The Education of the People in James’s The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima

Abstract

Chapter 2 reads Henry James's The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima in the context of their serialization in magazines later called 'genteel', showing how these novels question the practice of cultivation that those magazines facilitate and prize. Identifying that practice as a core ideal in the liberalism expressed by Bostonians like Charles Eliot Norton, the chapter shows how James questions the capacity of the broader public for such cultivation. Especially in his evocation of Reconstruction-era efforts to educate freedmen, James points to the hypocrisy and the accidental tyrannizing of liberal educators like Norton; but his novels distinguish between that accidental tyranny and the deliberate tyranny of those who would simply master and rule rather than educate. Associating such projects of mastery with Thomas Carlyle's pessimism, which he juxtaposes against an Emersonian optimism about democracy, James ambivalently endorses Carlyle's sense that 'the people' have meagre capacities, but also links the denial of education to violence. Drawing from Walter Pater, James portrays cultivations that feed on the pleasures of food and art in New York and the Continent, and suggests that this kind of cultivation fosters development much more successfully than the ascetic moralizing of democratic revolutionaries and Bostonians.