possible worlds.
This incisively expressed and sadly still universal sentiment has reminded me of W. H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts (1938) that was also penned in the turbulent times:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
Realising this, Hyacinth got himself pledged to the course of revolutionary violence. But later he has started to have doubts about the methods and even the parts of philosophy of total destruction propagated by his revolutionary bosses. Through his eyes, James juxtaposes the benefits of social progress versus destroying “high achievements of the civilisation�:
They seem to me inestimably precious and beautiful, the general fabric of civilisation as we know it, based, if you will, upon all the despotisms, the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies, and the rapacities of the past, but thanks to which, all the same, the world is less impracticable and life more tolerable... Hoffendahl (the chief conspirator-philosopher) wouldn’t have the least feeling for this ...He would cut up the ceilings of the Veronese into strips, so that every one might have a little piece. I don’t want every one to have a little piece of anything, and I have a great horror of that kind of invidious jealousy which is at the bottom of the idea of a redistribution.
Hoffendahl also would send his emissaries to physically destroy and terrorise individuals, the representatives of the institutions such as heads of the states, judges, the aristocracy etc. Of course to our modern eyes, this image of dividing the palaces into little pieces might sound as an exaggeration in order to win the argument. Also I would think that huge inequality of opportunities not “jealousy� might be the underlying cause for necessary redistribution. However, Hyacinth’s fears in this respect are not totally baseless. James’s generation has witnessed Paris Commune as well as earlier revolutions. In Sentimental Education Flaubert gave a portrait of rampage that was taking place in a Palace during the Commune. Later it was the time of Russian revolution that in many ways confirmed what Hyacinth anticipated about literal “cut up the ceilings into strips�.
Eventually, confused disillusioned and powerless, Hyacinth gave a bleak indictment to the whole situation akin A plague o' both your houses! :
The populace of London were scattered upon his path, and he asked himself by what wizardry they could ever be raised to high participations. There were nights when every one he met appeared to reek with gin and filth, and he found himself elbowed by figures as foul as lepers. Some of the women and girls, in particular, were appalling � saturated with alcohol and vice, brutal, bedraggled, obscene. “What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but annihilation?� he asked himself, as he went his way; and he wondered what fate there could be, in the great scheme of things, for a planet overgrown with such vermin, what fate but to be hurled against a ball of consuming fire. If it was the fault of the rich, as Paul Muniment held, the selfish, congested rich, who allowed such abominations to flourish, that made no difference, and only shifted the shame; for the terrestrial globe, a visible failure, produced the cause as well as the effect.
He seemed again to be coming back to the idea of total cleansing act of “deluge or annihilation�. It is not clear by this stage of his thinking which forces would make it happen and to which affect. He is disillusioned with his anarchist friends. But this act of romantic and full destruction seemed to him the only possibility of the new beginning or a deserved final ending. His thoughts seem to achieve almost religious apocalyptic height.
It is probably not surprising that James has rendered the vision of such an individual in the last few decades of the 19th century. Is it more surprising though that similar flavour of ideas seem to gain fraction nowadays. Anarchism ideology in its different forms is gaining the ground again both from the left and from the right. The majority of the discourse is much more nuanced. David Graeber and James C Scott are popular thinkers inclining towards a sophisticated vision of anarchism. But some more destructive ideas penetrate into the collective conscience from powerful fringes. When Luigi Mangione has assassinated the UnitedHealthcare CEO, he gained a huge fan base on-line who justified his actions on the basis of unfairness of the US healthcare system the CEO represented in their eyes. Some of them assigned to Luigi a status of saint: “Saint Luigi, Patron Saint of Healthcare Access for All�. That is a left wing fringe. On the right of the political spectrum the current US administration is actively involved in the rapid destruction of existing system of government on many fronts. I do not need to go deep into this here. I just say one name: Elon Musk. But he is far from being alone. Often these efforts are logically incoherent akin the best revolutionary romanticism:
The appetite for romantic destruction is the flip side of the desire for authoritarian order, and, like the Joker’s merry grin and sadistic grimace, one comes right after the other so quickly that they can’t be told apart. (It is also significant that steampunk, the projection of today’s concerns into an imaginary world of late-nineteenth-century technology, is the signature surrealism of our time.
Writes Adam Gopnik in his in The New Yorker.
But let’s come back to “Princess Casimassima�. Weirdly, if you want a distraction from news scrolling, this novel offers quite good opportunity: big and credible cast of characters, engrossing flowing narrative and the atmosphere - all at your disposal.
October 23, 2020
Senryu Review:
Dithering bookworm
ponders violent revolt
but prefers being bland
Dithering bookworm
ponders violent revolt
but prefers being bland
March 30, 2013
A great novel, even read as an inexpensive and indifferently copyedited ebook. Of course, it’s an even greater novel when followed up by Lionel Trilling’s famous essay about James’s novel in Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (the essay is included in some editions of The Princess Casamassima as a preface). Trilling makes clear how this 1880s tale—a poorly reviewed dud in its day—about a young London bookbinder drawn to an anarchist terrorist cell is both politically and morally astute. Moreover, Trilling does a wonderful job analyzing The Princess Casamassima as a psychosexual autobiography of James’s relationships with his brother William and sister Alice. This is a novel that has remained an academic favorite (a Google search unearths a wealth of interesting scholarly papers on The Princess Casamassima), if less on the radar of casual readers of James’s work (who are more likely to reach first for The Ambassadors, or a novella like The Turn of the Screw, or even What Maisie Knew, recently adapted and modernized for an upcoming film). The real surprise of The Princess Casamassima is how fun and readable it is, breathless at times in its plotting and pacing.
February 6, 2016
I got this title from a Thomas Pynchon novel I couldn't finish. (I think a dog was reading it.) That should have been a red flag. It's a weird book in that there's a lot to admire. Certainly, with its oppressive 1880s London atmosphere, I can see how this book would later impact Eliot ("Preludes") and Conrad ("Secret Agent"). There are also, as can be expected, a number of wonderfully rendered scenes. There are also long patches where you find yourself re-reading sentences over and over again, and then asking yourself WTF?
James is writing about class and revolution, but it's the unlikely meshing of certain characters that really wore me down, probably because James can't help but meditate on the things he likes, such as Art and the Beautiful but Boring People, thus moving away from his original themes. The obvious influence on James in PC are Dickens (take your pick) and Hugo (" Les Miserables"). Early on I was even wondering if he hadn't been sneaking some Dostoevsky into his reading. There are probably others, since you get the sense James was taking his crack at a "thriller" (I'm not trying to be funny), and one that would sell. It didn't, and as a result the novel has drifted into a large group of James' books that are probably best forgotten. I think this book was the one that sent him to writing plays for a while.
James is writing about class and revolution, but it's the unlikely meshing of certain characters that really wore me down, probably because James can't help but meditate on the things he likes, such as Art and the Beautiful but Boring People, thus moving away from his original themes. The obvious influence on James in PC are Dickens (take your pick) and Hugo (" Les Miserables"). Early on I was even wondering if he hadn't been sneaking some Dostoevsky into his reading. There are probably others, since you get the sense James was taking his crack at a "thriller" (I'm not trying to be funny), and one that would sell. It didn't, and as a result the novel has drifted into a large group of James' books that are probably best forgotten. I think this book was the one that sent him to writing plays for a while.
Read
June 8, 20196.5/10
Abandoned.
Not being able to find much point in going on, after 180-odd pages, I skimmed the rest of it, hoping it would get better. It was a vain hope, for it only became maudlin. Sometimes, it is the better part of wisdom to listen when an author writes that "it wasn't very good" and it was "rather vague", for this is exactly what James wrote of the Princess C.
There is more of Dickens and Zola in this work than there is of James: two authors he admired very much. Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but it doesn't wash in literature.
This felt more like one huge wrestling match: tortured machinations to get things "just right" in the "anarchical world of the London poor". James only proved he knew nothing about the London poor and even less about anarchy and revolution as a whole. His indulgence of slumming ladies was probably the only thing he got right in this one. Indeed, it seems he lost his voice completely in this one and went chasing after the ideas of those writers he admired most: George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, and even masqueraded as them for a while. What a relief that he found his own voice again, after this. To have achieved so much in Roderick Hudson, his first "true" novel, and to have fallen so absurdly off course in this one! Thank goodness the wings of the dove came along to lift him up again.
To use the telephone as a metaphor, I've never hung up on James, no matter how rambling he became, for there usually seemed to be a purpose. In this one, I put the receiver down politely, but firmly.
Abandoned.
Not being able to find much point in going on, after 180-odd pages, I skimmed the rest of it, hoping it would get better. It was a vain hope, for it only became maudlin. Sometimes, it is the better part of wisdom to listen when an author writes that "it wasn't very good" and it was "rather vague", for this is exactly what James wrote of the Princess C.
There is more of Dickens and Zola in this work than there is of James: two authors he admired very much. Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but it doesn't wash in literature.
This felt more like one huge wrestling match: tortured machinations to get things "just right" in the "anarchical world of the London poor". James only proved he knew nothing about the London poor and even less about anarchy and revolution as a whole. His indulgence of slumming ladies was probably the only thing he got right in this one. Indeed, it seems he lost his voice completely in this one and went chasing after the ideas of those writers he admired most: George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, and even masqueraded as them for a while. What a relief that he found his own voice again, after this. To have achieved so much in Roderick Hudson, his first "true" novel, and to have fallen so absurdly off course in this one! Thank goodness the wings of the dove came along to lift him up again.
To use the telephone as a metaphor, I've never hung up on James, no matter how rambling he became, for there usually seemed to be a purpose. In this one, I put the receiver down politely, but firmly.
July 15, 2017
Happy chance led me to read The Princess Casamassima directly after George Gissing’s . I had no idea that the two novels were so close in setting and theme. The leading character of James’s novel (published in 1886) is, like Gissing’s (1892), “born in exile.� Both are highly intelligent young men, from a background of genteel poverty, who identify with the upper classes by virtue of their taste and sensibility. Both come into contact with the wealthy and elegant world against whose windows they have long stood pressed up, hungry-eyed. Radical politics is the backdrop to Gissing’s novel, and plays a far more leading role in James’s.
One great difference between the two novels is that they are written from opposite sides of the tracks. James is consciously slumming it, when he writes of the lower middle class, whereas Gissing was himself from this background. James himself, in a review of Gissing’s (1897) points to this close acquaintance with a vast swathe of English society rarely touched by Victorian novelists as a great merit of his work.
Unsurprisingly, you can see this difference reflected in the two novels. James accounts for the conflicting elements in his protagonist’s character in a romantic and melodramatic manner, making his hero, Hyacinth Robinson, the son of a seduced-and-abandoned young French seamstress turned murderer and a dissolute lord. This paternal aristocratic inheritance helps “explain� Hyacinth’s intelligence, sensibility, and artistic tastes, which readers of the time (and perhaps James himself) might have struggled to credit in a young man of his lowly social background. Gissing offers no such mitigation; his clever, bitter, socially aspirant anti-hero, Godwin Peak, has no redeeming drop of blue blood in his veins.
Another difference between the novels is their treatment of radical politics. James has Hyacinth become involved in a revolutionary movement (another genetic inheritance, his French grandfather having died manning the barricades of the Paris Commune.) Hyacinth’s political sympathies are vital to the plot of the novel, and they enable the introduction of some of the novel’s most vivid characters: Hyacinth’s fellow conspirator, the charismatic Paul Muniment, and the two carefully contrasted aristocratic female fellow travelers, the saintly, awkward Lady Aurora Langrish, and the beautiful, wilful Princess Casamassima (Christina Light, from James’s first novel, .)
Curiously, despite the importance of the radical theme within James’s novel, we barely hear anything of the conspirators� thinking (and here is the great difference from Gissing, who has written a true novel of ideas.) Presumably intellectual revolutionaries in the 1880s were steeped in Marx and Engels, but we never hear of James's Hyacinth reading anything much beyond poetry and French novels. The one meeting of the conspirators we get to eavesdrop on portrays them as a bunch of farcical bumblers with hardly an argument between them, beyond “eat the rich!� When Hyacinth comes to know the beauty and refinement of upper-class life in person, his revolutionary sentiments begin to falter (his unexamined assumption—and perhaps his author’s� being that the rise of democracy will inevitably mean the destruction of high culture and the triumph of the “vulgar.�) This would be a lot less convincing if his original revolutionary sympathies had been more compelling and less thinly portrayed.
Another thing I found curious about James’s treatment of revolutionary politics is his squeamishness about the real poor. The world of the disadvantaged in The Princess Casamassima is a world of skilled artisans, shop girls, a violinist in a theater orchestra. Their principal deprivation consists in not being rich. We hear a lot about the slums and the shocking, brutal poverty found there, but James fights shy of representing it directly, other than in one vaguely described scene, where the slum inhabitants are described as too dehumanized even to recognize their own misery. I found myself contrasting this unfavorably with Elizabeth Gaskell’s , written forty years earlier, with its unflinching portrayal of poverty and radical politics among Manchester factory workers.
Setting politics aside, there’s a fair amount to enjoy in The Princess Casamassima, although I liked it rather less than Roderick Hudson and The American. James’s writing is immaculate; the evocation of late-Victorian London is interesting (who knew they had sheep in Hyde Park?); and Hyacinth is an engaging enough focalizer, in a wispy kind of way.
Of the other characters, the Princess herself I felt didn’t come off at all. James as narrator tells us so insistently that she is the most beautiful or the most extraordinary or the most unpredictable woman in Europe that it’s hard for the actual representation to live up to the pitch. Paul Muniment I liked more. James is strong on representing homosocial male desire, mediated Eve Sedgwick-style through complex triangles of affection. I felt Hyacinth and Paul were worthy heirs to Roderick Hudson’s Roderick and Rowland in that regard.
One great difference between the two novels is that they are written from opposite sides of the tracks. James is consciously slumming it, when he writes of the lower middle class, whereas Gissing was himself from this background. James himself, in a review of Gissing’s (1897) points to this close acquaintance with a vast swathe of English society rarely touched by Victorian novelists as a great merit of his work.
Unsurprisingly, you can see this difference reflected in the two novels. James accounts for the conflicting elements in his protagonist’s character in a romantic and melodramatic manner, making his hero, Hyacinth Robinson, the son of a seduced-and-abandoned young French seamstress turned murderer and a dissolute lord. This paternal aristocratic inheritance helps “explain� Hyacinth’s intelligence, sensibility, and artistic tastes, which readers of the time (and perhaps James himself) might have struggled to credit in a young man of his lowly social background. Gissing offers no such mitigation; his clever, bitter, socially aspirant anti-hero, Godwin Peak, has no redeeming drop of blue blood in his veins.
Another difference between the novels is their treatment of radical politics. James has Hyacinth become involved in a revolutionary movement (another genetic inheritance, his French grandfather having died manning the barricades of the Paris Commune.) Hyacinth’s political sympathies are vital to the plot of the novel, and they enable the introduction of some of the novel’s most vivid characters: Hyacinth’s fellow conspirator, the charismatic Paul Muniment, and the two carefully contrasted aristocratic female fellow travelers, the saintly, awkward Lady Aurora Langrish, and the beautiful, wilful Princess Casamassima (Christina Light, from James’s first novel, .)
Curiously, despite the importance of the radical theme within James’s novel, we barely hear anything of the conspirators� thinking (and here is the great difference from Gissing, who has written a true novel of ideas.) Presumably intellectual revolutionaries in the 1880s were steeped in Marx and Engels, but we never hear of James's Hyacinth reading anything much beyond poetry and French novels. The one meeting of the conspirators we get to eavesdrop on portrays them as a bunch of farcical bumblers with hardly an argument between them, beyond “eat the rich!� When Hyacinth comes to know the beauty and refinement of upper-class life in person, his revolutionary sentiments begin to falter (his unexamined assumption—and perhaps his author’s� being that the rise of democracy will inevitably mean the destruction of high culture and the triumph of the “vulgar.�) This would be a lot less convincing if his original revolutionary sympathies had been more compelling and less thinly portrayed.
Another thing I found curious about James’s treatment of revolutionary politics is his squeamishness about the real poor. The world of the disadvantaged in The Princess Casamassima is a world of skilled artisans, shop girls, a violinist in a theater orchestra. Their principal deprivation consists in not being rich. We hear a lot about the slums and the shocking, brutal poverty found there, but James fights shy of representing it directly, other than in one vaguely described scene, where the slum inhabitants are described as too dehumanized even to recognize their own misery. I found myself contrasting this unfavorably with Elizabeth Gaskell’s , written forty years earlier, with its unflinching portrayal of poverty and radical politics among Manchester factory workers.
Setting politics aside, there’s a fair amount to enjoy in The Princess Casamassima, although I liked it rather less than Roderick Hudson and The American. James’s writing is immaculate; the evocation of late-Victorian London is interesting (who knew they had sheep in Hyde Park?); and Hyacinth is an engaging enough focalizer, in a wispy kind of way.
Of the other characters, the Princess herself I felt didn’t come off at all. James as narrator tells us so insistently that she is the most beautiful or the most extraordinary or the most unpredictable woman in Europe that it’s hard for the actual representation to live up to the pitch. Paul Muniment I liked more. James is strong on representing homosocial male desire, mediated Eve Sedgwick-style through complex triangles of affection. I felt Hyacinth and Paul were worthy heirs to Roderick Hudson’s Roderick and Rowland in that regard.
April 18, 2021
Only managed to gather steam at the end. James's Dickensian ambitions don't necessarily feel necessary; this could have been 100 pages shorter.
His insights about the ambiguity of privilege, terror, and moral responsibility are well taken, though. No one here gets out alive...
I like the fact that James is the kind on whom nothing is lost, but it also feels sometimes like he is the person whose stories are so erudite, detailed, minutely observed, etc that for once you just want to tell him to get to the fucking point already.
So in other words he's me, kinda.
His insights about the ambiguity of privilege, terror, and moral responsibility are well taken, though. No one here gets out alive...
I like the fact that James is the kind on whom nothing is lost, but it also feels sometimes like he is the person whose stories are so erudite, detailed, minutely observed, etc that for once you just want to tell him to get to the fucking point already.
So in other words he's me, kinda.
April 19, 2021
Melodramma à gogo, 18/04/2021
Su questo romanzo a tratti insulso, a tratti irritante, non voglio spendere più parole del necessario. Scriverò, quindi, un commento schematico, ma esaustivo, schietto e forse un po' irriverente, seguito da un'invocazione finale all'autore:
PERSONAGGI
1) Hyacinth Robinson: individuo dal Sé a dir poco diviso (metà popolano e metà nobile, figlio illegittimo di un lord inglese e di una prostituta francese). Rilegatore di professione, è un inutile, debole, babbeo che si lascia influenzare con estrema facilità da chiunque incontri; oscilla per un bel pezzo tra le istanze del popolo e la vita lussuosa della nobiltà , e cade nella rete della principessa Casamassima.
2) Un paio di donnette misere, ma con una grande passione per l'aristocrazia (miss Pynsent e l'insopportabile Rose Muniment).
3) Un branco di maldestri cospiratori (anarchici? socialisti? non si capisce nulla), tratteggiati in maniera assai rozza e stereotipata. A parte due comunardi francesi in esilio, spicca tra di loro Paul Muniment, a quanto pare il più sveglio. Hyacinth nutre una sorta di venerazione per questo tale, a tratti pure un po' ambigua.
4) La principessa del titolo. Donna dal forte carattere, in verità , scavando più in profondità , l'ho trovata fatua. Afferma di voler sostenere la causa del popolo ed è un'abile manipolatrice. Hyacinth ci casca come un salame.
5) La figura misteriosa e per certi versi patetica del capitano Sholto.
6) Il signor Vetch, Millicent Henning e Lady Aurora: i primi due sono gli unici che abbiano davvero a cuore quel babbeo di Hyacinth; la terza è la sola persona veramente interessata a migliorare le condizioni del popolo ma, pur essendo anche lei una nobile, non ha lo charme e il carisma della principessa Casamassima.
DINAMICHE
1) Manipolazione e uso strumentale degli altri personaggi per i propri fini: onnipresenti. La principessa manipola Hyacinth; Paul si serve della principessa per i suoi scopi. La principessa scarica Hyacinth perché ormai non si interessa al popolo tanto quanto lei, quindi pensa di servirsi di Paul.
2) Collegata al punto appena sopra: incapacità da parte di Hyacinth di capire chi davvero tenga a lui. Di conseguenza, Hyacinth rincorre sempre le persone sbagliate. Che nervoso! Ahimè, Millicent è una popolana, mica può competere con la principessa. Povera donna.
3) Melodramma: Ã gogo. Fino all'ultima pagina.
4) Idee semplicisticamente reazionarie che sbucano a ogni piè sospinto. Basti vedere la rappresentazione dei cospiratori. Ma anche il fatto che la carità sia più che altro un modo per i nobili di far mostra della loro gran bontà . La fine del mondo arriverà con lo stato sociale!11!!11!111!
Va bene, signor James, Lei è di un altro periodo storico. Ma la mia pazienza ha un limite. Può avere tutte le idee reazionarie che vuole, ma che almeno Le metta bene per iscritto! Questo è davvero un polpettone ottocentesco. Spero di cuore che abbia scritto di meglio! La prossima volta vorrei rivalutarLa. Ci conto.
Cordiali saluti,
Elena
Su questo romanzo a tratti insulso, a tratti irritante, non voglio spendere più parole del necessario. Scriverò, quindi, un commento schematico, ma esaustivo, schietto e forse un po' irriverente, seguito da un'invocazione finale all'autore:
PERSONAGGI
1) Hyacinth Robinson: individuo dal Sé a dir poco diviso (metà popolano e metà nobile, figlio illegittimo di un lord inglese e di una prostituta francese). Rilegatore di professione, è un inutile, debole, babbeo che si lascia influenzare con estrema facilità da chiunque incontri; oscilla per un bel pezzo tra le istanze del popolo e la vita lussuosa della nobiltà , e cade nella rete della principessa Casamassima.
2) Un paio di donnette misere, ma con una grande passione per l'aristocrazia (miss Pynsent e l'insopportabile Rose Muniment).
3) Un branco di maldestri cospiratori (anarchici? socialisti? non si capisce nulla), tratteggiati in maniera assai rozza e stereotipata. A parte due comunardi francesi in esilio, spicca tra di loro Paul Muniment, a quanto pare il più sveglio. Hyacinth nutre una sorta di venerazione per questo tale, a tratti pure un po' ambigua.
4) La principessa del titolo. Donna dal forte carattere, in verità , scavando più in profondità , l'ho trovata fatua. Afferma di voler sostenere la causa del popolo ed è un'abile manipolatrice. Hyacinth ci casca come un salame.
5) La figura misteriosa e per certi versi patetica del capitano Sholto.
6) Il signor Vetch, Millicent Henning e Lady Aurora: i primi due sono gli unici che abbiano davvero a cuore quel babbeo di Hyacinth; la terza è la sola persona veramente interessata a migliorare le condizioni del popolo ma, pur essendo anche lei una nobile, non ha lo charme e il carisma della principessa Casamassima.
DINAMICHE
1) Manipolazione e uso strumentale degli altri personaggi per i propri fini: onnipresenti. La principessa manipola Hyacinth; Paul si serve della principessa per i suoi scopi. La principessa scarica Hyacinth perché ormai non si interessa al popolo tanto quanto lei, quindi pensa di servirsi di Paul.
2) Collegata al punto appena sopra: incapacità da parte di Hyacinth di capire chi davvero tenga a lui. Di conseguenza, Hyacinth rincorre sempre le persone sbagliate. Che nervoso! Ahimè, Millicent è una popolana, mica può competere con la principessa. Povera donna.
3) Melodramma: Ã gogo. Fino all'ultima pagina.
4) Idee semplicisticamente reazionarie che sbucano a ogni piè sospinto. Basti vedere la rappresentazione dei cospiratori. Ma anche il fatto che la carità sia più che altro un modo per i nobili di far mostra della loro gran bontà . La fine del mondo arriverà con lo stato sociale!11!!11!111!
Va bene, signor James, Lei è di un altro periodo storico. Ma la mia pazienza ha un limite. Può avere tutte le idee reazionarie che vuole, ma che almeno Le metta bene per iscritto! Questo è davvero un polpettone ottocentesco. Spero di cuore che abbia scritto di meglio! La prossima volta vorrei rivalutarLa. Ci conto.
Cordiali saluti,
Elena
April 3, 2019
I would like to review this but I would need to read it three more times to digest enough of it to even begin such a venture. Suffice it to say, it is fascinating, complicated, captivating, enthralling, and very long - 21.5 hours long (audiobook). If I live long enough, I may read it again and again and again.
October 31, 2009
This is my first foray into the work of Henry James. His writing and character development are extraordinary.
In his preface, James said, "One can never tell everything", and he is masterful in his choice of what he tells about each character. One of the pleasures of reading this novel is the delicious way that the complexity of each character is built. In much the same way that we get to know friends in our lives, James leads us to become progressively acquainted with each character. A few things about each character are clearly explained, but a good deal of information regarding each personality must be construed from hints, suggestions, and observations. It is necessary to think abut each character, and ponder his/her perceptions, motives, and contradictions. There are some things about each personality that remain mysterious or uncertain because James refuses to tell us.
"The little bookbinder" Hyacinth Robinson is the hero of this novel. He is the bastard son of a French nobleman who was murdered by his mistress, Hyacinth's mother. Hyacinth's mother was imprisoned, and consequently the infant Hyacinth was adopted and raised in London by an impoverished dressmaker. Hyacinth is drawn to art and beauty, and is keenly aware of the chasm between the world of wealth, luxury, and beauty, and the misery of the millions who live in poverty. He becomes involved in a revolutionary political group, and makes a vow to carry out anything asked of him to further the radical cause. After making this solemn vow Hyacinth meets and is subsequently sought out by the beautiful Princess Casamassima. Bored with her marriage and her life, she becomes interested in the plight of the poor and the associated radical politics. The princess offers Hyacinth opportunities and exposure to art, culture, and beauty, and he is captivated. But like the princess herself, the world of art, beauty, and privilege are unattainable. Hyacinth finds himself faced with the dilemma of whether to stay faithful to the vow and to the revolutionary politics that he had embraced.
I found myself wishing that the book wouldn't end because I wanted to continue my relationship with each character.
In his preface, James said, "One can never tell everything", and he is masterful in his choice of what he tells about each character. One of the pleasures of reading this novel is the delicious way that the complexity of each character is built. In much the same way that we get to know friends in our lives, James leads us to become progressively acquainted with each character. A few things about each character are clearly explained, but a good deal of information regarding each personality must be construed from hints, suggestions, and observations. It is necessary to think abut each character, and ponder his/her perceptions, motives, and contradictions. There are some things about each personality that remain mysterious or uncertain because James refuses to tell us.
"The little bookbinder" Hyacinth Robinson is the hero of this novel. He is the bastard son of a French nobleman who was murdered by his mistress, Hyacinth's mother. Hyacinth's mother was imprisoned, and consequently the infant Hyacinth was adopted and raised in London by an impoverished dressmaker. Hyacinth is drawn to art and beauty, and is keenly aware of the chasm between the world of wealth, luxury, and beauty, and the misery of the millions who live in poverty. He becomes involved in a revolutionary political group, and makes a vow to carry out anything asked of him to further the radical cause. After making this solemn vow Hyacinth meets and is subsequently sought out by the beautiful Princess Casamassima. Bored with her marriage and her life, she becomes interested in the plight of the poor and the associated radical politics. The princess offers Hyacinth opportunities and exposure to art, culture, and beauty, and he is captivated. But like the princess herself, the world of art, beauty, and privilege are unattainable. Hyacinth finds himself faced with the dilemma of whether to stay faithful to the vow and to the revolutionary politics that he had embraced.
I found myself wishing that the book wouldn't end because I wanted to continue my relationship with each character.
April 21, 2024
Henry James at the height of his powers.
His first novel written in London after he moved there from the U.S., inspired, he claims in the New York Edition forward, by walking the streets of the great metropolis. Indeed there is much walking here and I loved that--it's always been both my travel and see the city where I'm currently living strategy. In fact I'm 61 years old and have never piloted an automobile. Why would you when walking is so much more vivid and instructive?
Like The Bostonians that preceded it, politics again act as a backdrop, this time the great socialist/democratic struggle against the royalist/fascist world of inherited wealth and power rather than the social inequality of women of the previous novel. Still, almost more than any of the other novels so far this one is pretty much a pure character study. Oddly, although it's much less thought of I greatly preferred it to Portrait of a Lady. That one, with the giveaway title, is a character study looking for a character. Even if Hyacinth here is a rather lost soul I found him considerably more vivid and real than Isobel Archer.
It could probably be argued--anyway, it crossed my mind--that one's heredity is no longer the biological programming that most pre-20th century fiction would have us believe, but here I think the opening scene sets up well our protagonist's mental struggle with his heredity and the fact that if he hadn't known about it he might have been a completely different creature--even if he seems to show signs of nobility without having anyone in his life to impart these lessons to his character, making his good manners appear biological. Anyway, I forgive this small lacuna in sense as the character study is otherwise quite interesting.
Even if I'm a pretty radical believer in the socialist dream and class warfare, I think this novel brilliantly shows how intertwined the classes are and how all human on human violence is, in a way, a kind of suicide--collective, cultural, or racial. All war and all the violence we do to each other is a mysteriously stupid form of self destruction. Go figure.
His first novel written in London after he moved there from the U.S., inspired, he claims in the New York Edition forward, by walking the streets of the great metropolis. Indeed there is much walking here and I loved that--it's always been both my travel and see the city where I'm currently living strategy. In fact I'm 61 years old and have never piloted an automobile. Why would you when walking is so much more vivid and instructive?
Like The Bostonians that preceded it, politics again act as a backdrop, this time the great socialist/democratic struggle against the royalist/fascist world of inherited wealth and power rather than the social inequality of women of the previous novel. Still, almost more than any of the other novels so far this one is pretty much a pure character study. Oddly, although it's much less thought of I greatly preferred it to Portrait of a Lady. That one, with the giveaway title, is a character study looking for a character. Even if Hyacinth here is a rather lost soul I found him considerably more vivid and real than Isobel Archer.
It could probably be argued--anyway, it crossed my mind--that one's heredity is no longer the biological programming that most pre-20th century fiction would have us believe, but here I think the opening scene sets up well our protagonist's mental struggle with his heredity and the fact that if he hadn't known about it he might have been a completely different creature--even if he seems to show signs of nobility without having anyone in his life to impart these lessons to his character, making his good manners appear biological. Anyway, I forgive this small lacuna in sense as the character study is otherwise quite interesting.
Even if I'm a pretty radical believer in the socialist dream and class warfare, I think this novel brilliantly shows how intertwined the classes are and how all human on human violence is, in a way, a kind of suicide--collective, cultural, or racial. All war and all the violence we do to each other is a mysteriously stupid form of self destruction. Go figure.
November 25, 2013
The rare novel I just couldn't finish and I'll admit I was surprised. My only other experience of Henry James is the fine, witty, and dark The Bostonians and, being a fan of stuffy novels from would-be social conservatives on terrorism and anarchism (The Man Who Was Thursday; The Secret Agent), and also being a fan of wordy, intense 19th century fiction in general, I figured this one would be a enjoyable read. Nope. I gave it to the halfway point and then gave up. How many stifling conversations on furniture placement with bedridden young women do we need? How puling the main character, a bare bones anthropomorphization of the human desire to yank one up out of one's station in life? How lame the chatty dialogue, bookended by proust-bricks of internalized semi-angst?
Strange that James' preface is infinitely more stimulating, an introductory essay in which he warns us of the dense, prolix nature of the book, justifying it by exhorting us to share the emotional adventure of Hyacinth Robinson, that the book is largely a journey through his mind and emotions and desires and whatever-the-hell.
He simply doesn't deliver. Bogged down in mundane conversation and shiftless characters (even the Princess, in her one appearance before I gave up) was largely a flaccid, empty bag of nothing.
I know, I know, give it a chance, it gets better, but that potential slog just wasn't worth it by the time I was flinging the book away from me, cursing the Princess Kiss-my-assima.
Strange that James' preface is infinitely more stimulating, an introductory essay in which he warns us of the dense, prolix nature of the book, justifying it by exhorting us to share the emotional adventure of Hyacinth Robinson, that the book is largely a journey through his mind and emotions and desires and whatever-the-hell.
He simply doesn't deliver. Bogged down in mundane conversation and shiftless characters (even the Princess, in her one appearance before I gave up) was largely a flaccid, empty bag of nothing.
I know, I know, give it a chance, it gets better, but that potential slog just wasn't worth it by the time I was flinging the book away from me, cursing the Princess Kiss-my-assima.
August 22, 2012
Now, a sigh of relief. I have survived my first Henry James novel. I read it cover to cover, I only spent five days doing it, and honestly it wasn't bad. It so "wasn't bad" that I'll even confess I enjoyed it.
Generally, critics regard The Princess Casamassima as among James's weaker efforts. However, that's clearly a relative remark and one that I suppose indicates more than anything the depth and wealth of his catalogue. Had the book been written by a less prolific author, say Hamlin Garland or Sarah Orne Jewett, it would shine less like an oddly smooth pebble and more like the gem it really is.
As other reviewers have stated, the novel isn't driven by plot as much as character. In terms of movement and what literature teachers call "rising actions," there isn't much to report: Hyacinth Robinson, the book's protagonist, is the child of a French prostitute who is jailed shortly after his birth for murdering his aristocratic English fathor. He is raised by a spinster seamstress, Miss Pynsent, and her fiddle-playing neighbor, Mr. Vetch. Miss Pynsent takes pride in Hyacinth's aristocratic blood, and so though he grows up in one of London's slummier neighborhoods, he cultivates a sense of artistic taste and self-appreciation that drives an ever-widening wedge between his desires and aspirations and his living conditions and means. In his early twenties, desperate for the chance to avenge his social disenfranchisement and distinguish himself, Hyacinth joins an underground socialist movement. This makes him attractive to the Princess, whose newest hobby is exploring the adventurous London slums, and as the relationship between the two advances, the question arises: Will Hyacinth sacrifice his life to the cause that affects him less and less the more time he spends in the company of the Princess?
Ultimately, the book is about the psychology of extremist social movements. As Clinton Oliver points out in the introduction to the Harper Colophon edition, The Princess Casamassima was printed around the same time as the Haymarket riots in Chicago and the outbreak of a number of similar, violent protests on both sides of the Atlantic. As Arab Spring and other recent events attest, the questions James asks remain pertinent a hundred and twenty-five years later: Why do some members of the laboring classes strap bombs to their bodies or commit other acts of terrorism on behalf of organizations who treat them like faceless pawns? Why would other members of the laboring classes, the ones who relish art museums and theatre performances, give their lives to protect the aristocratic privilege that subjugates them? What leads people who are born into privilege to sacrifice the delights of their position and instead dedicate themselves to acts of charity or terrorism?
James asks more questions than he answers, and honestly I think that's what makes the book timeless; it's a novel that explores the mentality behind social movements rather than a participant in any movement itself (as compared to, say, Sinclair's The Jungle). But if James does offer any kind of answer, it has something to do with the alienation that is characteristic of capitalistic, modern, and urban living. For example, Lady Aurora and the Princess Casamassima are strangers in their well-to-do homes; the former is unattractive, the latter is American (and not terribly wealthy) by birth, and they're both women making their way in a masculinist society very much structured against them. They find their refuge, and their ability to be powerful, by contributing their privilege to aid the less fortunate.
Similarly, Hyacinth Robinson, the book's protagonist, is wholly divorced from his fate. In five-hundred pages (that span over twenty years), he makes just one decision regarding the direction his own life will take. The state jails his mother; Miss Pynsent decides whether or not he will see his mother on her death-bed; Mr. Vetch determines that he shall become a book-binder; the Princess allows him to work (or not) or visit (or not) according to her leisure; and so forth. When Hyacinth finally does act, it is, of course, an act of tragedy and desperation.
Lastly, a word about Hyacinth's name. Maybe it's too obvious to point out, or maybe I'm just conditioned to think only puppies, dolls, or cartoon characters should be named after flowers, but Hyacinth has got to be among the oddest and least "strenuous" of names given to the heroes of tragic nineteenth-century novels. Moreover, the book in which he is protagonist does not even carry his own name. It is called The Princess Casamassima, after a character who enters and exits the story. By naming his hero Hyacinth, by placing him in a book that carries not his name but that of a wayward Italian princess, James does more than remind us of Hyacinth's alienation. Tragedies (Oedipus Rex, for example, or King Lear), like histories, pretend that universals about human experience may be gleaned by chronicling only humanity's most titled and wealthy. Because he is poor, Hyacinth is doomed not to be remembered by history. Because she is royalty, The Princess Casamassima is bound to be remembered. But the discrepancy between title and protagonist is ironic: At the threshold of the twentieth century, as the aristocracy is dismantled on both sides of the Atlantic, James reminds us that history must account for the ordinary blokes, too.
Generally, critics regard The Princess Casamassima as among James's weaker efforts. However, that's clearly a relative remark and one that I suppose indicates more than anything the depth and wealth of his catalogue. Had the book been written by a less prolific author, say Hamlin Garland or Sarah Orne Jewett, it would shine less like an oddly smooth pebble and more like the gem it really is.
As other reviewers have stated, the novel isn't driven by plot as much as character. In terms of movement and what literature teachers call "rising actions," there isn't much to report: Hyacinth Robinson, the book's protagonist, is the child of a French prostitute who is jailed shortly after his birth for murdering his aristocratic English fathor. He is raised by a spinster seamstress, Miss Pynsent, and her fiddle-playing neighbor, Mr. Vetch. Miss Pynsent takes pride in Hyacinth's aristocratic blood, and so though he grows up in one of London's slummier neighborhoods, he cultivates a sense of artistic taste and self-appreciation that drives an ever-widening wedge between his desires and aspirations and his living conditions and means. In his early twenties, desperate for the chance to avenge his social disenfranchisement and distinguish himself, Hyacinth joins an underground socialist movement. This makes him attractive to the Princess, whose newest hobby is exploring the adventurous London slums, and as the relationship between the two advances, the question arises: Will Hyacinth sacrifice his life to the cause that affects him less and less the more time he spends in the company of the Princess?
Ultimately, the book is about the psychology of extremist social movements. As Clinton Oliver points out in the introduction to the Harper Colophon edition, The Princess Casamassima was printed around the same time as the Haymarket riots in Chicago and the outbreak of a number of similar, violent protests on both sides of the Atlantic. As Arab Spring and other recent events attest, the questions James asks remain pertinent a hundred and twenty-five years later: Why do some members of the laboring classes strap bombs to their bodies or commit other acts of terrorism on behalf of organizations who treat them like faceless pawns? Why would other members of the laboring classes, the ones who relish art museums and theatre performances, give their lives to protect the aristocratic privilege that subjugates them? What leads people who are born into privilege to sacrifice the delights of their position and instead dedicate themselves to acts of charity or terrorism?
James asks more questions than he answers, and honestly I think that's what makes the book timeless; it's a novel that explores the mentality behind social movements rather than a participant in any movement itself (as compared to, say, Sinclair's The Jungle). But if James does offer any kind of answer, it has something to do with the alienation that is characteristic of capitalistic, modern, and urban living. For example, Lady Aurora and the Princess Casamassima are strangers in their well-to-do homes; the former is unattractive, the latter is American (and not terribly wealthy) by birth, and they're both women making their way in a masculinist society very much structured against them. They find their refuge, and their ability to be powerful, by contributing their privilege to aid the less fortunate.
Similarly, Hyacinth Robinson, the book's protagonist, is wholly divorced from his fate. In five-hundred pages (that span over twenty years), he makes just one decision regarding the direction his own life will take. The state jails his mother; Miss Pynsent decides whether or not he will see his mother on her death-bed; Mr. Vetch determines that he shall become a book-binder; the Princess allows him to work (or not) or visit (or not) according to her leisure; and so forth. When Hyacinth finally does act, it is, of course, an act of tragedy and desperation.
Lastly, a word about Hyacinth's name. Maybe it's too obvious to point out, or maybe I'm just conditioned to think only puppies, dolls, or cartoon characters should be named after flowers, but Hyacinth has got to be among the oddest and least "strenuous" of names given to the heroes of tragic nineteenth-century novels. Moreover, the book in which he is protagonist does not even carry his own name. It is called The Princess Casamassima, after a character who enters and exits the story. By naming his hero Hyacinth, by placing him in a book that carries not his name but that of a wayward Italian princess, James does more than remind us of Hyacinth's alienation. Tragedies (Oedipus Rex, for example, or King Lear), like histories, pretend that universals about human experience may be gleaned by chronicling only humanity's most titled and wealthy. Because he is poor, Hyacinth is doomed not to be remembered by history. Because she is royalty, The Princess Casamassima is bound to be remembered. But the discrepancy between title and protagonist is ironic: At the threshold of the twentieth century, as the aristocracy is dismantled on both sides of the Atlantic, James reminds us that history must account for the ordinary blokes, too.
January 27, 2016
This is Henry James version of the Secret Agent. Hyacinth Robinson (one of the worst names in all of literature?) becomes ensnared in some anarchist/terrorist plot. Since its James, its terribly vague exactly what this plot is, and not because we are involved with shadowy figures, but because James has an extreme reluctance to ever tell anyone a concrete detail. I'm sorry, but political plots almost necessarily require the concrete. So, we get nothing as brilliant as a scheme to blow up Greenwich Mean Time. Rather, Hyacinth knows that he is going to have to kill someone, sometime, somehow, maybe. But that's James for you, and I can basically put up with it.
Hyacinth is a bookbinder by profession. James elevates his work to a kind of art form. I tend to think that James did this because he had a hard time imagining what it would be like for someone to actually work for a living. But he could get on board with an artist. There are thematic reasons for this choice, since there is considerable tension between the aesthetic sensibility here and the practical, and Hyacinth seems to tread right on the border. In fact, its his consideration of aesthetics that drives his main choice and conversion in the book.
Hyacinth is a bastard, and its more than implied that part of his resentment for the aristocracy arises from his resentment of his own illegitimacy at the hands of his (supposedly) noble father. He not only falls in with a group of anarchists, but also falls for the title character, who is a parvenue Princess who wants to get involved in the movement. The movement doesn't trust her, but is glad to take her money. It seems that she is trying to overthrow the established order because her family forced her into a loveless marriage with an Italian prince.
The book unfolds with delicious irony. The movement doesn't trust the Princess, and so, when she renounces her fortune, they give her up and essentially force her back to her husband. So, she tries to join them, but when she stops being of use to them because she is no longer noble, she gets pushed away and forced back into her original cage.
Hyacinth commits himself to prove that he is a man of action, and then destroys himself rather than act. He seems to fall in love with two women in the book, but can't bring himself to declare himself to either of them, and so again is a man of action who simply does not act.
The main problem I have with the book is that, aside from the one moment where Hyacinth commits, he is essentially a passive character, being pushed along by others and by events. And of course, its James, so the events themselves are always a bit vague. In general, passive characters make for bad narratives, and James does a better job with this one than one might expect. But it's no Secret Agent.
Hyacinth is a bookbinder by profession. James elevates his work to a kind of art form. I tend to think that James did this because he had a hard time imagining what it would be like for someone to actually work for a living. But he could get on board with an artist. There are thematic reasons for this choice, since there is considerable tension between the aesthetic sensibility here and the practical, and Hyacinth seems to tread right on the border. In fact, its his consideration of aesthetics that drives his main choice and conversion in the book.
Hyacinth is a bastard, and its more than implied that part of his resentment for the aristocracy arises from his resentment of his own illegitimacy at the hands of his (supposedly) noble father. He not only falls in with a group of anarchists, but also falls for the title character, who is a parvenue Princess who wants to get involved in the movement. The movement doesn't trust her, but is glad to take her money. It seems that she is trying to overthrow the established order because her family forced her into a loveless marriage with an Italian prince.
The book unfolds with delicious irony. The movement doesn't trust the Princess, and so, when she renounces her fortune, they give her up and essentially force her back to her husband. So, she tries to join them, but when she stops being of use to them because she is no longer noble, she gets pushed away and forced back into her original cage.
Hyacinth commits himself to prove that he is a man of action, and then destroys himself rather than act. He seems to fall in love with two women in the book, but can't bring himself to declare himself to either of them, and so again is a man of action who simply does not act.
The main problem I have with the book is that, aside from the one moment where Hyacinth commits, he is essentially a passive character, being pushed along by others and by events. And of course, its James, so the events themselves are always a bit vague. In general, passive characters make for bad narratives, and James does a better job with this one than one might expect. But it's no Secret Agent.
November 20, 2011
Read in the 70s in a graduate-level seminar I took as an undergraduate English major.
In my less acute moments, momentarily forgetting the past, I tend to think of novelists' recycling characters as a case of franchising, the process in which anything that's found to sell is offered up for repeat consumption as if it were fried chicken. In truth, characters in whom the author and/or the public have an abiding interest have been reused for centuries. ( titled one of his plays , reckoning the number of previous stage treatments of his subject to have been 37.)
This novel provides an instance. The character of Christina Light, employed by James some 11 years earlier in , returns here, now estranged from the Italian prince to whom her mother had married her off at the end of that previous work.
Is this story really about politics, as some reviews here suggest? Yes and no. (That's a crude approximation of the multiplicity of answers to any significant question that James increasingly provided in his fiction, as his skills grew.) The Princess Casamassima does concern a revolutionary plot. But it's better summarized as follows, borrowed from an introductory note by Adrian Dover for "James has dissected not so much the revolutionaries based in London in the early 1880s but that tension between economic and æsthetic approaches to life, which is still, or perhaps even more, in play today."
By the way, the site from which I drew that, which I just discovered in preparing my comments, looks valuable for providing e-texts of many James works not easily available elsewhere, including all of the prefaces James wrote for the New York edition and even three of James's plays. Its main page is
In my less acute moments, momentarily forgetting the past, I tend to think of novelists' recycling characters as a case of franchising, the process in which anything that's found to sell is offered up for repeat consumption as if it were fried chicken. In truth, characters in whom the author and/or the public have an abiding interest have been reused for centuries. ( titled one of his plays , reckoning the number of previous stage treatments of his subject to have been 37.)
This novel provides an instance. The character of Christina Light, employed by James some 11 years earlier in , returns here, now estranged from the Italian prince to whom her mother had married her off at the end of that previous work.
Is this story really about politics, as some reviews here suggest? Yes and no. (That's a crude approximation of the multiplicity of answers to any significant question that James increasingly provided in his fiction, as his skills grew.) The Princess Casamassima does concern a revolutionary plot. But it's better summarized as follows, borrowed from an introductory note by Adrian Dover for "James has dissected not so much the revolutionaries based in London in the early 1880s but that tension between economic and æsthetic approaches to life, which is still, or perhaps even more, in play today."
By the way, the site from which I drew that, which I just discovered in preparing my comments, looks valuable for providing e-texts of many James works not easily available elsewhere, including all of the prefaces James wrote for the New York edition and even three of James's plays. Its main page is
May 25, 2020
Oh, boy. A novel of far left radical politics and anarcho-syndicalist terrorism... by Henry James?! This novel shares a plot dynamic that is too similar to , which James was working on concurrently. Namely, a love triangle that shows the protagonist torn between two opposing worldviews. Whereas in The Bostonians it was a young woman trapped between the older suffragist “friend� (*ahem*) and the younger, conservative male Southerner with whom she falls in love, this novel features a young working class man torn between the radical world of his male friend (although we later find out he is less of a friend than imagined) and an aristocratic beauty who introduces him to a posh world of wealth, all the while, ironically, claiming to want to help the working class in their struggle. That woman is, of course, the princess of the title, who is the classic rich girl wanting to “slum it� in consolidation with the working class...as long as she continues to receive her husband’s monthly allowance, naturally! Complications arise when both men fall for her and her husband finds out everything. As usual, James takes equal aim at all parties and political viewpoints, with the arch Madame Grandoni providing commentary and sly asides that seem to be in line with the author’s own thinking (which is a guess on my part).
James gives us an engaging beginning that introduces compelling characters, followed by a plodding middle section that should have been trimmed down significantly, and concluding with a final 100 pages that sufficiently wraps up the plot, but without the power I had been expecting. A memorable novel, if not a very great one.
James gives us an engaging beginning that introduces compelling characters, followed by a plodding middle section that should have been trimmed down significantly, and concluding with a final 100 pages that sufficiently wraps up the plot, but without the power I had been expecting. A memorable novel, if not a very great one.
Read
August 29, 2022Très long. Lu en diagonale et même pas arrivée à la fin. J’ai trouvé ça barbant même si des passages sont beaux.
Peut-être du à la traduction, qui sait? Je n’avais vraiment plus le courage
Peut-être du à la traduction, qui sait? Je n’avais vraiment plus le courage
June 22, 2024
I’m not usually into speculating on the sexual habits of authors, but if Henry James were alive today I’m guessing he’d be a gooner par excellence. The Princess Casamassima was James’s atypical political novel published the same year as James’s OTHER atypical political novel, The Bostonians, which was such a failure James said to himself “thank you sirs, may I have another� (maybe he’s into S&M too?). It’s a 200k word exercise in sexual tension as James edges the reader towards a climax at a rate of a stroke per page.
The novel revolves around Hyacinth, the bastard son of a prostitute mother who was imprisoned for having murdered his supposedly-aristocratic father. He’s raised by the friend of a prostitute named Miss Pynsent (“Pinnie�), a relatively poor but morally upright dressmaker. As a young man, Hyacinth will get a job as a bookbinder and become involved with political revolutionaries, including the quietly confident Paul Muniment, who spends his days taking care of his bed-ridden sister, Rosy. Though initially passionate for the cause, Hyacinth will soon be lured away by his appreciation for aesthetic beauty thanks to the Princess Casamassima, a fiercely independent spirit whose own interests are in the lives of the poor and the goings-on of the revolutionaries.
At the novel’s core is the divided soul of Hyacinth, which can be interpreted in any number of ways. The first way is as a coded façade for James himself, an author of such titanic intelligence that, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, he couldn’t help but perpetually hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time. James kept his own sexuality private, hinting in letters at his erotic attraction to both men and women (how much of this was rhetorical flattery and how much an expression of genuine feeling is hard to say). There’s a similar ambiguity with Hyacinth, whose attractions to the various male and female figures in his life seem similarly divided in their source, with the Princess representing the perfection of aesthetic beauty, Millicent, his neighborhood friend from childhood, representing the feminine joie de vivre, while Paul Muniment seems to represent the purposeful, cool-headed determination that Hyacinth lacks.
Another method of interpreting Hyacinth’s divided souls is via the political polarization. Hyacinth’s visit to his mother’s deathbed in prison is arguably the formative experience of his youth, and will drill into his soul his identity as a member of the lower working classes. Witnessing such penury and suffering is a natural enough initiation into the revolutionary politics that aim at rectifying those unfair conditions; yet Hyacinth also finds himself inexorably drawn towards the aesthetic and beautiful (as was James himself). When he’s invited into the world of the Princess Casamassima, herself an ineffably beautiful creature, he can’t help but feel that such fine things are almost exclusively the possessions and creations of the upper classes, and that for all the hurt caused by such class divisions that such beauty is worth saving, that, indeed, it’s one of the few things that make life worth living.
Another method interpreting the division is that of the harshness of reality versus the beauty of the imagination. That division is already hinted at in Hyacinth’s parentage, in which he’s early on forced to confront the bleak reality of his mother’s suffering, all the while his imagination is fed about his high-born aristocratic father by Pinnie, who very much believes Hyacinth was born for something greater than a life of menial toil and hardships. There is in his early revolutionary spirit the desire to elevate other people into that imaginary, Edenic realm of the beautiful; but as is often the case, life tends to disillusion one to the dismal prospects of such a vision ever coming to fruition. If anything, Hyacinth finds himself contempt for the “insensitive� people who care not for finer things and, indeed, seemed resigned to their condition.
Near the end of Book 1, James himself elegantly lays out Hyacinth’s own perception of this political and spiritual war within himself: “He was liable to moods in which the sense of exclusion from all that he would have liked most to enjoy in life settled upon him like a pall. They had a bitterness, but they were not invidious � they were not moods of vengeance, of imaginary spoliation: they were simply states of paralysing melancholy, of infinite sad reflection, in which he felt that in this world of effort and suffering life was endurable, the spirit able to expand, only in the best conditions, and that a sordid struggle, in which one should go down to the grave without having tasted them, was not worth the misery it would cost, the dull demoralisation it would entail� It was not so much that he wished to enjoy as that he wished to know; his desire was not to be pampered, but to be initiated� He wanted to drive in every carriage, to mount on every horse, to feel on his arm the hand of every pretty woman in the place. In the midst of this his sense was vivid that he belonged to the class whom the upper ten thousand, as they passed, didn’t so much as rest their eyes upon for a quarter of a second� they only reminded him of the high human walls, the deep gulfs of tradition, the steep embankments of privilege and dense layers of stupidity, which fenced him off from social recognition� And this was not the fruit of a morbid vanity on his part, or of a jealousy that could not be intelligent; his personal discomfort was the result of an exquisite admiration for what he had missed� At moments he was aghast when he reflected that the cause he had secretly espoused, the cause from which M. Poupin and Paul Muniment (especially the latter) had within the last few months drawn aside the curtain, proposed to itself to bring about a state of things in which that particular scene would be impossible. It made him even rather faint to think that he must choose; that he couldn’t (with any respect for his own consistency) work, underground, for the enthronement of the democracy, and continue to enjoy, in however platonic a manner, a spectacle which rested on a hideous social inequality. He must either suffer with the people, as he had suffered before, or he must apologise to others, as he sometimes came so near doing to himself, for the rich; inasmuch as the day was certainly near when these two mighty forces would come to a death-grapple.�
The day may be certainly near in Hyacinth’s mind, but James lets this tension subtly simmer until it rises to a boil over 150k words later. The crux on which everything will turn will ultimately be Hyacinth pledging an oath to Paul’s revolutionary cause, which will obligate him to carry out some crucial mission at some unknown time in the future. One of the novel’s central mysteries (and there are many; James hasn’t yet arrived at his impressionistic later style in which the impossibility of knowing people will be rendered in torturously ambiguous syntax and style, but he is clearly already concerned with the enigmas within us all) is why Hyacinth ends up making such a pledge, and why he feels obliged to stick with it. My own read is that Hyacinth’s real devotion is to Paul—their relationship being perhaps the only “real� love affair of the novel—who represents everything Hyacinth is not and wishes he was, and so long as Paul remains steadfastly devoted to the revolutionary cause, Hyacinth will follow. Hyacinth’s devotion itself could be read as his own desperate desire for an identity, and the purpose attendant upon such identity, that’s not as fragile as his own; and Paul’s imperturbable demeanor and unwavering sense of purpose is precisely that.
Paul himself is something of an enigma, and were it not for the tenderness with which he cares for his sister it would be easy to see him as a kind of subtle villain who’s willing to let Hyacinth devote himself to a cause Paul knows Hyacinth’s heart isn’t into. It’s questionable how much Paul is knowingly manipulative versus how much his moral sins are those of omission, of failing to disabuse Hyacinth of the notions he has about their friendship and the cause itself. That friendship will lead to perhaps the most subtly heartbreaking moment of the novel. The pair go for a boat ride around London and spend a day conversing at the park, upon which Paul tells Hyacinth that his outburst at the local club (among the impotent local anarchists) is what inspired him to finally recommend him for a more prominent position. Hyacinth replies with: ‘I did jump at it � upon my word I did; and it was just what I was looking for. That’s all correct!� said Hyacinth, cheerfully, as they went forward. There was a strain of heroism in these words � of heroism of which the sense was not conveyed to Muniment by a vibration in their interlocked arms. Hyacinth did not make the reflection that he was infernally literal; he dismissed the sentimental problem that had bothered him; he condoned, excused, admired � he merged himself, resting happy for the time in the consciousness that Paul was a grand fellow, that friendship was a purer feeling than love, and that there was an immense deal of affection between them. He did not even observe at that moment that it was preponderantly on his own side.� There’s even some question as to whether Paul’s own devotion to the cause isn’t more apparent than actual. He says multiple time that his joy is in quietude and placidity and he certainly doesn’t undertake any revolutionary actions. The ultimate tragedy of the novel may be that in Hyacinth’s sensitivity towards the aesthetic surface of people and things—whether it’s Millie’s vulgar beauty, the Princess’s refined beauty, or Paul’s unflappable devotion and calm—he’s equally insensitive to the true nature of them.
If the men of the novel are all talk when it comes to their revolutionary commitments, it’s the women that seem to walk the walk. Early on we’re introduced to Lady Aurora, who has devoted her time, if not most of her life, to helping the poor. We first meet her at the Muniments where spends much time visiting and conversing with Rosy. Though not an active revolutionary, Aurora is at the very least seeking to ameliorate the hardships that attend to poverty. The Princess Casamassima is, like Paul, something of an enigma at first. She’s first introduced at a theater by Captain Sholto, who informs Hyacinth the Princess would like to speak to him. The Princess has taken up an interest in revolutionary politics and the life of the poof people in London, and because Sholto had seen Hyacinth at the local club for such revolutionaries, Sholto felt he would be a good representative. Hyacinth and The Princess’s relationship will arguably be the flip-side to the Hyacinth-Paul relationship. Early on it seems as if Paul is the genuine revolutionary while The Princess is just capriciously playing with the idea out of boredom (this is her attendant, Madame Grandoni’s perception of the matter). However, The Princess will have arguably the most radical character development within the novel in which she casts off her aristocratic life, in large part as an act of rebellion against her controlling husband. The higher value she places on freedom is a telling contrast to the high value that Hyacinth places on the beauty of the materialistic objects she possesses; but The Princess recognizes something that Hyacinth doesn’t, and that’s that such a life can be just as much of a torturous imprisonment as the one in which Hyacinth’s mother suffered, and in such imprisonment those objects become no more than bars of a cell.
There is a reason that James named the novel after The Princess rather than Hyacinth, and though the “revolutions� enacted by her and Lady Aurora are more ostensibly personal than political, one is very much reminded of the slogan that the personal IS political. It’s also arguable that such action even on the personal level is infinitely better and ultimately more important than all of the grand ideas of Paul, Hyacinth, and the shadowy group of revolutionaries who spend more time talking and planning and complaining than acting. Hyacinth’s own “act� will be the tragic denouement of the novel, and while it’s debatable how well James pulls it off (he wasn’t much of a novelist for dramatic set-pieces), what’s less deniable is how appropriate it is given Hyacinth’s previous afflictions with melancholy and given his state late in the novel in which all of his ties with friends and family have been, at least to his mind, sufficiently severed, with Paul and The Princess spending most of their time together and even Millie appearing to be intimately friendly with Captain Sholto, who’d become something of a nemesis to Hyacinth.
Like The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima proved divisive among critics. While The Bostonians reputation was much worse when it premiered and was rehabilitated much later, The Princess Casamassima was better liked in its time, but has become one of the lesser-known of James’s impressive oeuvre. For all its richness and complexity it’s an easy novel to find flaw with. The paucity of incidences leads to the impression that for long stretches James’s narrative is just spinning its wheels. Much like The Bostonians, this especially affects the latter half of the novel once James has established and developed his psychological portraits about as much as he possibly can. In particular, much of Books 4 and 5 feel like lengthy recaps that collapse into motionless static. I’m very much of the mind that there’s probably a ~140k novel here that’s every bit the masterpiece that The Portrait of a Lady is. Still, a large chunk of this novel is James at his best, orchestrating his psychological symphony of character portraits with an unparalleled level of depth and nuance. I’ve to read an author more attuned to the subtleties of consciousness, and however much James’s novels sometimes lack the thrill of an external life being lived, they thrum with an equally thrilling life of the mind and the multitude of ways in which such consciousnesses interact with each other and reflect upon themselves.
The novel revolves around Hyacinth, the bastard son of a prostitute mother who was imprisoned for having murdered his supposedly-aristocratic father. He’s raised by the friend of a prostitute named Miss Pynsent (“Pinnie�), a relatively poor but morally upright dressmaker. As a young man, Hyacinth will get a job as a bookbinder and become involved with political revolutionaries, including the quietly confident Paul Muniment, who spends his days taking care of his bed-ridden sister, Rosy. Though initially passionate for the cause, Hyacinth will soon be lured away by his appreciation for aesthetic beauty thanks to the Princess Casamassima, a fiercely independent spirit whose own interests are in the lives of the poor and the goings-on of the revolutionaries.
At the novel’s core is the divided soul of Hyacinth, which can be interpreted in any number of ways. The first way is as a coded façade for James himself, an author of such titanic intelligence that, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, he couldn’t help but perpetually hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time. James kept his own sexuality private, hinting in letters at his erotic attraction to both men and women (how much of this was rhetorical flattery and how much an expression of genuine feeling is hard to say). There’s a similar ambiguity with Hyacinth, whose attractions to the various male and female figures in his life seem similarly divided in their source, with the Princess representing the perfection of aesthetic beauty, Millicent, his neighborhood friend from childhood, representing the feminine joie de vivre, while Paul Muniment seems to represent the purposeful, cool-headed determination that Hyacinth lacks.
Another method of interpreting Hyacinth’s divided souls is via the political polarization. Hyacinth’s visit to his mother’s deathbed in prison is arguably the formative experience of his youth, and will drill into his soul his identity as a member of the lower working classes. Witnessing such penury and suffering is a natural enough initiation into the revolutionary politics that aim at rectifying those unfair conditions; yet Hyacinth also finds himself inexorably drawn towards the aesthetic and beautiful (as was James himself). When he’s invited into the world of the Princess Casamassima, herself an ineffably beautiful creature, he can’t help but feel that such fine things are almost exclusively the possessions and creations of the upper classes, and that for all the hurt caused by such class divisions that such beauty is worth saving, that, indeed, it’s one of the few things that make life worth living.
Another method interpreting the division is that of the harshness of reality versus the beauty of the imagination. That division is already hinted at in Hyacinth’s parentage, in which he’s early on forced to confront the bleak reality of his mother’s suffering, all the while his imagination is fed about his high-born aristocratic father by Pinnie, who very much believes Hyacinth was born for something greater than a life of menial toil and hardships. There is in his early revolutionary spirit the desire to elevate other people into that imaginary, Edenic realm of the beautiful; but as is often the case, life tends to disillusion one to the dismal prospects of such a vision ever coming to fruition. If anything, Hyacinth finds himself contempt for the “insensitive� people who care not for finer things and, indeed, seemed resigned to their condition.
Near the end of Book 1, James himself elegantly lays out Hyacinth’s own perception of this political and spiritual war within himself: “He was liable to moods in which the sense of exclusion from all that he would have liked most to enjoy in life settled upon him like a pall. They had a bitterness, but they were not invidious � they were not moods of vengeance, of imaginary spoliation: they were simply states of paralysing melancholy, of infinite sad reflection, in which he felt that in this world of effort and suffering life was endurable, the spirit able to expand, only in the best conditions, and that a sordid struggle, in which one should go down to the grave without having tasted them, was not worth the misery it would cost, the dull demoralisation it would entail� It was not so much that he wished to enjoy as that he wished to know; his desire was not to be pampered, but to be initiated� He wanted to drive in every carriage, to mount on every horse, to feel on his arm the hand of every pretty woman in the place. In the midst of this his sense was vivid that he belonged to the class whom the upper ten thousand, as they passed, didn’t so much as rest their eyes upon for a quarter of a second� they only reminded him of the high human walls, the deep gulfs of tradition, the steep embankments of privilege and dense layers of stupidity, which fenced him off from social recognition� And this was not the fruit of a morbid vanity on his part, or of a jealousy that could not be intelligent; his personal discomfort was the result of an exquisite admiration for what he had missed� At moments he was aghast when he reflected that the cause he had secretly espoused, the cause from which M. Poupin and Paul Muniment (especially the latter) had within the last few months drawn aside the curtain, proposed to itself to bring about a state of things in which that particular scene would be impossible. It made him even rather faint to think that he must choose; that he couldn’t (with any respect for his own consistency) work, underground, for the enthronement of the democracy, and continue to enjoy, in however platonic a manner, a spectacle which rested on a hideous social inequality. He must either suffer with the people, as he had suffered before, or he must apologise to others, as he sometimes came so near doing to himself, for the rich; inasmuch as the day was certainly near when these two mighty forces would come to a death-grapple.�
The day may be certainly near in Hyacinth’s mind, but James lets this tension subtly simmer until it rises to a boil over 150k words later. The crux on which everything will turn will ultimately be Hyacinth pledging an oath to Paul’s revolutionary cause, which will obligate him to carry out some crucial mission at some unknown time in the future. One of the novel’s central mysteries (and there are many; James hasn’t yet arrived at his impressionistic later style in which the impossibility of knowing people will be rendered in torturously ambiguous syntax and style, but he is clearly already concerned with the enigmas within us all) is why Hyacinth ends up making such a pledge, and why he feels obliged to stick with it. My own read is that Hyacinth’s real devotion is to Paul—their relationship being perhaps the only “real� love affair of the novel—who represents everything Hyacinth is not and wishes he was, and so long as Paul remains steadfastly devoted to the revolutionary cause, Hyacinth will follow. Hyacinth’s devotion itself could be read as his own desperate desire for an identity, and the purpose attendant upon such identity, that’s not as fragile as his own; and Paul’s imperturbable demeanor and unwavering sense of purpose is precisely that.
Paul himself is something of an enigma, and were it not for the tenderness with which he cares for his sister it would be easy to see him as a kind of subtle villain who’s willing to let Hyacinth devote himself to a cause Paul knows Hyacinth’s heart isn’t into. It’s questionable how much Paul is knowingly manipulative versus how much his moral sins are those of omission, of failing to disabuse Hyacinth of the notions he has about their friendship and the cause itself. That friendship will lead to perhaps the most subtly heartbreaking moment of the novel. The pair go for a boat ride around London and spend a day conversing at the park, upon which Paul tells Hyacinth that his outburst at the local club (among the impotent local anarchists) is what inspired him to finally recommend him for a more prominent position. Hyacinth replies with: ‘I did jump at it � upon my word I did; and it was just what I was looking for. That’s all correct!� said Hyacinth, cheerfully, as they went forward. There was a strain of heroism in these words � of heroism of which the sense was not conveyed to Muniment by a vibration in their interlocked arms. Hyacinth did not make the reflection that he was infernally literal; he dismissed the sentimental problem that had bothered him; he condoned, excused, admired � he merged himself, resting happy for the time in the consciousness that Paul was a grand fellow, that friendship was a purer feeling than love, and that there was an immense deal of affection between them. He did not even observe at that moment that it was preponderantly on his own side.� There’s even some question as to whether Paul’s own devotion to the cause isn’t more apparent than actual. He says multiple time that his joy is in quietude and placidity and he certainly doesn’t undertake any revolutionary actions. The ultimate tragedy of the novel may be that in Hyacinth’s sensitivity towards the aesthetic surface of people and things—whether it’s Millie’s vulgar beauty, the Princess’s refined beauty, or Paul’s unflappable devotion and calm—he’s equally insensitive to the true nature of them.
If the men of the novel are all talk when it comes to their revolutionary commitments, it’s the women that seem to walk the walk. Early on we’re introduced to Lady Aurora, who has devoted her time, if not most of her life, to helping the poor. We first meet her at the Muniments where spends much time visiting and conversing with Rosy. Though not an active revolutionary, Aurora is at the very least seeking to ameliorate the hardships that attend to poverty. The Princess Casamassima is, like Paul, something of an enigma at first. She’s first introduced at a theater by Captain Sholto, who informs Hyacinth the Princess would like to speak to him. The Princess has taken up an interest in revolutionary politics and the life of the poof people in London, and because Sholto had seen Hyacinth at the local club for such revolutionaries, Sholto felt he would be a good representative. Hyacinth and The Princess’s relationship will arguably be the flip-side to the Hyacinth-Paul relationship. Early on it seems as if Paul is the genuine revolutionary while The Princess is just capriciously playing with the idea out of boredom (this is her attendant, Madame Grandoni’s perception of the matter). However, The Princess will have arguably the most radical character development within the novel in which she casts off her aristocratic life, in large part as an act of rebellion against her controlling husband. The higher value she places on freedom is a telling contrast to the high value that Hyacinth places on the beauty of the materialistic objects she possesses; but The Princess recognizes something that Hyacinth doesn’t, and that’s that such a life can be just as much of a torturous imprisonment as the one in which Hyacinth’s mother suffered, and in such imprisonment those objects become no more than bars of a cell.
There is a reason that James named the novel after The Princess rather than Hyacinth, and though the “revolutions� enacted by her and Lady Aurora are more ostensibly personal than political, one is very much reminded of the slogan that the personal IS political. It’s also arguable that such action even on the personal level is infinitely better and ultimately more important than all of the grand ideas of Paul, Hyacinth, and the shadowy group of revolutionaries who spend more time talking and planning and complaining than acting. Hyacinth’s own “act� will be the tragic denouement of the novel, and while it’s debatable how well James pulls it off (he wasn’t much of a novelist for dramatic set-pieces), what’s less deniable is how appropriate it is given Hyacinth’s previous afflictions with melancholy and given his state late in the novel in which all of his ties with friends and family have been, at least to his mind, sufficiently severed, with Paul and The Princess spending most of their time together and even Millie appearing to be intimately friendly with Captain Sholto, who’d become something of a nemesis to Hyacinth.
Like The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima proved divisive among critics. While The Bostonians reputation was much worse when it premiered and was rehabilitated much later, The Princess Casamassima was better liked in its time, but has become one of the lesser-known of James’s impressive oeuvre. For all its richness and complexity it’s an easy novel to find flaw with. The paucity of incidences leads to the impression that for long stretches James’s narrative is just spinning its wheels. Much like The Bostonians, this especially affects the latter half of the novel once James has established and developed his psychological portraits about as much as he possibly can. In particular, much of Books 4 and 5 feel like lengthy recaps that collapse into motionless static. I’m very much of the mind that there’s probably a ~140k novel here that’s every bit the masterpiece that The Portrait of a Lady is. Still, a large chunk of this novel is James at his best, orchestrating his psychological symphony of character portraits with an unparalleled level of depth and nuance. I’ve to read an author more attuned to the subtleties of consciousness, and however much James’s novels sometimes lack the thrill of an external life being lived, they thrum with an equally thrilling life of the mind and the multitude of ways in which such consciousnesses interact with each other and reflect upon themselves.
October 5, 2017
This 1886 novel is not going to appeal to everyone. But I loved it. I love the richness and hesitancy of mid-period Henry James - note that the Black Penguin edition uses James' original 1880s text, not his later 1910s revision, which is more convoluted and obscure than the original. I also loved the beautiful,sad, and short hero, Hyacinth Robinson, a mild bookbinder blessed and burdened with an exquisite consciousness!
This is said to be the most "Dickensian" of Henry James' major novels. It certainly revels in detailing the fogs and smudges and gaslit pubs and bold "New Women" of late 19th century London. It also is a boldly political text that is quite relevant to the world in 2017, dealing with terrorism, conspiracies, and individuals caught up in affairs far beyond their comprehension. Parts of the book remind me of an Arthur Conan Doyle story, or the Joseph Conrad of "The Secret Agent." At the same time, it's undeniably a Jamesian novel with mysteries of motivation and gaps in the action and completely "unrealistic" dialogue between the major characters -- but if you really want "realism" I'd recommend that you stick to Anthony Trollope.
This is said to be the most "Dickensian" of Henry James' major novels. It certainly revels in detailing the fogs and smudges and gaslit pubs and bold "New Women" of late 19th century London. It also is a boldly political text that is quite relevant to the world in 2017, dealing with terrorism, conspiracies, and individuals caught up in affairs far beyond their comprehension. Parts of the book remind me of an Arthur Conan Doyle story, or the Joseph Conrad of "The Secret Agent." At the same time, it's undeniably a Jamesian novel with mysteries of motivation and gaps in the action and completely "unrealistic" dialogue between the major characters -- but if you really want "realism" I'd recommend that you stick to Anthony Trollope.
September 8, 2021
It resembles a recent, poorly reviewed and quite a bit superior novel: John Updike’s TERRORIST, which, among other things, is well-behaved enough to spend its last forty-odd pages racing toward a genuinely breathtaking climax. Not so here: James� inquiry into the encounter between a terrorist Princess and a smitten plebeian boy beauty sounds Proustian depths from the get, and scarcely leaves perceptions within perceptions to skate to the finish line. Yet as a portrait of the emotional vagaries of upper-crust radicalism, and even more so as a microfiber-attentive snapshot of two lovely young people in love, it is top-shelf James. If we only we didn’t have to deal with the Dickensian cockneys that the master deems salt-of-the-earth regular folk!
March 18, 2024
Henry James' greatest insight in The Princess Casamassima is a detailed portrayal of the relations between the European radical left and the aristocracy. At the same time as the revolutionaries want to tear down and reshape the world, they yearn to be accepted by high society; on the other hand, the progressive aristocrats go to great lengths to fraternize with the militants -- from an earnest belief in social change or from jaded boredom -- but ultimately drop them at their manic-depressive whim. The "ulcer of envy" and radical chic: James might be uncharitable, but he's demonstrably perceptive.
Because this is The Master we're talking about, the novel is exceptionally composed in all its finest details of description, pacing, prose, and tone. Psychological, sexual, and moral depth -- you betcha. But the plot he whiffs: after a brilliant set-up, he writes hundreds of pages of his characters getting introduced to one another, one by one; then some solid development; then some more of characters coyly inquiring about other characters; then a loud pop at the end.
Because this is The Master we're talking about, the novel is exceptionally composed in all its finest details of description, pacing, prose, and tone. Psychological, sexual, and moral depth -- you betcha. But the plot he whiffs: after a brilliant set-up, he writes hundreds of pages of his characters getting introduced to one another, one by one; then some solid development; then some more of characters coyly inquiring about other characters; then a loud pop at the end.
January 10, 2011
Le oscure origini di un ragazzino, si dice che sia figlio di un pari di Inghilterra, ma sono soltanto illazioni, l'unica certezza è la sua nobiltà d'animo, evidente agli occhi di tutti in quanto risalta maggiormente nel contesto dei bassifondi londinesi.
Le idee rivoluzionarie del popolo fanno breccia nel suo animo, del resto è figlio di un lord..., la vita con lui ha un conto in sospeso, è stata ingiusta ed egli non può perdere l'occasione per vendicarsi di quel bel mondo che lo ha respinto.
Poi, un incontro inaspettato, una persona lontana anni luce dal suo ambiente e dal suo mondo, una nobildonna con un interesse fuori dal comune per il popolo e per quelle idee socialiste sempre più presenti. Quelle stesse idee che vorrebbero vedere lei e i suoi pari sul patibolo.
Tra di loro si instaura un legame, una complicità che sconvolgerà , in maniera irreparabile, la vita del nostro eroe.
Da molti è ritenuto un libro sull'anarchia e sulla perdita di ideali, per me, più che altro, è un libro sulla scoperta e l'esaltazione, sulla disillusione e il tradimento, sull'amore e la morte.
Le idee rivoluzionarie del popolo fanno breccia nel suo animo, del resto è figlio di un lord..., la vita con lui ha un conto in sospeso, è stata ingiusta ed egli non può perdere l'occasione per vendicarsi di quel bel mondo che lo ha respinto.
Poi, un incontro inaspettato, una persona lontana anni luce dal suo ambiente e dal suo mondo, una nobildonna con un interesse fuori dal comune per il popolo e per quelle idee socialiste sempre più presenti. Quelle stesse idee che vorrebbero vedere lei e i suoi pari sul patibolo.
Tra di loro si instaura un legame, una complicità che sconvolgerà , in maniera irreparabile, la vita del nostro eroe.
Da molti è ritenuto un libro sull'anarchia e sulla perdita di ideali, per me, più che altro, è un libro sulla scoperta e l'esaltazione, sulla disillusione e il tradimento, sull'amore e la morte.
October 31, 2018
It’s a bizarre book by James� standards, lacking his two recurring characters—the Old World and the New. With its themes of revolution and plucky urchins in the London slums, it’s almost Dickensian. But in the end it is a James novel, and there’s a lot to love—the delightful Madame Grandoni for one, and his customary marrying of razor wit and aesthetic fripperies in the most satisfying turns of phrase. Christina Light reappears as the eponymous Princess, and although somewhat less interesting than she was in Roderick Hudson she at least retains her compelling uniquesness (without which, the novel would come off as a lot more derivative than it did). I feel the main problem of this book is its indecisive teetering between being an observation of social revolution and being James� classic novel of aesthetics and high society. I’ll admit to being somewhat more partial to the latter (it’s James, not Dickens!) but there was a certain poignancy to the whole thing.
December 21, 2020
The funny thing about this novel is that people (both when it was published and today) seem to dislike it. It is no secret that I adore Henry James, but really, I loved this book. It is a great introduction to James in my opinion. The writing is good, the descriptions plentiful. What works well is that you can see Jame and his reluctance to reveal all to the reader. This goes to a near painful extremes in the latter novels (esp Wings of the Dove), but in The Princess, it is far more subtle.
The politics may not be accurate or the best but who cares. Enjoy this book for the great character study and descriptions of London.
All this said, the end did come a bit abruptly.
The politics may not be accurate or the best but who cares. Enjoy this book for the great character study and descriptions of London.
All this said, the end did come a bit abruptly.
November 2, 2013
If Conrad had been Henry James, he'd have written this, instead of The Secret Agent. As he wasn't, he didn't. But James did, for which I am grateful.
August 15, 2022
The foibles of revolutionary politics.
October 7, 2018
The problem with “The Princess Cassamassima� is that it’s a deeply political book written by somebody who, on the evidence, doesn’t really care about politics and only knows one thing about it, namely that socialism is wrong (just don't ask why though). Many of the relationships in the book are deeply political, but James has no real idea what this might mean, and as a result these relationships simply don’t make much sense, with inevitable negative consequences. The Paul-Hyacinth relationship suffers the most from James’s lack of understanding and refusal to learn. Paul has, supposedly, cast a spell over Hyacinth, holding him enthralled despite Paul’s apparent lack of charisma. Politically speaking, this is understandable: Paul holds an important position in the political group that Hyacinth has found himself attracted to, and his understanding and political thinking is far more advanced than Hyacinth’s. He could easily hold Hyacinth spellbound by explaining the origins of the injustice and poverty that Hyacinth sees all around him, and then demonstrating how the group he is a leading member of can solve things. In short, his hold over Hyacinth would be due to his ability to use ideology to explain both how the world works and how it can be made better. But because James doesn’t know what a propaganda-by-the-deed anarchist actually believes and can’t be bothered to learn, we never get to see how this relationship might work. Instead, on the occasions when Muniment does talk politics, he only speaks in vague generalities of democracy and revolution. When Hyacinth asks him a direct question, instead of inspirational speeches or detailed explanations he gets more generalities or, even worse, admissions that Paul doesn’t know, something that a committed ideologue like Paul would almost certainly never say. In particular, when Hyacinth starts having second thoughts about committing his own act of propaganda by the deed, Paul has nothing for him: he can’t even tell Hyacinth what the act is supposed to accomplish. Under the circumstances, the idea that Hyacinth would be entirely enthralled by Paul � who never really shows to advantage in any other fashion � is ludicrous, and yet without Hyacinth’s worship of Paul the book falls apart.
The Princess, too, suffers, again because James’s lack of knowledge about politics means that he has no real idea of what a rich, titled woman might do in it. As a delicately-nurtured female, the Princess clearly can’t strike a blow against the system herself � the idea is never even proposed � but after that James is out of ideas. The fact that the Princess ends up essentially slumming, living as one of the lower middle classes (but with luxuries like fancy tea that they could never afford) so that she might understand the people, is not simply because James wants to demonstrate that she really has no comprehension of the lower classes: it’s because he has no conception of anything she could do for the cause, other than donating money, of course. The idea that she could organize workers, or set up a school, or write muckraking or polemical articles, or campaign for a parliamentary candidate, apparently never enters his head. But it’s not just the Princess: we don’t see anybody doing any of these things. As far as James knows, politics consists of getting together to complain, and plotting to carry out political killings, with no ground in between. And while the members of Paul’s cell are presumably devoted to the idea of revolution via assassination, Hyacinth is young and politically unformed, with an interest in socialism: it hardly seems likely that he could avoid, at the very least, going to the occasional meeting or reading socialist literature and periodicals. After all, he’s in London in the 1880s, home to both Marx (who died in 1883) and Engels, and founding location of the International Workingmen’s Association, better known as the First International (though it had dissolved due to internal disputes in 1872). There was no shortage of radical politics available to choose from, and even though the other members of the cell were unlikely to stop their plotting to start agitating for an 8-hour day, they would surely not ignore the other leftists in the city, even if it were only to explain why their approach was superior to trade unionism or the actions of the British Social Democratic Federation. And this is while still treating them as more or less caricatures: in reality, even anarchists involved in assassination plots often participated in other struggles as well, while the supposedly ultra-dedicated members of the cell spend most of their time doing nothing resembling political activity.
In fact, the lack of political interest on the part of these hardened revolutionaries may be the most unbelievable part of the whole book. They never discuss politics or economics among themselves, it seems, and never read political works or periodicals. (Only the Princess is ever seen, once, studying some weighty tome, probably Marx's "Capital".) Perhaps this is because they are so invested in their terrorist plotting that they have no time to spare for anything else, and yet over the course of the book � a period of well over a year � they put together exactly one plot, and most of the organization of it is done by other people. This lack of interest in terrorist plotting is only one of the unusual traits displayed by these terrorist plotters. There’s also a total lack of concern over the police � only the Princess’s long-suffering companion/mother figure, Madame Grandoni, ever worries that the cell might be busted by the cops � and a general indifference to the prospect of being caught. They don’t seem to be quite as strongly committed to their beliefs as you would expect from wild-eyed radicals, either. When Hyacinth starts to move away from his previous politics, not only is there no concern over the possibility that, since he is no longer sympathetic to the activities of the group, he might turn them in, there’s not even the personal feeling of betrayal that one would expect from a group of dedicated fighters for the people when they learn that a comrade in the struggle was abandoning the fight. When Hyacinth suggests that maybe he doesn’t want to shoot anybody any more, nobody storms at him for his callous disregard of the fate of the working masses or denounces him for treason to the noble cause of human liberation. Instead, he is told that if he doesn’t want to carry out his task any more, he doesn’t have to. By contrast, what threatens to destroy his friendships with the other members of the cell is precisely his determination to continue with the task: even though he no longer believes in the idea of striking a blow on behalf of struggling humanity, he feels honor-bound to go ahead with it since he promised that he would, while his friends, despite their supposedly deep commitment to the cause, which would presumably be forwarded regardless of the assassin's ideological leanings, try to persuade him not to.
What makes the book readable, despite these far from minor flaws, is the character of Hyacinth. He is a brilliant creation, a young man whose foster mother injects a dose of romance into an otherwise fairly grim existence � she scrapes by as a seamstress in a London slum, family-less except for Hyacinth and friendless except for the violinist Vetch, who lives next door � by fondly imagining that Hyacinth’s father is the nobleman his mother, a seamstress and, it is implied, part-time prostitute, was imprisoned for killing (she presumably killed him in a jealous rage but there’s zero evidence of Hyacinth’s parentage), and hence that at any moment he may be swept away by his noble relatives to the life of luxury and privilege his birth demands. (The usual treatment of bastard children by the nobility is of course much less favorable, but it’s hard to begrudge Pinnie her fantasy.) Set apart from the other inhabitants of the slum by his origins, it’s no surprise that Hyacinth would embrace (even while denying that he does so) his mythical noble father, especially once he discovers that his real mother is a jailed French murderess. (The scene in which, at the age of 10, he meets her for the first time � on her deathbed, no less � and is both repelled by her appearance and unable to communicate since he speaks no French, is poignant, despite its melodrama, and firmly establishes this aspect of his character.) Naturally then young Robinson grows up believing that he has been robbed of his rightful destiny, and ends up joining a radical socialist group. However, on a trip to Paris following Pinnie’s death, made with her and Vetch's life savings (Vetch, also family-less, regards him almost as a son), he is finally able to experience the aristocratic lifestyle he semi-consciously believes he should always have had, and comes to the realization that envy of his supposed aristocratic relations has been a driving force in his politics. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he then goes on to assume that everybody else is also driven by envy, a form of projection that is perhaps not unexpected for a really rather naive young man. This is all very well, and quite well executed: the problem is that one gets the impression that James wants you to believe that Hyacinth has really deduced an important truth about the socialist movement. This truth is spelled out in a letter Hyacinth sends to Vetch from France: alas, it’s difficult to really take as a serious intervention a document which proclaims that the fate of the vast majority of people is to suffer in poverty, and then accuses anybody who wants to change this situation of engaging in a form of envy politics. The idea that the desire of the starving to be fed and the homeless to be housed is nothing more than envy of people who have food and shelter is ludicrous. Robinson’s conception of redistribution is no less ridiculous, as it focuses more on art than on, say, money, food, land, or work: his list of objects to be redistributed includes great works of art but omits great fortunes. Again, this is all well within character, but James is constantly nudging you to think that Hyacinth is intelligent and thoughtful and has really cracked the code on socialism, at which point the book starts to descend into propaganda.
The nominally non-political secondary characters are also, alas, mainly used for propaganda purposes. Lady Aurora is a saint, here only to show up the Princess: the latter can’t even conceive of the idea that she might help the poor whom she is so interested in until Lady Aurora offers to show her some ways to do so through charity. Millie’s role is to show up the Princess from the other side, as the potential love interest who represents real life and, not coincidentally, comes from the same social class as Hyacinth. Vetch converts to conservatism late in life, though he at least has a respectable reason: he feels that he is too old to change. Rose Muniment is the worst of all: her sole function in the book is to be happy despite the fact that she is confined to her bed and lives a life of poverty, and thus demonstrate that everybody who agitates for change, and especially her brother Paul, is simply a malcontent. Because James is a great writer, all of these characters have some redeeming qualities � Lady Aurora’s shyness, Millie’s unbounded vulgarity, Vetch’s sarcasm � enough to make them interesting (except for Rose Muniment: no writer on Earth could make her interesting). But as the only two characters who really work are Hyacinth and Pinnie, and Pinne dies halfway through the book, there’s not enough to carry the propaganda quite as far across the border into art as it needs to go.
The Princess, too, suffers, again because James’s lack of knowledge about politics means that he has no real idea of what a rich, titled woman might do in it. As a delicately-nurtured female, the Princess clearly can’t strike a blow against the system herself � the idea is never even proposed � but after that James is out of ideas. The fact that the Princess ends up essentially slumming, living as one of the lower middle classes (but with luxuries like fancy tea that they could never afford) so that she might understand the people, is not simply because James wants to demonstrate that she really has no comprehension of the lower classes: it’s because he has no conception of anything she could do for the cause, other than donating money, of course. The idea that she could organize workers, or set up a school, or write muckraking or polemical articles, or campaign for a parliamentary candidate, apparently never enters his head. But it’s not just the Princess: we don’t see anybody doing any of these things. As far as James knows, politics consists of getting together to complain, and plotting to carry out political killings, with no ground in between. And while the members of Paul’s cell are presumably devoted to the idea of revolution via assassination, Hyacinth is young and politically unformed, with an interest in socialism: it hardly seems likely that he could avoid, at the very least, going to the occasional meeting or reading socialist literature and periodicals. After all, he’s in London in the 1880s, home to both Marx (who died in 1883) and Engels, and founding location of the International Workingmen’s Association, better known as the First International (though it had dissolved due to internal disputes in 1872). There was no shortage of radical politics available to choose from, and even though the other members of the cell were unlikely to stop their plotting to start agitating for an 8-hour day, they would surely not ignore the other leftists in the city, even if it were only to explain why their approach was superior to trade unionism or the actions of the British Social Democratic Federation. And this is while still treating them as more or less caricatures: in reality, even anarchists involved in assassination plots often participated in other struggles as well, while the supposedly ultra-dedicated members of the cell spend most of their time doing nothing resembling political activity.
In fact, the lack of political interest on the part of these hardened revolutionaries may be the most unbelievable part of the whole book. They never discuss politics or economics among themselves, it seems, and never read political works or periodicals. (Only the Princess is ever seen, once, studying some weighty tome, probably Marx's "Capital".) Perhaps this is because they are so invested in their terrorist plotting that they have no time to spare for anything else, and yet over the course of the book � a period of well over a year � they put together exactly one plot, and most of the organization of it is done by other people. This lack of interest in terrorist plotting is only one of the unusual traits displayed by these terrorist plotters. There’s also a total lack of concern over the police � only the Princess’s long-suffering companion/mother figure, Madame Grandoni, ever worries that the cell might be busted by the cops � and a general indifference to the prospect of being caught. They don’t seem to be quite as strongly committed to their beliefs as you would expect from wild-eyed radicals, either. When Hyacinth starts to move away from his previous politics, not only is there no concern over the possibility that, since he is no longer sympathetic to the activities of the group, he might turn them in, there’s not even the personal feeling of betrayal that one would expect from a group of dedicated fighters for the people when they learn that a comrade in the struggle was abandoning the fight. When Hyacinth suggests that maybe he doesn’t want to shoot anybody any more, nobody storms at him for his callous disregard of the fate of the working masses or denounces him for treason to the noble cause of human liberation. Instead, he is told that if he doesn’t want to carry out his task any more, he doesn’t have to. By contrast, what threatens to destroy his friendships with the other members of the cell is precisely his determination to continue with the task: even though he no longer believes in the idea of striking a blow on behalf of struggling humanity, he feels honor-bound to go ahead with it since he promised that he would, while his friends, despite their supposedly deep commitment to the cause, which would presumably be forwarded regardless of the assassin's ideological leanings, try to persuade him not to.
What makes the book readable, despite these far from minor flaws, is the character of Hyacinth. He is a brilliant creation, a young man whose foster mother injects a dose of romance into an otherwise fairly grim existence � she scrapes by as a seamstress in a London slum, family-less except for Hyacinth and friendless except for the violinist Vetch, who lives next door � by fondly imagining that Hyacinth’s father is the nobleman his mother, a seamstress and, it is implied, part-time prostitute, was imprisoned for killing (she presumably killed him in a jealous rage but there’s zero evidence of Hyacinth’s parentage), and hence that at any moment he may be swept away by his noble relatives to the life of luxury and privilege his birth demands. (The usual treatment of bastard children by the nobility is of course much less favorable, but it’s hard to begrudge Pinnie her fantasy.) Set apart from the other inhabitants of the slum by his origins, it’s no surprise that Hyacinth would embrace (even while denying that he does so) his mythical noble father, especially once he discovers that his real mother is a jailed French murderess. (The scene in which, at the age of 10, he meets her for the first time � on her deathbed, no less � and is both repelled by her appearance and unable to communicate since he speaks no French, is poignant, despite its melodrama, and firmly establishes this aspect of his character.) Naturally then young Robinson grows up believing that he has been robbed of his rightful destiny, and ends up joining a radical socialist group. However, on a trip to Paris following Pinnie’s death, made with her and Vetch's life savings (Vetch, also family-less, regards him almost as a son), he is finally able to experience the aristocratic lifestyle he semi-consciously believes he should always have had, and comes to the realization that envy of his supposed aristocratic relations has been a driving force in his politics. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he then goes on to assume that everybody else is also driven by envy, a form of projection that is perhaps not unexpected for a really rather naive young man. This is all very well, and quite well executed: the problem is that one gets the impression that James wants you to believe that Hyacinth has really deduced an important truth about the socialist movement. This truth is spelled out in a letter Hyacinth sends to Vetch from France: alas, it’s difficult to really take as a serious intervention a document which proclaims that the fate of the vast majority of people is to suffer in poverty, and then accuses anybody who wants to change this situation of engaging in a form of envy politics. The idea that the desire of the starving to be fed and the homeless to be housed is nothing more than envy of people who have food and shelter is ludicrous. Robinson’s conception of redistribution is no less ridiculous, as it focuses more on art than on, say, money, food, land, or work: his list of objects to be redistributed includes great works of art but omits great fortunes. Again, this is all well within character, but James is constantly nudging you to think that Hyacinth is intelligent and thoughtful and has really cracked the code on socialism, at which point the book starts to descend into propaganda.
The nominally non-political secondary characters are also, alas, mainly used for propaganda purposes. Lady Aurora is a saint, here only to show up the Princess: the latter can’t even conceive of the idea that she might help the poor whom she is so interested in until Lady Aurora offers to show her some ways to do so through charity. Millie’s role is to show up the Princess from the other side, as the potential love interest who represents real life and, not coincidentally, comes from the same social class as Hyacinth. Vetch converts to conservatism late in life, though he at least has a respectable reason: he feels that he is too old to change. Rose Muniment is the worst of all: her sole function in the book is to be happy despite the fact that she is confined to her bed and lives a life of poverty, and thus demonstrate that everybody who agitates for change, and especially her brother Paul, is simply a malcontent. Because James is a great writer, all of these characters have some redeeming qualities � Lady Aurora’s shyness, Millie’s unbounded vulgarity, Vetch’s sarcasm � enough to make them interesting (except for Rose Muniment: no writer on Earth could make her interesting). But as the only two characters who really work are Hyacinth and Pinnie, and Pinne dies halfway through the book, there’s not enough to carry the propaganda quite as far across the border into art as it needs to go.
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