2 - Instructions to the Reader: James's Prefaces to the New York Edition

Summary

The critic's first duty in the presence of an author's collective works is to seek out some key to his method, some utterance of his literary convictions, some indication of his ruling theory. The amount of labor involved in an inquiry of this kind will depend very much upon the author. In some cases the critic will find express declarations; in other cases he will have to content himself with conscientious inductions.

— Henry James, “The Novels of George Eliot”

IN LATE JULY 1905, HENRY JAMES was sixty-two; he just had returned to England from a long and emotional trip to America, a country he had not seen in decades. The cultural changes he noted urged him to look back not only at his youth, but at the whole of his life and career. He returned, then, in a reflective, biographical mood that emerged in his essays published as The American Scene (1907) and, most significantly, in his new project: a specially printed and bound multi-volume edition of his works. He would call it the New York Edition, in honor, he said, of his birthplace and, perhaps, in recognition of the preeminence of that city — more than London or Paris — as the vibrant cultural capital of the future.

In a long memorandum to his publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, James laid out his plans for the edition, a compendium of his “principal novels — that is with the exception possibly of one” — and of selected stories, which, he hoped, “will gain in significance and importance, very considerably, by a fresh grouping or classification, a placing together … of those that will help each other …”