The Bostonians (62 page)

3
(p. 18)
Miss Birdseye:
(See Introduction.) Miss Birdseye might have been based on Elizabeth Peabody (1804-1894), an American Transcendentalist and social reformer devoted to education. She was the sister-in-law of Horace Mann (1796-1859) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), and she helped Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) establish his Transcendentalist Temple School in Boston. Miss Birdseye’s resemblance to Miss Peabody, particularly “in her displaced spectacles” (p. 32), outraged readers; James denied the comparison and was dismayed by it. (See Edel,
Henry James: 1882-1895, The Middle Years.)

4
(p. 19)
Abolitionists:
Abolitionism began in the United States during the American Revolution in the 1780s to end the institution of slavery and the slave trade. In 1833 William Lord Garrison founded the American Anti-Slavery Society, which called for the immediate outlawing of slaves. Slavery was finally abolished after the Civil War with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

5
(p. 20) seance: Seances were very popular in the nineteenth century, and both James’s father and his brother William were practitioners (see Introduction). Seance comes from the French word for “meeting,” but in occultism, such a meeting is conducted by a medium who works to communicate with spirits of the dead.

Chapter IV

1
(p. 24)
Mary J. Prance:
Dr. Prance resembles Katharine Peabody Loring, the longtime companion and caretaker of James’s invalid sister, Alice. Loring cared for Alice during the writing of
The Bostonians.
(See Lewis,
The Jameses: A Family Narrative.)

2
(p. 25)
Short-Skirts League:
The name of this group is reminiscent of Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818-1894), a social reformer and lecturer who defended pantaloons—loose-fitting trousers, usually above the ankle in length—as a way of dress for women (she wore hers under a short skirt). Such garments came to be called “bloomers.”

3
(p. 25)
phalansteries:
In a scheme devised by Charles Fourier (1772-1832) for the reorganization of society (see Introduction), a phalanstery (from the French
phalanstère)
was a self-contained structure or group of structures occupied by a cooperative social community known as a phalanx; each phalanx consisted of about 1,800 persons who lived together as one family and held property in common.

4
(p. 28)
take the flowing bowl from every man:
This is a reference to the progressive temperance movements and religious revivalism of the nineteenth century (often abolitionist groups) that lobbied for the moderation or complete prohibition of alcohol consumption. In 1846 temperance campaigner Neal Dow helped lead the nation’s first prohibition law through the Maine Legislature. Between 1846 and 1855, thirteen states passed their own versions of Maine’s prohibition law, and in 1874 the influential Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was founded in Cleveland, Ohio. Prohibition became part of federal law after World War I, with the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919.

5
(p. 28)
Amariah:
Amariah was the name James originally intended to give to Verena’s father, Selah Tarrant (see
The Notebooks of Henry James,
p. 67).

6
(p. 29) a
mesmeric healer:
Mesmerism was a therapeutic system popularized by German physician F. A. Mesmer (1733-1815); Mesmer believed that magnets had curative properties for pain. Significant particularly to the nineteenth-century Spiritualists was his treatment that involved inducing a hypnotic state in a patient through a force Mesmer called “animal magnetism,” which he believed to be an actual substance in the body and that he claimed could be channeled and transmitted between people. Though patients with a variety of self-proclaimed ailments flocked to his healing sessions—and he did seem to have incredible public success—a scientific committee established in 1784 concluded that Mesmer’s claims could not be substantiated. Nonetheless, his techniques appealed to a broad swath of the public, prompting numerous other late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century practitioners to follow his lead, work that led to the modern use of hypnosis. Hypnosis, though similar in its trancelike qualities, induces a state of consciousness in which a person purportedly loses the power of voluntary action and responds to suggestion or direction in order to access suppressed memories or to correct certain behaviors.

Chapter V

1
(p. 31)
Roxbury:
Roxbury, a southern residential section of Boston, was at the time of the novel considered a different city. West Roxbury was the site of the Fourier-inspired Brook Farm utopian communal living experiment (see chapter IV, note 3).

Chapter VI

1
(p. 38)
cotton-States:
The Confederate states (see chapter II, note 1) were originally South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, and eventually included Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Missouri and Kentucky were represented, but they never officially seceded.

Chapter VII

1
(p. 48)
“I’ve got no atmosphere; there’s very little of the Indian summer about me!”:
By atmosphere, Mrs. Farrinder and Verena mean an overall or dominant effect of a work of art or emotional appeal. Thus, Mrs. Farrinder is using “Indian summer” metaphorically, as a period of flourish toward the end of one’s life.

2
(p. 50)
a company of mountebanks:
A mountebank is a charlatan, a boastful and unscrupulous person who, in this case, hawks quack medicines to potential customers by enticing them with various entertainments.

Chapter VIII

1
(p. 53)
the detested carpet-bagger:
The derogatory term carpetbagger (literally, one who carries all his or her belongings in a bag made of carpet) refers to a northerner immigrating to the southern states after the American Civil War (1861-1865) seeking private gain, political or otherwise, from the results of the North/South conflict.

2
(p. 53)
the horrible period of reconstruction:
The reconstruction period (1865-1877) following the American Civil War was marked by political corruption and the North’s essential desertion of the South’s thousands of liberated slaves, who were still terribly oppressed as they struggled to develop working skills for their new lives.

Chapter IX

1
(p. 63)
Cambridge:
Cambridge is in Middlesex County, in eastern Massachusetts, on the north bank of the Charles River opposite Boston. It was organized as a town in 1636, when it became the site of Harvard College. The town was named for Cambridge, England, in 1638. The James family moved there at the end of the Civil War. Olive would have walked there easily via the West Boston (now Longfellow) Bridge

Chapter X

1
(p. 65)
vendor of lead-pencils:
After the War of 1812, an embargo prevented the importation of pencils from Europe, and Americans first began manufacturing their own. In 1821 Charles Dunbar (brother-in-law of Henry David Thoreau) discovered a deposit of plumbago, or graphite (the mineral actually used as the core of “lead” pencils), in New England. As a result, the Thoreau Pencil Company, named after Henry’s father, John, came to be known as the maker of the finest pencils in America. Henry himself worked for the company, developing pencils (mixing graphite with clay as the Germans had done) and machinery for his father.

2
(p. 65)
Cayuga community:
This Cayuga community is an allusion to those radical religious groups that first began within the Anglican Communion in the nineteenth century. It is also similar to the utopian Oneida Community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886) in New York.

3
(p. 65)
spiritual picnics and vegetarian camp-meetings:
Camp meetings were religious revival gatherings that were especially popular in America during the nineteenth century with various Protestant denominations. As many as 10,000 attendees camped in forest areas and participated in constant three- to four-day church sessions, which often emphasized sudden conversion experiences and thus earned a wild reputation. Many of these groups advocated vegetarianism. Although vegetarianism goes back to ancient times, it took on tremendous force as a progressive moral and political movement in the nineteenth century, propelled by a belief in the equality of all living beings and that to eat meat was barbarous. In the United States, William Metcalfe, an English clergyman and physician, established a vegetarian church in Philadelphia in 1817 and was a founder of the American Vegetarian Society in 1850. In 1893 a vegetarian congress took place at the World’s Fair in Chicago, boasting members such as Bronson Alcott, Upton Sinclair, and George Bernard Shaw.

Chapter XI

1
(p. 71)
lady-editors of newspapers advocating new religions:
This is likely a direct reference to Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), who founded Christian Science in 1879, the monthly
Christian Science Journal
in 1883, the weekly
Christian Science Sentinel
in 1898, and the
Christian Science
Monitor in 1908. However, James is also making a wider gesture toward the proliferation of religions in the late nineteenth century, many of which emerged from millennial fear and Adventism and the apocalyptic prophecies of William Miller (who predicted Christ’s return in the year 1844), loosely including Christian Science and Joseph Smith’s Mormonism, but even more specifically the religion founded by Ellen G. White (1827-1915), Seventh-Day Adventism (formally incorporated in 1863). White herself was a health advocate (her vegetarian beliefs were the origin for modern-day cereal) and an active abolitionist before the Civil War.

2
(p. 77)
marriage-tie:
In the spirit of Charles Fourier, free love was a cause for certain radical movements that advocated women’s rights (including suffrage) and saw marriage as restrictive. One of its promoters, Victoria Woodhull, was the first woman to run for president (1872).

3
(p. 78)
Joan of Arc:
Joan of Arc (1412?-1431) was a peasant girl who saved France from English domination when she was only seventeen years old. Directed by heavenly visions of Saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret, she dressed as a boy and rode to Chinon to clear the way for the coronation of the French Dauphin. Equipped with a shield and a banner, Joan planned the retrieval of Orléans and inspired the French army to break the English siege of that city. They were successful, and the Dauphin was crowned as King Charles VII. Joan continued fighting for France but was eventually captured and sold to the English, who harassed and tortured her. French clerics who supported the English tried her for witchcraft and heresy—the latter because she claimed direct inspiration from God, in what they saw as a rejection of church hierarchy. At the end of the trial she recanted but was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment; subsequently she retracted her statement and was burned alive as a relapsed heretic. Joan was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1920.

4
(p. 79)
“Faust”:
Written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832),
Faust
is the story of a man who, in the pursuit of knowledge, makes a pact with Mephistopheles, trading his soul for ultimate experience.

5
(p. 79) “Entsagen sollst du, sollst entsagen!”: The actual line from part 1 of Goethe’s Faust is “Entbehren sollst du! Sollst entbehren.” Olive herself provides readers with the translation: “Thou shalt renounce, refrain, abstain!”

Chapter XII

1
(p. 82)
Topeka:
Topeka, the capital of Kansas, was founded by a group of antislavery colonists led by Charles Robinson, who was from New England; however, in 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the region to free-soil settlement, and a pro-slavery group set up a legislature. When the Topeka Constitution banned slavery, tensions ran high, and they remained so until Kansas joined the Union in 1861.

2
(p. 84)
Helen of Troy:
According to Greek legend, Helen of Troy was the most beautiful woman in the world and the subject of the infamous love triangle that started the Trojan War. The wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, Helen was given to Paris as a reward for his naming Venus (over Juno and Minerva) the most beautiful goddess. Paris persuaded Helen to flee with him to Troy, and Agamemnon, her brother-in-law, led an expedition to recover her. Paris was killed, and Helen was returned to Sparta.

3
(p. 84)
Empress of France:
Eugénia María de Montijo de Guzmán was the wife of Napoleon III and empress of France (1853-1870). She was known for taking an active role in political affairs. James here is likely referring to her support of the French opposition to a Prussian candidate for the vacant Spanish throne, a controversy that precipitated the Franco-German War of 1870, which sent Napoleon into exile.

Chapter XIII

1
(p. 91)
Tremont Temple:
Tremont Temple is a Baptist church on 88 Tremont Street in Boston. It was founded by Timothy Gilbert in 1839 as an integrated church, one that allowed entrance to all races and classes.

Chapter XV

1
(p. 109)
King’s Chapel:
King’s Chapel, founded in 1686, is a Unitarian Universalist Church on the corner of School and Tremont Streets on Boston’s Freedom Trail. The chapel building itself, erected in 1757, is considered a great example of American Georgian architecture.