In the Cage

Abstract

Henry James’s ‘London’ marks an appropriate conclusion to this study not just chronologically but also technically, in its gradual departure from the conventions of Victorian fiction. In the mid-1880s James conceived of the novelist as competing ‘with his brother the painter in hisattempt to… catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle’ (LC1, 53); his contemporaneous novel, The Princess Casamassima, self-consciously vies with Impressionist painting: ‘He liked the reflection of the lamps on the wet pavements, the feeling and smell of the carboniferous London damp; the way the winter fog blurred and suffused the whole place, made it seem bigger and more crowded, produced halos and dim radiations, trickles and evaporations, on the plates of glass. He moved in the midst of these impressions this evening’ (N, 57–8). But although in the same essay James emphasised that ‘the supreme virtue of a novel’ was ‘the air of reality (solidity of specification)’ (LC1, 53), he would subsequently redefine realism, so that in late James, as in late Monet, the early Impressionist concern with the aspect of things evolves into an exploration of the observing consciousness itself. This extreme subjectivity raises the question of how James’s ‘London’ can be related to its historical context.