The Year of Henry James

by David Lodge

  There is a danger that we will take that statement as the last, authoritative word on the story. But James was careful to qualify his analysis of Daisy with the phrases ‘as I understand her’ and ‘to my perception’, allowing the possibility of understanding and perceiving her differently. Certainly the narrative method he used so skilfully in the story allows for a wide range of emphasis in its interpretation, and makes it infinitely rereadable.

  Notes

  1 Graham Clarke, ed., Henry James: Critical Assessments: 1: Memories, views and writers (1991), p. 41.

  2 Philip Horne, ed., Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999), p. 111.

  3 Leon Edel, ed., Henry James Letters (1974–84) Vol. 2, p. 213.

  4 Preface to the New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume XVIII (1909).

  5 Letter to Mrs Eliza Lynn Linton, 6 October 1880, in Horne, Henry James: A Life in Letters, p. 122.

  6 A point made by Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James (1991), p. 65.

  7 Vivian R. Pollack, ed., New Essays on Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw (1993), Editor’s introduction, p. 5.

  8 Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James (Penguin edn, 1977), Vol. I, pp. 47–9.

  9 All definitions are from the Oxford English Dictionary.

  10 Edel, The Life of Henry James, Vol. I, p. 517.

  11 Philip Horne, Henry James and Revision: the New York Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 235.

  12 Ibid.

  13 The words are those of Leslie Stephen. James recounts in the Preface that he first submitted the story to the editor of Lippincott’s Magazine, based in Philadelphia, who promptly rejected it without explanation, and a ‘friend’ (actually Leslie Stephen, who accepted it for the English Cornhill Magazine) suggested that this was the reason.

  14 Roger Gard, ed., Henry James: The Critical Heritage (1968), p. 74.

  15 Edel, Life, Vol. I, p. 521.

  16 Quoted by Jean Gooder, ed., Henry James: Daisy Miller and Other Stories (1985), p. xiv.

  17 Henry James, The Future of the Novel: Essays on the Art of Fiction, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 14.

  18 Jean Gooder, ed., Henry James: Daisy Miller and Other Stories, p. xxix.

  19 Quoted by Horne, Henry James and Revision, p. 264.

  20 Ibid., pp. 234 and 258.

  21 William Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway (1972), p. 165.

  22 Quoted by Horne, Henry James and Revision, p. 229. William James was commenting on the story, ‘A Most Extraordinary Case’, first published in 1868.

  23 Clarke, ed., Henry James: 1: Memories, views and writers, p. 81.

  24 ‘The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion . . .’ T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (1951), p. 145.

  25 Letter to Mrs Eliza Lynn Linton, 6 October 1880, in Horne, Henry James: A Life in Letters, p. 122.

  * * *

  fn1All quotations from Daisy Miller in this essay are from the text of the first version of the story published in book form by Macmillan in 1879, unless otherwise indicated. Differences between the two versions, both of which are available in modern reprints, are discussed below.

  fn2In the revised text of the story he introduces himself to Daisy and her mother in Section II as ‘Mr Frederick Forsythe Winterbourne’, but is referred to elsewhere by his surname alone.

  fn3After describing the anecdotal source of Daisy Miller in the Preface, James observes that it was the very absence of detailed information about the American mother and daughter ‘that left a margin for the small pencil-mark inveterately signifying, in such connexions, “Dramatise, dramatise!”’ The feature film of Daisy Miller released in 1975, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, with a script by Frederic Raphael, was not entirely satisfactory, but showed how few changes were necessary to adapt the story for performance.

  James adapted Daisy Miller in 1882 for a New York theatre whose manager rejected it as ‘too literary’. In fact, in trying to cater to the rather coarse theatrical taste of the time, James produced a vulgar travesty of the original story, including a contrived ‘happy ending’. He subsequently published the playtext, but, not surprisingly, it was never performed. He incorporated one or two details from it, including Winterbourne’s given names, into the NYE text.

  * * *

  H. G. WELLS

  Kipps: The Story of

  a Simple Soul

  * * *

  The early novels and tales of H. G. Wells fall into two quite different and distinct categories. He first made his name as the author of ‘scientific romances’ like The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), The War of the Worlds (1898) and The First Men on the Moon (1901), classics of what is now called science fiction. In these works he explored the implications of recent discoveries about evolution and cosmology in thrilling yarns which tapped into deep sources of anxiety and wonder in the collective unconscious. Over the same period he was also writing more conventional realistic novels about contemporary social life: The Wheels of Chance (1896), Love and Mr Lewisham (1901), and Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul, which was completed and published in 1905, but begun much earlier. All three books have as their central character a young man of humble background and limited horizons who glimpses the possibility of a richer and more fulfilling existence but is unable to seize the opportunity and in the end resigns himself to a life more ordinary. All three stories contain a significant autobiographical element. Hoopdriver (the hero of Wheels of Chance) and Kipps are drapers’ assistants, as was Wells for two miserable years in youth; and Mr Lewisham is a teacher, as Wells was before he became a professional writer.

  It was his literary genius that allowed Wells to throw off the chains of wage-slavery and become a free spirit and a rich and famous man. That blessing is not vouchsafed to the heroes of these novels, though the possibility is briefly and rather absurdly entertained by Kipps (‘he let it be drawn from him that his real choice in life was to be a Nawther’). As Wells’s biographers, Norman and Jean Mackenzie, observe: ‘The “little men” to whom Wells gave his best writing as a novelist . . . are not fated to escape into their wish-fulfilments. They are nostalgic figures and, unlike their author, they are not permitted to cross the frontier of success. They are not fit to become supermen.’1 By ‘nostalgic’ the Mackenzies indicate that in creating these characters Wells drew deeply on memories of his early life and the emotions associated with it; but at the same time he celebrated his own escape from its limitations, humiliations and privations, by placing himself as author at a comic distance from his heroes. This is especially true of Kipps, probably the funniest of all his novels.

  Herbert George Wells was born in 1866, the fourth child of his parents, who had met when his mother was a lady’s maid and his father a gardener at a large country house. By the time of Herbert’s birth they were running a rather unsuccessful shop, grandiloquently called Atlas House, in the high street of Bromley, Kent, selling chinaware and cricket equipment. Joseph Wells was a professional county cricketer of some note, and his earnings from this source usefully supplemented their meagre business income. The family lived above and behind the shop, in dark, cramped and insanitary accommodation which made an indelible mark on the consciousness of young Bertie (as he was known in the family) and gave him a lifelong obsession with domestic architecture. His parents clung to the very lowest rung of the lower middle class, sending their son to a cheap and badly managed private school to avoid the stigma of a state ‘board school’. In fact Wells largely educated himself, making good use of a long period of convalescence at the age of seven to develop a precocious enthusiasm for reading, which his parents did their best to discourage. When his father broke his leg and was forced to retire from cricket the family fortunes declined steeply. His mother took the position of housekeeper at Uppark, in Sussex, the stately home where she had former
ly been employed, and young Bertie’s occasional sojourns in this establishment gave him a valuable insight into the upper reaches of the English class system and the place of the landed aristocracy and gentry in English social history.

  It was Mrs Wells’s intention that Bertie should, like his two older brothers, be apprenticed as a draper’s assistant when he left school at the age of fourteen. Wells put up some resistance to this plan, and contrived to get dismissed by his first employer within a few weeks, but after short spells as a pupil teacher and chemist’s assistant he finally submitted to becoming a draper’s apprentice at Southsea, a seaside district of Portsmouth in Hampshire, in June 1881. Recalling that experience in his Experiment in Autobiography he wrote, ‘I recall those two years of my incarceration as the most unhappy hopeless period of my life’,2 but it qualified him to write, in the early chapters of Kipps, one of the most vivid accounts in English fiction of the lives of workers in the retail trade. In his second year a new apprentice took over some of Wells’s more menial duties, but also the errands that had provided occasional relief and escape from the shop’s boring routine and petty restrictions. ‘He had by the bye,’ Wells recalled, ‘an amusing simplicity of mind, a carelessness of manner, a way of saying “Oo’er,” and a feather at the back of his head that stuck in memory, and formed the nucleus which grew into Kipps . . .’3

  When he could bear the ignoble servitude of the Southsea Drapery Emporium no longer, Wells abandoned his apprenticeship and returned to Midhurst, the nearest town to Uppark, to work as an unqualified teaching assistant. This was another kind of wage-slavery, but more congenial, and it provided a platform from which the talented young man was able to propel himself into higher education. He won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington (later to become Imperial College) where he studied a range of subjects, including biology under the instruction of Professor Thomas Huxley, and eventually took a first-class degree in zoology. Wells’s interest in and aptitude for the physical sciences was an unusual preparation for a literary career but, combined with a natural gift for verbal expression nourished on voracious reading, it was precisely what gave him ‘competitive edge’ when in the early 1890s he began to supplement his earnings as a tutor in a correspondence college with freelance journalism and, in due course, fiction. He bridged the gap between ‘the two cultures’ long before that phrase was coined by C. P. Snow.

  Wells badly needed the extra money at this time, because of the complications of his personal life. In spite of indifferent physique, and a history of illness and serious accidental injuries, the young Wells was very interested in sex and very frustrated by the repression and prudery that inhibited relations between men and women in late Victorian England. In 1891 he married his cousin Isabel but quickly discovered that they were sexually and emotionally ill-matched. Soon he was conducting an affair with one of his adult students, Amy Catherine Robbins – whom he later renamed ‘Jane’ – and lived with her in what was then known as sin until he obtained a divorce in 1895 and was free to marry her. Curiously she seemed no more capable of satisfying his erotic needs than her predecessor, but she was more tolerant of his tendency to seek satisfaction with other women, and she remained his faithful, supportive and more or less complaisant wife until her death in 1927. It is probably not coincidental that both Kipps and Lewisham find themselves compromised by conflicting ties and obligations to two women; but the urgency of Wells’s own sexual desires finds little expression in Love and Mr Lewisham, and none at all in Kipps, whose hero has a childlike innocence in this as in every other respect.

  The composition of the latter novel had a long and complicated history. We can date its inception very precisely. In his earlier years Wells was in the habit of drawing little cartoon-sketches which he called ‘picshuas’ as a kind of visual diary, and one of these, dated 5 October 1898, shows Wells as an authorial chicken who has just hatched an egg from which has emerged a diminutive figure named ‘Kipps’.4 He and Jane were at this time living in a rented cottage by the edge of the sea at Sandgate, a few miles to the west of Folkestone, and he was to situate his new hero in the same part of England, where the Romney Marshes meet the cliffs of Folkestone. In July of that year the young couple had set out on a cycling tour of the south coast, but at Seaford in Sussex Wells became seriously ill, with acute pain in the kidney which had been damaged in a football injury some years earlier. Luckily he was able to consult a very able and sympathetic doctor, Henry Hick, whom he had met through George Gissing, and who lived in the little town of New Romney. Hick generously took the invalid and his wife into his own house and nursed him there. While he was convalescing Henry James cycled over from Rye with Edmund Gosse, who was staying at Lamb House, and met Wells for the first time, commencing a literary friendship which began in mutual esteem but ended unhappily some seventeen years later. In the autumn of 1898 Gosse and James were covertly checking out Wells’s possible need of a grant from the Royal Literary Fund, but they discovered that the young writer’s finances were in good order and that he was already planning to build himself a house in the locality with an en suite bathroom for every bedroom – which in due course materialised as Spade House, Sandgate. Meanwhile he rented the aptly named Beach Cottage in the same place, where he finished Love and Mr Lewisham and began the story of Arthur Kipps, a humble draper’s assistant who inherits a fortune and is suddenly promoted into the bourgeoisie.

  Originally, however, the novel was entitled The Wealth of Mr Waddy, and apart from a brief ‘Prelude’ Kipps himself did not figure in the early chapters. Wells worked hard on the book in late 1898 and submitted a draft of the first 35,000 words, with an additional 15,000 words of notes indicating the intended development of the story, to his agent J. B. Pinker in January 1899. As Pinker endeavoured without success to interest publishers and magazine editors in the project, Wells added further passages to the typescript, but towards the end of 1899 he abandoned the novel on the grounds that it had grown too big and unwieldy in scale. Later he returned to the story, focusing more narrowly on the character and fortunes of Arthur Kipps, but he still had difficulty in bringing it to a conclusion that was aesthetically and thematically satisfying, for reasons that will be examined later.

  The sizeable fragment of The Wealth of Mr Waddy, which Wells himself believed to be lost, in fact survived and was published posthumously.5 It is well worth reading on its own merits as well as for the fascinating glimpses it affords into the workshop of Wells’s imagination and the light it throws on his development as a novelist. As its editor, Harris Wilson, observes, it supports ‘the contention of some critics that the early Wells was much “darker” than the later’.6 Mr Waddy, who is only briefly mentioned in the published novel as the source of Kipps’s legacy, dominates the early chapters of the earlier version – a monster of egotism and misanthropy who provokes a kind of appalled laughter in the reader. Selfish and irascible by nature, he is further embittered by being crippled in a cycling accident just as he inherits a fortune, and condemned to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He has no compassion for those similarly afflicted but more needy. ‘Convalescent Homes indeed! Lethal chambers are what we want,’ is his typical reaction to a request for a charitable donation. Residing in Folkestone, he tyrannises over a little group of servants and hangers-on, who include Chitterlow and his wife Muriel. An ill-fated attempt to make their son Harry ingratiate himself with Waddy in the manner of Little Lord Fauntleroy so enrages the misanthropic invalid that he loses control of his wheelchair on the Folkestone Leas and careers down a path that leads to the cliff-edge, to be saved from certain death by the chance intervention of Kipps. Waddy dies shortly afterwards from shock, but not before he has left all his fortune to Kipps, as much to spite his retainers as out of gratitude to his rescuer.

  The retrospective account that follows of Kipps’s character, background and apprenticeship as a draper is very similar to the corresponding passages in the published novel, though more condensed
. Wells’s notes indicate that the rest of the plot was to develop along essentially the same lines as in Kipps, and the characters of Ann, Helen and Coote (a little younger) were already in place, as well as the Chitterlows. So his declared reason for abandoning Mr Waddy, and starting afresh – that it had been planned on ‘too colossal a scale’7 – doesn’t quite ring true. Perhaps Pinker’s failure to find a publisher made him think its comedy was too black to have popular appeal, for he was always desirous of commercial success as well as critical acclaim. The characters, apart from Kipps himself, are greedy, predatory and unscrupulous, with not a redeeming feature between them, whereas in Kipps they are treated more gently, their behaviour being expressive of what is wrong with society in general rather than manifestations of personal malevolence.

  The model for both versions was pre-eminently Dickens, as Wells himself frankly acknowledged. He wrote to his father about Mr Waddy in December 1898, ‘I am writing rather hard . . . at a comic novel in the old-fashioned Dickens line’,8 and seven years later he wrote to his publisher Macmillan about the finished Kipps: ‘I’ve been aiming at the interest of character, the same interest that gives Dickens his value . . .’9 The very names ‘Chitterlow’, ‘Coote’ and ‘Kipps’ have a Dickensian ring. In some ways the discarded character of Mr Waddy was the most Dickensian of all, a comic villain with something of the demonic energy and eloquence of Quilp or Fagin, but Chitterlow has an obvious ancestry in Jingle, Micawber and other plausible, unreliable good fellows in Dickens’s corpus, while the orphaned and repressed childhood of Kipps occasionally reminds one of the young David Copperfield and of Pip in Great Expectations. The opening pages of Kipps are particularly reminiscent of the beginnings of those two novels, and the allusion to Barnaby Rudge on the first page (Kipps’s mother wears a ‘Dolly Varden hat’ in the only image of her that survives) may be a conscious acknowledgement by Wells of his debt to Dickens. The two writers had indeed much in common – a penurious lower-middle-class background, an indifferent education, and the talent, energy and ambition to overcome these handicaps. Both men were scornfully critical of what they perceived as a corrupt and ossified social system which privileged the undeserving few and stifled the potential of most of its members; and just as Dickens drew on the emotional trauma of being made to work in a blacking factory at the age of twelve to give an authentic pathos to his representations of loneliness, unhappiness and oppression, so Wells drew on his miserable existence as a draper’s apprentice to similar effect.