Henry James

he believed that a vocational orientation for his children would detract from, even subvert, the broad overall opportunity for spontaneous life that the fullest spiritual development demanded.

He would have preferred the social and ritual details of some settled, ordinary institutional affiliation. Why couldn’t he go to church, with his family, like everyone else? And, also, why couldn’t his father have a job, like everyone else’s? What was he to respond when playmates asked him what his father did? To the young boy, it seemed that the family lived outside society

If Henry junior had an immediate hero, it was his brother William. Less than two years older, William somehow seemed to him superior, partly because of age but also because of energy, sociability, and talent.

He remembered incidents, places, people, with a tenacious retentiveness to which he later attributed some of his self-formation. Scenes stuck in his mind, details, impressions.

Such migrations were not unusual for the Jameses’ neighbors, mostly well-to-do New York families, some of them related to, or themselves in the process of obtaining, fortunes, mostly in real estate. Their children were Henry junior’s companions in the streets, at social events, in the schools that he and William were soon to attend, in “the small warm dusky homogeneous New York world of the mid-century.”

Each summer the family fled the Manhattan heat. The moves satisfied Henry senior’s restlessness and expressed his class expectations. Such migrations were not unusual for the Jameses’ neighbors, mostly well-to-do New York families, some of them related to, or themselves in the process

reading back into his childhood the myth of his adult self

Henry senior was, in contrast, a great noisemaker, an actor who could be heard in the back rows. He projected volume(s), arguments, ideas. Mary James was an audience, a more sympathetic other self whom one spoke to even when not speaking aloud.

The Marriage Question

In the evenings, he read to his wife. They both became Fourierian socialists, envisioning a utopia in which injustice would no longer exist