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Clayton, Owen
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Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915.
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Howells' English Travel Books: Problems in Technique
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Howells wrote three books on England: London Films (1906), Certain Delightful English Towns (1906), and Seven English Cities (1909). As with most of his book publication, nearly all of these three had appeared in magazines, with about forty pages of London Films first coming out in the December 1904 issues of Harper's Monthly and the North American Review and with one essay of Seven English Cities printed in Harper's as late as July 1909. The first two books resulted from Howells' visit to England from March to October 1904, and the last partly from a visit in May and June 1908, though it drew also upon his earlier, longer stay. From the beginning he showed an outward reluctance to return to travel literature, his first extended work in the genre since Tuscan Cities in 1886 and A Little Swiss Sojourn in 1892. In a letter of 12 April 1904 to his wife he complained that Colonel George Harvey, of Harper & Brothers, “in spite of our agreement … has told round that I'm going to do a book,” and he went on to ask her to remember “that I have not yet promised any sort of book on England, though probably I shall do one of some sort.” But in the same letter he reported doing “a tentative impression which could be used in the Spectator and Harper's Weekly” (neither did print it); he had already written letters and sent a “diary” to his wife, from which his daughter, who accompanied him to England, has observed he drew upon for his first two books; and he had begun the first of four notebooks soon after his landing at Plymouth in March. At least as early as February 15, as Robert W. Walts has found, Howells had written to F. A. Duneka of Harper's about a proposed travel book; and as Walts remarks, after quoting more extensively than I have from the April 12 letter to Howells' wife: “Nevertheless, after the indignation had been smothered, two books, London Films and Certain Delightful English Towns, were produced from that trip.”
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References
1 For details of periodical publication see William M. Gibson and George Arms, A Bibliography of William Dean Howells (New York, 1948), entries 06-A, 06-F, and 09-B. Entries 11-9, 11-12, 11-16, 11-21, 12-2, and 12-12 cite six uncollected magazine articles based on Howells' 1910 and 1911 visits to England and appearing in 1911–12.
I wish to acknowledge with thanks a grant-in-aid from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1964 that allowed me to visit most of the places Howells wrote about; and I am grateful to Professors Edwin H. Cady and Willard Thorp for their many helpful suggestions.
2 Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed. Mildred Howells (New York and London, 1928), ii, 192–193.
3 Life in Letters, ii, 186 ff.
4 These are at the Houghton Library of Harvard University: see John K. Reeves, “The Literary Manuscripts of W. D. Howells,” BNYPL, lxii (June 1958), 276. Though the Houghton Library has no notebook for the 1908 visit, it has two for later English visits, described by Reeves as “Europe, 1911” and “Stratford, 1913.” I am indebted to W. W. Howells and the Houghton Library for permission to have had these notebooks microfilmed; though what Howells used from them and did not use has interest, in this essay my concern is only with the published accounts.
5 Robert W. Walts, “Howells's Plans for Two Travel Books,” PBSA, Lvii (1963), 454–455. On pp. 456–458 Walts reprints Howells' plans for the two books from the holographs at the House of Harper. The plans, then entitled “London Sojourns” and “English Journeys” and written on board ship in April 1905, when Howells returned from Europe after a winter at San Remo, differ from the final books most notably in the inclusion of material in “London Sojourns” that later appeared in Certain Delightful English Towns and the inclusion in both plans (but especially “English Journeys”) of essays later appearing in Seven English Cities. Also, some places cited in the plans are omitted altogether from the final books; as Walts justly remarks, “Howells planned large and wrote small” (p. 459).
6 Edwin H. Cady, The Realist at War … William Dean Howells (Syracuse, 1958), p. 250.
7 [Review of Fetridge], Atlantic Monthly, xix (March 1867), 380–383; [Review of Bennett], “Editor's Easy Chair,” Harper's Monthly, cxxvi (April 1913), 796–799. Both earlier and later reviews (e.g., Gibson and Arms, entries 66-44, 14-2, 16-13) might qualify as of this genre, but the Fetridge and Bennett reviews are definitely major ones. The first of the “Glimpses of Summer Travel” appeared in the Cincinnati Gazette, lxxi (21 July 1860), 2, and “A Memory of San Remo” in Harper's Monthly, cxl (February 1920), 321–327.
8 [Review of John Durand's translation], Atlantic Monthly, xxii (July 1868), 124 and 125. Among other reviews or essays in which this emphasis appears are: [on Bayard Taylor's By-Ways of Europe], Atlantic Monthly, xxiii (June 1869), 764–765; [on Hippolyte Taine's Notes on England], xxx (August 1872), 240–242; [on C. D. Warner's Mummies and Moslems], xxxviii (July 1876), 108–112; “Life and Letters,” Harper's Weekly, xxxix (25 May 1895), 485; [on Mrs. Katherine Hooker's Wayfarers of Italy], “Editor's Easy Chair,” Harper's Monthly, cvi (January 1903), 326–327; [on Castilian Days], “John Hay in Literature,” North American Review, clxxxi (September 1905), 344–345; [on Bennett's Your United States], as cited in n. 7.
Curiously Howells did not review James's English Hours (1905) or the earlier books in which all but two of the essays first appeared (1875, 1883, 1893). Nor did James review any of the three English travel books, though he had enthusiastically written of Howells' Italian Journeys, North American Review, cvi (January 1868), 336–339. Howells did not review James's The American Scene (1907) either, but he was surely aware of the likelihood of its appearance while writing many of his own sketches, since parts of it appeared in the North American Review and Harper's Monthly between April 1905 and August 1906 (Leon Edel and Dan H. Laurence, A Bibliography of Henry James, 2nd ed., London, 1961, entry A63). On four occasions sketches by Howells (April, June 1905; April, June 1906) appeared in Harper's Monthly in the same months when James's were appearing in the North American Review, and in December 1905 both James (“New York and the Hudson: A Spring Impression”) and Howells (“English Idiosyncrasies,” later entitled “Glimpses of English Character” in Seven English Cities) appeared there together. Did the North American Review critic of Seven English Cities justly speculate that the book was Howells' “little revenge, his Quip Modest” (cxc, December 1909, 839) for The American Scene?
9 Venetian Life, New Holiday ed. (Boston and New York, 1907), pp. xvii and xviii.
10 In J. Henry Harper, The House of Harper (1912), quoted by James L. Woodress, Jr., Howells & Italy (Durham, N. C., 1952), p. 194.
11 Outside the scope of this essay a number of other problems deserve attention. Among those already touched upon are the relation of the notebooks, the full development of Howells' critical theory of travel literature as developed in reviews over the course of his lifetime, the comparison of James and Howells as travel writers, and utilization of novelistic techniques in the later travel books. Also worth consideration are the shifts in approach between early and later travel books, the distinctions to be made between the English travel books and those on Italy and Spain within the same decade, and the possible influence of Emerson's English Traits and Hawthorne's Our Old Home.
12 Cady, p. 250, used as a chapter title with special reference to Howells' election in 1908 as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
13 Life in Letters, ii, 350 (29 June 1915 to Henry James).
14 In Harper's Monthly, cxv (October 1907), 803–806, Howells meets an ocean liner as if he were a $15-a-week reporter, satirizing various returning types and speculating with some despair upon their taking up the “old familiar burden” of America after these internationalized travelers have been “lost to the republic.” More generally, see the collection of “Easy Chair” papers, titled Imaginary Interviews (New York and London, 1910); on p. 12 (not in the magazine text) Howells refers to the “subdivisions of his own ego.”
15 This stands in sharp contrast with Howells' arraignment of the confidential novelist throughout his career; e.g., Criticism and Fiction (New York, 1891), p. 76. But Howells' use of point of view exhibits variation throughout his career, as David J. Burrows has effectively shown in his unpubl. diss. “Point-of-View in the Novels of William Dean Howells” (New York Univ., 1964).
16 For references to the three English travel books I use the initials of the titles (LF, CDET, SEC) Mowed by the page numbers of the first edition, but as here no initials appear when the title appears in context.
17 CDET, pp. 6, 25, 175, 179, 196, 235.
18 “Bibliographical [dated July 1909],” London Films and Certain Delightful English Towns, Library ed. (New York and London, 1911), p. ix.
19 The Future of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1956), p. 13.
20 Criticism and Fiction, p. 73.
21 Notably in “Henry James, Jr.,” Century, xxv (November 1882), 25–29. See “Dickens and Thackeray” in Criticisms and Fiction and Other Essays, ed. Clara M. and Rudolf Kirk (New York, 1959), pp. 93–97, for an excellent review of the whole subject. In Criticism and Fiction, p. 174 (p. 81 in the Kirk edition) Howells, for example, pays tribute to “The might of that great talent.”
22 For other references to Dickens, see LF, pp. 104, 161, and CDET, p. 9; and for Hardy, see LF, p. 155, CDET, pp. 92, 111, 223, and SEC, p. 73.
23 Oscar W. Firkins, William Dean Howells: A Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), p. 43. In their books Firkins, pp. 41–63, and Delmar G. Cooke, William Dean Howells: A Critical Study (New York, 1922), pp. 128–151, have written the most extensive published accounts of Howells' travel writing in general. One unpubl. diss. deals with the subject at greater length—Marion L. Stiles, “Travel in the Life and Writings of William Dean Howells” (Univ. of Texas, 1946)—and in part relevant to my essay is Maggie Daniel, “Howells's Attitude Toward England and English Literature” (Univ. of Wisconsin, 1953); though I have profited greatly from reading both works, my indebtedness is not direct enough, as far as I am aware, to allow documented acknowledgment. In Joseph A. Dowling, “William Dean Howells and His Relationship with the English” (New York Univ., 1957), I have found citations of British reviews of the English travel books that I would otherwise have missed.
24 “Bibliographical,” p. x.
25 “William Dean Howells,” Harper's Monthly, cxiii (July 1906), 221. A sketch for Certain Delightful English Towns appears in the same issue.
26 In my treatment of images I am indebted generally though not specifically to a seminar paper by James L. Dean, of the University of New Mexico. In a dissertation Dean plans to take up many of the problems of Howells' travel writing referred to in n. 11.
27 Cady has touched upon this matter, for example, in writing about A Modern Instance in The Road to Realism … William Dean Howells (Syracuse, 1956), p. 214: “They are covert and serviceable, the symbols of a realist.” See also Cady's introduction to his edition of The Rise of Silas Lapham (Boston, 1957), pp. ix–xi; Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia, 1954), pp. 132–136; and the introduction to Howells' Prefaces to Contemporaries (1882–1920), ed. George Arms, William M. Gibson, and Frederic C. Marston, Jr. (Gainesville, Fla., 1957), pp. xi–xiii and xvii.
28 Criticism and Fiction, pp. 15–16, Cf. pp. 62, 72, with the quotations from Valdés.
29 Harper's Monthly, cix (July 1904), 309–312.
30 The host was Henry Strachey, known to Howells through John St. Loe Strachey, editor of The Spectator, to whom Howells wrote about the visit. Sutton Court is not even named in the text of Certain Delightful English Towns, though the photograph of the house is reproduced in the book with the title “Sutton Court, One of England's Historic Houses.” In the magazine illustrations there is also “An Interior: Sutton Court,” Harper's Monthly, cxiii (July 1906), 172.
31 “Bibliographical,” p. [xi].
32 For instances of the frequent attacks against realism as photographic, see Helen McMahon, Criticism of Fiction: A Study of Trends in the Atlantic Monthly 1857–1898 (New York, 1952), pp. 25 and 31; Robert Falk, The Victorian Mode in American Fiction 1865–1885 (East Lansing, Mich., 1965), pp. 30, 48, and 119. In his own criticism Howells seldom writes of realism in terms of photography, and then generally with hesitation. For example, in Criticism and Fiction, pp. 11–12, he does not reply directly to the charge that the “real grasshopper” is “photographic,” and (p. 130) he refers somewhat ambiguously to an author's possible use of “a snap-camera.” In Literature and Life (New York and London, 1902), p. 25, he certainly speaks with tongue in cheek of “the base, sordid, photographic, commonplace school of Tolstoy, Tourguénief, Zola, Hardy, and James.” As already noted, the whole treatment in London Films shows a duality of attitude. Long before, of course, Zola had made a forthright reply in The Experimental Novel: “A stupid reproach made against us naturalistic writers is that we wish to be merely photographers” (Documents of Modern Literary Realism, ed. George J. Becker, Princeton, 1963, p. 168).
33 “Editor's Easy Chair,” Harper's Monthly, cxxviii (April 1914), 797.
34 Harper's Monthly, cvi (April 1903), 811, 814, reprinted as “The Practices and Precepts of Vaudeville,” Imaginary Interviews, pp. 33, 40.
35 Webster's New International Dictionary (Springfield, Mass., c. 1909, and 1913), p. 815.
36 In this preference for the analogy with painting Howells follows his contemporary realists. Cf. Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays, ed. Clara M. and Rudolf Kirk, pp. 225, 227, 244, 339, 344, 373, for typical references to the realist as painter, the last (1912) with allusion to “the kinematograph.” For Howells' interest in painting, see also Clara M. Kirk, W. D. Howells and Art in His Time (New Brunswick, N. J., 1965).
37 Athenaeum., No. 4074 (25 November 1905), pp. 717–718.
38 The Seen and Unseen at Stratford-on-Avon (New York and London, 1914), pp. 43–44.
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