The James household of the 1850s consisted of a patriarch and matriarch, four sons, and one daughter. Let's run through the scorecard this morning.
The patriarch was Henry James Sr., a graduate from Union College, a drop-out from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a participant at what seemed an earth-shaking movement at the time, but what has been nearly forgotten since -- Swedenborgian mysticism.
The matriarch was Mary Robertson James, nee Walsh, Irish on her father's side, Scottish on her mother's, introduced to her future husband by her brother, when both of the young men were students together at Princeton. In long talks Henry persuaded her first that the Bible doesn't require the office of Minister (he was talking himself into leaving the seminary), and then that she should marry him -- in a civil ceremony, of course. (The officiant at the wedding was the Mayor of NYC himself, Isaac Varian.)
Their oldest child was William James, who of course is the inspiration for this blog, and of whom for the remainder of this post we'll say no more;
Then there was Henry James Jr., an author of novels and short stories who examined the literary possibilities of trans-Atlantic irony, and in 1913 would write of this family unit, "the blest group of us [were] such a company of characters and such a picture of differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each of us ... pleads for preservation."
Then there was Garth Wilkinson James, who once confessed that he felt like a “foundling” in the shadow of his two genius older brothers. Garth enlisted in the Union Army in the US Civil War, served heroically, suffered wounds that were nearly fatal, and drank himself to death after the war.
And what about Bob? Robertson James, also enlisted, served honorably but without Garth’s trauma, and after the war became one of the so-called “carpetbaggers,” i.e. one of the white northern folks moving into the south to make their entrepreneurial fortune. The move was often associated (as it was in Bob’s case) with the related goal of hiring the newly freed blacks of the south and proving that a wage system works better than slavery. Bob’s efforts in this regard (on Florida farm land) did not pan out. But he, unlike the family’s other veteran, Garth, lived a long life, much of it in comfortable circumstances since Bob was wise enough to marry well.
Finally (in chronological order only!) we come to Alice James, pictured above, a diarist and a keen observer of society who has in recent years become something of a feminist heroine. She seems to have had serious life long health problems that were ignored because in that day they could be written off as “hysteria,” just what happens when a woman over-extends her energies.
That is the thumbnail precis for five great stories. Or seven. Or, as the novelist's words might suggest, one.
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