Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-75dct Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-23T08:14:20.327Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Felicity Forever Gone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2011

B. C. Lee
Get access

Extract

In the thirty years or so which separate James's The Europeans from The Ivory Tower, the transformation of America was accomplished, and the society James knew and wrote about in 1878 was indeed gone forever. What had taken its place he was not really to discover until his return in 1904. It is true that he had dealt in his work with the American millionaire and the ‘rape of Europe’, but the naivete of his conception of what such a figure as Christopher Newman would be like is easily demonstrated by the lives of such men as Frick, Vanderbilt and Jay Gould. These men and their contemporaries: Hill, Harriman, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Duke, Cornell and Morgan - a comparative handful of multimillionaires - had brought into being an industrial power as remote and different in its own way from mid-century New England, as they both were from the Europe James had come to know so well.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bulletin of the British Association for American Studies , Volume 5 , December 1962 , pp. 31 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © British Association for American Studies 1962

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

1. The Letters of Henry James, Vol. 11, pp. 373–374.Google Scholar
2. The Education of Henry Adams, p. 239.Google Scholar
3. The Education of Henry Adams, pp. 499–500.Google Scholar
4. The American Scene, pp. 8–13.Google Scholar
5. The American Scene, pp. 76–79. The subsequent history of New York has of course proved James right. But even he could hardly have foreseen the extent to which the old New York would succumb to what he called the ‘monsters of the mere market’. The following, part of a broadcast by Alistair Cooke, is taken from The Listener, of July 14th, 1955: ‘This (51st Street) is the very centre of the most prosperous part of Manhattan, where the land values are stratospheric and consequently the real estate values are beyond the reach of mortal wage slaves. Along this street, between Park Avenue and Sixth Avenue - three blocks only - eighty per cent of the buildings standing in 1947 have been destroyed and in their place six new skyscrapers have gone up, the smallest of which is twentyone storeys.… This is New York - the place that does not conceive of a city as a slow-accumulating shape and style and way of life, but as a revolving investment in real estate.Google Scholar
6.Mumford, L., Sticks and Stones, p. 76.Google Scholar
7. The American Scene, pp. 146–147.Google Scholar
8. The American Scene, p. 159Google Scholar
9. The American Scene, pp. 463–464Google Scholar
10. The American Scene, pp. 103–106.Google Scholar
11. A Round of Visits, p. 12.Google Scholar
12. The American Scene, p. 490.Google Scholar
13. The American Scene, pp. 209–225.Google Scholar
14. Notes for The Ivory Tower, p. 285 (The Ivory Tower, Collins, London, 1927)Google Scholar
15. The Ivory Tower, p. 22.Google Scholar
16. The Ivory Tower, p. 6.Google Scholar
17. The Ivory Tower, p. 4.Google Scholar
18. The Ivory Tower, p. 57.Google Scholar
19. The Ivory Tower, pp. 47–48.Google Scholar
20. The Ivory Tower, Notes, pp. 327–328.Google Scholar
21. The Ivory Tower, Notes, p. 333.Google Scholar
22. The Ivory Tower, p. 233.Google Scholar
23. The Ivory Tower, Notes, pp. 300–301.Google Scholar