House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family by Paul Fisher

From the Publisher

An American odyssey that reveals the fascinating complexities of one of history’s most brilliant, eccentric, and daring families

The James family, one of America’s most memorable dynasties, gave the world three famous children: a novelist of genius (Henry), an influential philosopher (William), and an invalid (Alice) who became a feminist icon, despite her sheltered life and struggles with mental illness. Although much has been written on them, many truths about the Jameses have long been camouflaged. The conflicts that defined one of American’s greatest families— homosexuality, depression, alcoholism, female oppression—can only now be thoroughly investigated and discussed with candor and understanding.
 
Paul Fisher’s grand family saga, House of Wits, rediscovers a family traumatized by the restrictive standards of their times but reaching out for new ideas and ways to live. He follows the five James offspring (“hotel children,” Henry called them) and their parents through their privileged travels across the Atlantic; interludes in Newport and Cambridge; the younger boys’ engagement in the Civil War; and William and Henry’s later adventures in London, Paris, and Italy. He captures the splendor of their era and all the members of the clan—beginning with their mercurial father, who nurtured, inspired, and damaged them, setting the stage for lives of colorful passions, intense rivalries, and extraordinary achievements. House of Wits is a revealing cultural history that revises and completes our understanding of its remarkable protagonists and the changing world where they came ofage.

The New York Times - Charles McGrath

The Jameses are a huge and complicated story, and to tell it Mr. Fisher goes in for a certain amount of novelization, mind reading and needlessly perky writing. But he keeps all the balls juggling, gives fair and sympathetic time to everyone, and along the way provides a lively and detailed social history of the period and its houses, museums, steamships, restaurants, department stores and hotels.

Publishers Weekly

Biographers return again and again to the Jameses-the great novelist Henry, groundbreaking psychologist and philosopher William, diarist Alice (who became a feminist icon) and their parents and other siblings. Now Fisher, who has taught American literature at Harvard, Yale and other institutions, delivers a solid and crisp narrative of this fascinating American clan. In addition to the three prominent siblings, two other brothers labored to shine from behind the shadows they cast. But as Fisher reveals, much darkness and bitterness-along with a brilliant father who was both a Christian socialist and heir to a fortune-shaped these remarkable people. For all of its successes, the James family harbored its share of trouble: alcoholism, repressed sexuality, heartbreak, jealousy and adultery. Most importantly, in a rigidly prim Victorian world, the expatriate Henry, a resident of London, wrestled with homosexuality. He lived a closeted life of clandestine affairs with younger men-always wary of the dark fate that had befallen Oscar Wilde. Fisher narrates all of this, and more, vividly, cleanly and engagingly. (June 10)

Morris Hounion - Library Journal

Fisher, who has taught American literature at various universities, presents an exhaustive group biography of one of America's most famous literary families. His cast of characters includes Henry James Sr.; Henry's wife, Mary; their five children; Henry James Jr. (called Harry); William James; Alice James; and the two younger (and most obscure) brothers, Wilkie and Bob. Fisher examines his subjects' lives by showing their relationship to the family as a whole as well as their efforts to individualize themselves. He also focuses on their identities as representative of the Victorian period that shaped them. Some themes he examines in detail are mental illness, alcoholism, sexual predilection, and the roles of men and women of the time. While the book is very long, the events depicted and the portrayals of the Jameses and those they knew are fascinating and colorful. One misses, however, photographs, especially since Fisher often describes pictures of the James family and their acquaintances. F.O. Matthiessen (The James Family) and R.W.B. Lewis (The Jameses) have previously written about the James family. Fisher's biography is recommended for most public and larger academic libraries. (Index not seen.) [See Prepub Alert, LJ11/1/07.]

Kirkus Reviews

Stunning multigenerational portrait of one of the most complex families in American intellectual history. It's difficult to nudge aside brothers Henry (the novelist) and William (psychologist, philosopher, spiritual seeker) to accommodate lesser-known sister Alice and ne'er-do-well younger brothers Bob and Wilkie-not to mention parents Henry and Mary, Aunt Kate and such notable friends and acquaintances as Emerson, Thackeray, Wharton et al. But first-time author Fisher accomplishes the task with aplomb and panache. The book begins in 1855, as the peripatetic paterfamilias prepared to haul the entire entourage off to Europe. (Henry Sr. wanted his boys in Swiss schools, a hot desire that quickly cooled in the alpine air.) The author then retreats for 100 pages or so to sketch the family background before returning to the 1855 European sojourn. The complex demands of a multiple biography buttressed by the requisite social, cultural and literary history sometimes lead Fisher, as he shifts focus from one James to another, to rewind his tape to catch up on the doings of a James he's neglected for a while. But he is careful with dates and places, so the potential for confusion is unrealized. Back and forth across the Atlantic we go, with Henry fils spending most of his career abroad, Alice settling in England eight years before her death and the rest of the clan making frequent visits. Henry Sr. is portrayed as a dominant, fiery intellectual presence, and the author properly accentuates Mary's quiet strength. Alice, sickly and often depressed, struggled to establish her identity amid dominant men. Civil War veterans Bob and Wilkie moved West but failed to find either fame or fortune. William andHenry became cultural icons. Although Fisher discusses the Jameses' publications and other enterprises, his focus is on them as a family, a collection of unique individuals who remained affectionate while envious, loyal and supportive even when continents and oceans separated them. A golden bowl, brimming full. Agent: Brettne Bloom/Kneerim & Williams

Product Details

• ISBN: 0805074902
  
• ISBN-13: 9780805074901
• Format: Hardcover, 704pp
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated
• Pub. Date: June 2008
• Sales Rank: 49,866

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

THE VOYAGE OF THE ATLANTIC

Though small, spare, and unbalanced in his gait, Henry James Sr. loved to pit himself against the uncomprehending world. Sometimes he walked with canes, to cope with a childhood injury, but more often this self-appointed prophet of social reform cast away all artificial forms of support and navigated on his own. Such was the case on this steamy and momentous June dayin 1855, when the forty-four-year-old patriarch lowered himself down the steps of his Fourteenth Street brownstone, ready to take on just about everyone.

The James family party was leaving New York: one lame man, Henry himself; three bonneted women; five young children; and a Himalaya of luggage. On this "thoroughly hot" summer morning, as the New York Tribune described it, they were striking out toward a Europe that, thanks to the lithographs and novels that had stoked their imaginations, felt more real to them, in a sense, than the scorching streets of Manhattan. It was as if they were going home, though the places they envisioned were as yet unknown. Defiantly, Henry was preparing to snatch his young family— Alice, his smallest child, was only six—away from the city that had counted as the only genuine home they’d ever known. The Jameses were moving to the lake country of Switzerland, where, Henry insisted, his children would blossom in the experimental hothouses of Swiss schools. He was, after all, a social engineer of sorts. His children, he believed, should be the beneficiaries of the world’s most enlightened thinking.

The "acquisition of the languages" by young patricians was all the vogue—an educational "New York fetish"of the 1850s, as Henry’s novelist son would later claim. But Henry wasn’t only following a trend; he was intoxicated by the idea that these groundbreaking schools could help his children fulfill the ambitious destinies he had marked out for them. Liberated from the bad moral influences of rough-and-tumble New York, their father felt, his sons would soon acquire exquisite manners and impeccable French. To anyone who questioned his decision to transplant them across the ocean, the cane-wielding Henry—often armed, literally and figuratively, with a stick—bristled with justifications.

For years, Henry had waged a single-minded campaign to rid himself and his family of their solid Manhattan address. He’d leveled various crafty arguments at his wary, stiff-collared listeners. He’d persuaded his friend Horace Greeley, the slender and bespectacled editor of the New York Tribune, with his visions of instructive European cities. He’d even defied his idol, the New England philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had testily declared European travel to be a "fool’s paradise" in his influential 1841 essay "Self-Reliance."

Of course, Henry loved to argue as much as he loved to travel. And partly, his insubordination was Emerson’s own fault, as the protégé had adopted his mentor’s own radical American individualism with gusto. Society everywhere is a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members," Emerson had written a decade before in "Self-Reliance"; "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." But Emerson hadn’t intended for Henry to be as maddeningly, perversely singular as he was currently showing himself. Sitting serene among his flush green New England orchards, remote from the family upheaval now unfolding at Henry’s front door, Emerson may have wondered if he’d created a monster. Others, posed the question, would certainly have responded in the affirmative.

To be sure, Henry’s diatribes explaining the upending of his family rang with the same high principles he had shown in public debates over slavery, utopian socialism, women’s role in society, and "free love." He had spoken out on almost every controversial issue of his time, with a sometimes bewildering mix of radicalism and conservatism. On free love he had been at least a theoretical extremist; on women’s rights, he was a notorious reactionary—and these strong and often contradictory opinions would impact the development of his children. But Henry’s many enthusiasms also concealed a deeper truth behind his present urgency. Henry James Sr. was "different," a jumble of discordant notes. At times he seemed unbalanced.

He had previously suffered from restlessness, nervousness, and melancholia. For years "blue devils" and "black devils" had plagued the man with a phantasmagoria of symptoms as well as depression and anxiety. Such burdens made it difficult for him to concentrate or sustain interest in much of anything. On top of everything else, Henry suffered from visual hallucinations: a decade before, he’d blundered onto a devil crouching on a hearthstone—a dramatic mental thunderclap that had brought on a severe nervous breakdown in 1844.

Henry also had a decades-long history as an alcoholic—a usually unspoken-of feature of his life and his children’s. He had been drinking hard liquor since the age of eight or nine and had been addicted to alcohol since his troubled adolescence. His adult life, too, had been dominated by his addiction. But six years before, he had consulted a doctor friend in England; and four years prior, in 1851, he had made a public declaration, in the New York Tribune, that he had given up drinking. He had done it, he claimed, by sheer force of will. The nineteenth century, to be sure, scarcely understood and rarely discussed such demons. Both alcoholism and mental illness still invited derision and superstition. But sanatoriums for drinking problems had begun to appear, and reformist crusaders such as the Quaker-inspired Dorothea Dix had started to lobby northeastern states to create bonafide mental hospitals in order to ease psychological afflictions. Dix herself—dark-chignoned and straight-backed—was a victim of recurrent depression. She longed to provide refuge for those whom she saw as suffering from a vast, crippling, and invisible epidemic. For generations, the inmates of "charitable" institutions had been poked with sticks, made to froth, rant, and tear at one another for mob amusement.

More fortunate, with his independent income, Henry was in no danger of incarceration. He didn’t even appear "mad." On the contrary, he was capable of charming and disarming many of the New Yorkers he met. Vastly intelligent and tenderhearted, he was the sort of man that women warmed to and even fell in love with; several receptive New York ladies had succumbed, among them Mary Walsh, whom he had married fifteen years before. His children, too, felt his magnetism, and all of them would be shaped by his alcoholism and mental illness, as well as by his charm, his nonconformity, and his radiant intelligence.

AS THEY SPILLED down the steps of their former home, the five James children—William, Henry, Wilkie, Bob, and Alice—must have looked fresh and willing enough, caught up in their father’s enthusiasm and the excitement of the day. By moving to Europe, Henry hoped to provide his offspring with what he called a "sensuous education"—sensuous in this case implying a broad and lively development of faculties, under the tutelage of nature, and not frivolous sensuality. Henry’s interest in his children’s education was an extension of his social theories about the moral improvement of the human race. For this reason, the progressive Henry was also morally and certainly sexually as strict as many a nineteenth-century patriarch. Instead of budding libertines, the young Jameses would become guinea pigs of Henry’s theories about "social consciousness"—Henry’s version of the human progress that the nineteenth century often believed in. Lovingly, Henry treasured his children as "chickens" who sheltered under his paternal wings every night. Yet when he gazed at them—at thirteen-year-old William and twelve-year-old Henry Junior especially—he saw not only overdressed Victorian children kitted out for a sea voyage but also the forerunners of a new and improved "race."

Whatever his eventual plans for his brood, Henry’s first goal was to get the family to their steamship—a journey of several stages, the first a drive from their Fourteenth Street residence to the Hudson River ferry. The family kept no carriage, so they hired conveyances arrived from Mr. Hathorn’s livery stable in nearby University Place. With Henry’s thin sons helping Hathorn’s hired hands—doing their utmost to budge some of the cumbersome baggage—the hacks were soon loaded. Ironrimmed steamer trunks, leather portmanteaus, cylindrical hatboxes, and patterned carpetbags would litter the next six decades of the family’s life, but the disarray of this departure, though outwardly gay and optimistic, also hinted at Henry’s personal desperation as well as the tension underlying this family scene.

Henry held his head high as he struggled to find his seat in the carriage—not a good sign for his steadiness on an ocean passage. For all his protestations about his offspring’s education, Henry had also launched his plan for his own narcissistic reasons: he knew he had to make something of himself, and he hoped Europe could help. He’d kicked off this family hegira not only to soothe his anxiety but also to nudge his own stalled literary career back to life, in order to write philosophical letters for the New York Tribune. Henry was in his mid forties, and he wanted to make more of his life. He wanted to produce a series of articles about his family’s precarious life in transit, about their future careers as "hotel children."

T H E B I G C A R R I A G E S, "lolling and bumping," started off for the Jersey ferry. Regal, dark-haired Mary Walsh James, Henry’s wife, cut a commanding figure. Forty-five and a year older than Henry, she had organized the move with a cool head and the tactical eye of a general. Yet she too must have been excited. Secretly, she loved to travel; the notion of being a woman who actually visited foreign countries had counted as one of the attractions of her marriage. But more than her husband, Mary had been able to foresee how hellish it would be to cross the ocean with five extremely curious children—not to mention one somewhat childlike husband.

Mary had firsthand knowledge of these challenges: the Jameses had sailed for Europe before, a decade earlier, when William and Henry Junior were mere babies. But this time around, they were going not for a tour, not for the yearlong hobnob in which wealthy Americans sometimes indulged, but for good—for years, anyway. Tiresome arrangements had been necessary to rent the house, charge letters of credit to European banks, and move a sprawling family out of the home in which they’d resided for seven years. Henry had schemed. Mary had budgeted, sorted, and packed for months. Travel in the mid-nineteenth century involved a welter of setbacks and dangers, even before stepping into a hired carriage.

Mary well understood that her husband, a moral philosopher turned vagabond, fretted less about his family’s travel arrangements than about his own particular luggage, a "vast, even though incomplete, array of Swedenborg’s works," as his son Henry would remember it. All over Europe, these tomes by an arcane eighteenth-century Swedish mystic, carefully arranged in an enormous trunk, would startle many a porter and weigh down many a conveyance. The prolific Emanuel Swedenborg had managed to scribble more than ninety books before giving up the ghost, and a significant number of these effusions constituted the traveling library of his zealous American follower. For a whole decade of Henry’s marriage, the frayed red Swedenborgs had put a "strain"—though an "accepted" one—on Mary James’s patience. When trying to explain their inexplicable father to her children, Mary would refer to their "Father’s Ideas"—the capital I, as her son Henry remembered it, implied in her voice.

Against Henry’s ideas, Mary marshaled her own allies. Two other women accompanied the family in their carriage, to help Mary look after the children: one aunt and one nanny. Mary’s younger unmarried sister, Catharine, as usual, had her hands full with the excitement of her niece and nephews, who jostled and elbowed one another to claim better views of the streets. The children had read in Charles Dickens about London, their first stop; twelve-year-old Henry Junior especially had soaked in the luxurious lithographs of Joseph Nash’s Mansions of England in the Olden Time on the drawing room carpet, swinging his heels in the air. And now that the Jameses had actually started, Mademoiselle Cusin, their French governess, could hardly govern them.

Deliberately sweet and detached, Mary liked to stay above such a fray, with her children as well as her husband. But she probably didn’t savor the prospect of a voyage on the Atlantic, the steamship that awaited them on the other side of the Hudson. Henry had been so eager to get to Liverpool that he’d even booked his family on one of the most notorious and luckless steamers ever to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

Like the later Titanic, the leviathan Atlantic had at least a sporting chance of sinking, no matter how unsinkable it billed itself. The 1850s had already seen some of the worst maritime disasters in American history. So much sidewheeler luxury tonnage had split on icebergs or foundered in wind-lashed seas that some of the James family’s friends had felt that it was an exception when crossing the Atlantic "not to be drowned." Henry and Mary’s "laughing assurances to the contrary [were] received with uplifted eyes and hands and . . . incredulous ‘Ohs!’ " The Jameses’ friends read the newspapers; they knew what happened to unlucky steamers. Wreck after wreck had unfolded in lithographic splendor.

IN COMPARISON to the high-latitude, iceberg-strewn shipping lanes, New York must have seemed safe and predictable. The place, after all, had counted as home for a family who would afterward spend their lives perpetually in search of an equivalent emotional anchorage. In Manhattan, over the past decade, the younger Jameses had enjoyed what they would remember as idyllic childhoods. They’d wolfed iced custards. They’d bounded alongside side-whiskered uncles and ringletted aunts. They’d frequented matinees, dame schools, and music shops with gas lamps shaped like harps. They’d haunted bookshops stuffed with gorgeous English bindings, where bells tinkled cheerfully over the doors. But the New York of 1855 had already begun to gather its modern momentum. The city, pushing toward a million inhabitants, was the world’s most thriving port as well as its second largest city, after London. Mary James’s ancestral home was a burgeoning metropolis surrounded by river traffic, a populous island overflowing with polyglot crowds. Walt Whitman, a young and as yet unknown Brooklyn poet, celebrated New York in 1854 as a magnificent hive of New World democracy.

As the Jameses headed out down Broadway—at the time slicing five miles across Manhattan from the Battery to the mushrooming fifties, where the vast urban pleasure ground of Central Park would soon be staked out—they threaded a canyon of commerce. New York no longer amounted to a provincial town of narrow Federal townhouses and quaint Dutch gables, as Henry and Mary could easily remember. Downtown, the city was now sprouting six-story commercial buildings in brown sandstone, native brick, sooty granite, and pillared marble.

Among the most monstrous of the new Manhattan hotels was the St. Nicholas, between Broome and Spring streets. The largest such establishment in the world, it boasted more than six hundred rooms. In its gilded and mirrored dining room, exotic dishes were kept warm over spirit lamps, prepared by French chefs according to the latest New York craze. Blue flames cast a glow at every table, while a feet of liveried waiters whisked in plates of the era’s ubiquitous oysters.

Elsewhere along the Jameses’ route from Fourteenth Street to lower Manhattan, other monuments to New York’s muscular adolescence would have been visible. On Lafayette Place, the recently completed Astor Library imitated Venice with its ruddy round-topped "Byzantine" arches. (This precursor of the New York Public Library, with its two hundred thousand volumes, had been built by John Jacob Astor, the fur and real estate tycoon—and incidentally America’s first millionaire— who, with his temper and whims almost matched Henry James Sr. in oddness.)

Alexander T. Stewart’s dry-goods shop, on Broadway, at Chambers Street, overflowed from a six-story marble cube. This forerunner of New York’s soon-to-be-legendary department stores employed a platoon of four hundred people and even featured a "telegraph line on the premises" for lightning-quick orders. Stewart’s damasks and brocades, lace collars and Valenciennes .ounces commanded mind-boggling prices, but it was the imported luxury fabrics that mesmerized wealthy New York women, among them Mary James. The children had "wearily trailed through it," hanging to their entranced mother’s or their aunt Kate’s skirts.

Also on Broadway, P. T. Barnum’s theater, his Great American Museum, was "covered with gaudy paintings" and flew eye-catching flags. During the month of the Jameses’ departure, Barnum had hosted a "National Baby Show" in which he had paraded "one hundred of the .nest babies in America." (In antebellum America, this show rigorously excluded black infants.) Barnum’s spectacle of a museum more usually housed "bottled mermaids, ‘bearded ladies,’ and chill dioramas," as the younger Henry recalled, which had both fascinated and repelled the James children. Thanks partly to their father’s big plans, some of the children would feel, in the future, like Barnum monstrosities or carnival freaks—as the perspicacious Alice James would later put it—who’d "missed fire."

Just as the family was poised to encounter Europe, New York was ready to compete head-to-head with London. In 1851, London had astounded the world with its Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. (A schoolmate of the younger Henry James had shown him an "iridescent and gilded card" advertising this dazzling fair enclosed in a gigantic vaulted greenhouse.) New York countered in 1853 with its own Crystal Palace, a vast domed Taj Mahal of cast iron and glass. Like its imperial British competitor, this first U.S. world’s fair showcased what the well-known Manhattan diarist George Templeton Strong called "covetable things." It plugged American-made jewelry and furniture as well as displaying "appetizing nuggets and bars and chunks" of freshly mined California gold.

A shrine to American style and ingenuity, the Crystal Palace also stood beside the terminal reservoir of the Croton aqueduct, a fortress like structure that towered between Fortieth and Forty-second streets, near where the New York Public Library would go up fifty years later. In one of the engineering miracles of an optimistic century, these new public waterworks had recently begun to pump public water into the astonished bathrooms of up-and-coming New Yorkers like the Jameses. Such modern conveniences hadn’t graced the lives of previous generations, but the Jameses and their peers would pioneer all manner of modern improvements, and plumbing was only the beginning.

ACROSS THE HUDSON, the massive steamship Atlantic awaited them—huge and blunt, with its beetle-black hull, dark rigging, and massive side wheels. Already this ship had loomed large in popular legend. As the James boys were well aware, it had figured in one of the most disturbing maritime cliffhangers of the day. A few winters before, the ship had gone missing. Some speculated that it was locked in pack ice. Others thought it had gone down with all hands. Anxiety about the vessel’s fate ran high during the freezing January and drizzling February of 1851.

On February 4, the New York Tribune announced a series of public lectures by "Mr. James," the first on the "Legitimacy and Significance of the Institution of Property." But while Henry was spinning his social philosophy, the city was gripped with the potential loss of both property and life, as steamer after steamer coasted into port with "no news," "no tidings," and "no trace" of the Atlantic. "I am surprised a vessel or vessels has not been sent to the neighborhood of Cape Race to look for the Atlantic," one New Yorker fretted to Horace Greeley’s paper. "Surely the lives of the persons on board are worth the effort."

After many a false alarm, news finally came. The missing leviathan reemerged in a belling headline: THE ATLANTIC SAFE AT CORK! The Cunard liner Africa brought the revelation that the American ship had broken its main shaft in mid-Atlantic and, thus crippled, had inched its way back to Ireland on canvas.

The news spread through the city like wildfire. Breathless, a grease painted New York actor appeared in the smoking footlights of his downtown theater. The crowd, in a hush, awaited his announcement. "Ladies and gentlemen, I rejoice to be able to tell you that the good ship Atlantic is safe!" At this, the house, including nine-year-old William and seven-year-old Henry James, let loose with roars of joy and applause.

In past decades, travelers like the Jameses who were bound for Europe had crowded to Packet Row, the fringe of docks on the lower tip of Manhattan. There "packets"—fast wooden sailing ships outfitted to carry mail and grandees—had departed on the first of every month. With the advent of steamers, and of goliath steamships like the Atlantic, the bustle of the Manhattan docks had outgrown these quaint facilities and had transplanted itself across the river.

At the departure of a big steamship, bedlam reigned at the Collins Line depot in Jersey City. Young Henry later described the waterside "abords [outskirts] of the hot town"—as the James children knew them from other summertime sailings. He remembered the "rank and rubbishy" quarters of the city on both sides of the Hudson, where big loose cobbles, for the least of all base items, lay wrenched from their sockets of pungent black mud and where the dependent streets managed by a law of their own to be all corners and the corners to be all grocers; groceries indeed largely of the "green" order, so far as greenness could persist in the torrid air, and that bristled, in glorious defiance of traffic, with the overflow of their wares and implements.

Carts and barrows and boxes and baskets, sprawling or stacked, familiarly elbowed in its course the bumping hack (the comprehensive "carriage" of other days, the only vehicle of hire then known to us).

Pandemonium reigned as Henry Senior shouted to porters, and Mary and her sister shepherded the children. One or two of them were likely to bolt off; the others remained quietly observant.

The gangways of the Atlantic, meanwhile, thronged with well-to-do travelers and their dependents. As they boarded, the James children were confronted by the big, gaudily painted figurehead on the steamship’s prow, "supported right and left by a gilded mermaid." Was this muscled male torso supposed to be the sea god Neptune? Or was it William Wordsworth’s famous Triton, sounding his vine-and-leaf-twined horn? Witty English travelers joked that the figure represented Edward Knight Collins, the bullish American shipping magnate and owner of the Atlantic blowing his own bugle. Like Barnum, Collins operated with the hyperbolic instincts of a Yankee showman. And his ambitions far outstripped the mere building and running of Atlantic steamships. With his three-hundred-foot liner—heavily subsidized by Congress—Collins had aspired to trounce the speed records set by the ever-.fleeter British passenger ships. And Collins likewise hoped to outstrip the opulent furnishings of the more established Cunard Line.

As for the Atlantic, American newspapers cried it up as a "floating palace." They touted it as "the most beautiful specimen of marine architecture afloat." Passage on the ship cost a staggering $130 for a first class cabin, $325 for "exclusive use of extra-size state-rooms." An "experienced surgeon" also patrolled the ship, a precaution against the seasickness and influenza that dogged Victorian steamers.

The Atlantic’s huge boilers heated ample water for bathrooms, an unheard-of convenience at sea. It packed forty tons of ice, cut on New England ponds in the winter, to keep its luxurious provisions chilly and to provide iced drinks for the passengers: "lemonade (frozen)," as the ship’s menu advertised.

When the James children scurried down below decks, they discovered a whole enticing fantasyland. Grandiose carved escutcheons of the states erupted on the panels between their staterooms. In the main salon—almost seventy feet long and crafted out of brocatelle marble, stained glass, and rare woods like "white holly, satin-wood, and rosewood," as other observers noted—the children threaded through a profusion of columns and mirrors and overstuffed plum-colored sofas, "their numbers quadrupled by the reflection." At the ship’s stern, the young Jameses could marvel over stained-glass windows radiating the hastily concocted arms of the cities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. They could glimpse stirring spread eagles, five-pointed stars, and an operatic oil painting of Liberty crushing a feudal prince underfoot.

Were they, the James children, the embodiment of liberty— embarking on an unorthodox "sensuous education"? Or were they, with their French governess and attendant aunt, with their cushion of family money, young nobility themselves? The Atlantic’s contradictions of democracy and elitism matched the Jameses’ own contradictions. And by coming aboard, they’d launched their own perilous equivalent of its career; they too had .red a shot across the bow of Europe.

AT T H E R A I L, as the Atlantic steamed out to sea, its coal-.red boilers smudging a long strip of evening sky, the James family watched their familiar New York dwindle. But as the Atlantic punched through waves in the open ocean out past Fire Island, seasickness seized them. One after another, they succumbed to what the family unanimously called the "Demon of the Sea." As the voyage continued, they would plunge into "very nasty weather nearly the whole of the passage," as Henry would note in one of his first letters to the Tribune. What’s more, the staterooms or sleeping cabins of the Atlantic were tiny, each with two bunks and only one small porthole. For the convenience of large Victorian families, these miniature rooms offered communicating doors. But these hardly spread cheer when the vomiting began and circulated from one child to the next.

Mary and her sister, Kate, who rightly claimed the constitutions of horses, carefully shepherded their sickness-prone charges, including the hypochondriacal Henry. But as the Atlantic surged into deeper, rougher water, even these hardy women crumpled, groaning, into the fold-down bunks. The Atlantic rolled and plunged, and only the narrow precautionary bed rails kept the sisters from sprawling out onto the floor.

Though elegantly paneled and floored with "rich carpeting," the Atlantic’s staterooms quickly grew as airless as cupboards. The grand steamer provided tight quarters even on a good day of its ten- or twelve day voyage. No wonder that the children hurried up on deck to escape these claustral cubicles whenever their equilibrium permitted.

Mary, always so well dressed, would, in other circumstances, have relished announcing herself in the dining salon in her best crinolines, with her five handsome children in tow. But only two members of the family felt well enough regularly to appear at dinner: Henry Senior and his youngest son, Bob, who later would become an accomplished sailor and who now managed to sidestep the green-gilled misery of his all-too sensitive siblings.

Henry and Bob made an odd-looking twosome. Henry, wobbly but cheerful, navigated the rolling decks with his canes as eight-year-old Bob darted about, bright-eyed and birdlike, basking in the rare windfall of his father’s complete attention. The abundant wine and spirits no doubt tempted Henry, but he could glory in his abstinence and in his sense that, after so many delays, he was making something of himself. His appearance marked him as a New York gentleman of means, with confidence, wit, and condescension; but he added more novel distinctions: the cachet of being a writer and a newspaperman, a contributor of high-profile travel letters to the Tribune. Henry, often desperately insecure and self-conscious, felt equal to the company he met every evening at the captain’s table. He conversed fearlessly with James Renwick, an eminent professor of physics and geology at Columbia, and with the illustrious Sir Allan MacNab, premier of Upper and Lower Canada, as he perused the baroque menu that included a first course of green turtle soup, made with captured sea turtles. Diners could then move on to turkeys in oyster sauce or "epigram" of lamb with truffles. For dessert, there were apple fritters, almond-cup custards, cranberry tarts, or "Coventry puffs." (Bob’s fingers got sticky.) And the famous frozen lemonade—especially good for a recovering alcoholic—was available morning, noon, and night.

From these suppers, Henry no doubt brought to his incapacitated family entertaining or indignant anecdotes. The children lived on stories, and they appreciated their father’s. As he vowed to confide to Tribune readers, Henry objected to a young woman at the table who’d struck him as belonging "to ‘the lower classes’ in manners and deportment." But mostly he returned with updates from Captain West on the Atlantic’s course and position. The ship was plying north as well as east. It was thrusting deep into stormy northern latitudes—to avoid icebergs, the captain counter intuitively insisted.

Henry admired Captain West as "manly and good-hearted . . . full of kindness." In his company, Henry felt "the menace plucked out of every storm." But although the Atlantic’s experienced skipper spoke calmingly of his sharp-eyed lookouts, of his iceberg-free course, both Mary and Henry no doubt worried as the Atlantic crossed the Grand Banks and headed toward even more polar waters. Another Collins monster ship, the Arctic, had met a terrible fate off Newfoundland only the year before, in 1854, in one of the greatest maritime disasters of the decade.

The Arctic, an even speedier and more luxurious seagoing palace than its sister ship, had embodied high-stakes ambition. In a dense fog it had collided with another ship and quickly sunk; three hundred people died, including Edward Knight Collins’s own wife, daughter, and son. Its loss in the Grand Banks had dealt the United States a tragic loss that seemed like a punishment for hubris. The Jameses could not know, in 1855, that the Collins Line was doomed, that American ships would never overtake the European passenger companies in the coming heyday of transatlantic liners. But they keenly understood during this tense northern voyage the vulnerability of their own hopes.

EVEN WHEN LAID low by seasickness, Mary worked her magic to stitch her high-strung family together. She alleviated the ravages of Henry’s demons, calming him with her sweet, steady gaze. She wouldn’t have moved the family to Switzerland, if it had been up to her. True, she’d learned to share Henry’s enthusiasm for those top-notch Swiss schools. But she wouldn’t have chosen to stow her children on an ill-fated ship, to toss and turn with nightmares of ice grinding into the prow. And yet she’d chosen Henry. And to choose Henry, she might well recall, was to choose a universe of icebergs.

Mary Walsh James was nothing, though, if not resilient—yet, lacking her husband’s wit, she hadn’t been missed at the captain’s table. Like her younger sister, Kate, like her small daughter, Alice, Mary was at times easy to overlook. She was a distinct personality, with a roster of definite likes and dislikes, but she also cultivated the invisibility of Victorian wives, mothers, and daughters. And yet it is not possible to understand the Jameses or their America without her. Her favorite son, at least, roundly defended her importance. Henry Junior would ask, "What account of us all can pretend to have gone the least bit deep without coming to our mother at every penetration?" Mary James, with her Victorian solidity and prudery—and with her un-Victorian assertiveness—would shape her children’s careers, their anxieties and ambitions, quite as much as their volatile father. She was the world as it should be, in the eyes of nineteenth-century mothers: a place where her children didn’t always fit comfortably.

As the first week passed and the Atlantic steamed past Ireland, Mary revived and was soon figuring accounts and rooting in trunks for some of the elaborate pleated frocks she’d laid in to wear on the voyage. By the time the Atlantic sailed into the waters of Liverpool Bay, Mary was magnificently dressed and at the rail with her children, ready to return to terra firma when the gangplanks went down.

It was July 8, 1855—four days after an Independence Day spent tossing at sea—when the James children disembarked at the Liverpool docks and, at a stroke, became expatriates and foreigners. When she looked at her children, wide-eyed at the spectacle of the strangely dressed and strangely accented international throngs around them, Mary could hardly have foreseen how this dislocation would transform her children. Years before, she had told a friend that sometimes her "mother’s heart paints a future for [her] boys, & the thought . . . adds a brighter tint of happiness to the picture." Her boys as well as her little girl lit up, eager to engage with the unknown train stations and hotels that now spread in front of them. She watched as all five of her children drank in the smoke-smudged horizons of Europe’s busiest port and the world’s most extended empire.

The Jameses had avoided the fate of the Arctic, but they hadn’t dodged the consequences of becoming a family in transit, a group of close-knit exiles adrift among the palaces and ruins of Europe. Though plenty of well-to-do nineteenth-century American families routinely lived and traveled in Europe—the Continent of 1855 teemed with Yankee top hats and steamer trunks—the Jameses were already no ordinary tourists, and their coming travels would rarify them further. The young Jameses would grow up believing the answer to their problems could be found in the next city, the next country. At the same time, they would be thrown onto one another for company and comfort, sometimes in terrible isolation; they would be outsiders everywhere. Psychological survival, from this point on, would prove challenging enough for these émigrés, and their careers in dislocation had only just begun.

Excerpted from House of Wits by Paul Fisher

Copyright © 2008 by Paul Fisher.

Published in 2008 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the publisher.