Introduction

Summary

In December 1876, the 33-year-old Henry James, who had been living in Paris for a year, moved to London, taking rooms at 3 Bolton Street, near Piccadilly. He was to retain the Bolton street residence for ten years. London was cold, wet and dark, but the lodgings suited him admirably, and James settled down to work. On Christmas Eve, 1876, he reported to his mother that he liked ‘feeling in the midst of the English world, however lost in it I may be; I find it interesting, inspiring, even exhilarating’ (CLHJ 1876–8 1:14). After a lonely Christmas and several weeks of solitude, James's social calendar quickly filled up; indeed, Leon Edel calls 1876–8 the period of James's ‘Conquest of London’. On 12 January 1877, he wrote to his American friend Thomas Sergeant Perry, ‘Yes London seems like a powerful big & busy place—much more interesting & inspiring, though much less agreeable, & for a lonely celibate, less convenient, than Paris. I subscribe to Mudie's & have 6 books at a time (new & uncut)—a 60’^ith of which I read!’ (CLHJ 1876–8 1:37). He carried letters of introduction from prominent American men of letters – Henry Adams, Charles Eliot Norton and James Russell Lowell. He looked up Americans of his acquaintance (the Ashburners, neighbours from Cambridge; the Bostonian Crafts; George Smalley of the New York Tribune; Sarah Wister, daughter of the actress Fanny Kemble), who introduced him, in turn, to other London residents. Soon James was invited to dinners, breakfasts and, eventually, country weekends. He met, among many others, Robert Browning, James Anthony Froude, William Gladstone, Heinrich Schliemann (the excavator of Troy), Alfred Lord Tennyson and Anthony Trollope. Still feeling an outsider, James nonetheless began to penetrate the sanctums of London society: during the winter of 1878–9, as he told Grace Norton, famously, he dined out 107 times (though he later told the American diplomat William Jones Hoppin it had been 140). An important step in establishing himself came with the invitation from Lord Houghton (Richard Monckton Milnes) to his literary breakfasts and then to the Cosmopolitan, a late-night talking club.