Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [2]
1853 The New York City Commission pays $5,000,000 for land that will become Central Park, a vast public recreation space in the European style. The first portion of the park will open in 1858; it will be complete some sixteen years hence.
1857 The Atlantic Monthly is founded by Moses Dresser Phillips and Francis H. Underwood. Early contributors include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell (the magazine’s first editor), and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In coming years Henry James, Jr., will be a frequent contributor.
1859 In October Henry, Sr., takes his family to Geneva.
1860 The family returns to America in September and settles in Newport, Rhode Island.
1861 The American Civil War begins.
1862 Henry James, Jr., enrolls at Harvard Law School but drops out after a year to pursue a writing career. He becomes friendly with writer William Dean Howells.
1864 In February James publishes his first piece of fiction, the story “A Tragedy of Error,” in the Continental Monthly. Nathaniel Hawthorne dies.
1865 James begins to write reviews for the Nation, a new liberal weekly. The American Civil War ends.
1866 The first permanent transatlantic telegraph cable links Europe and America, vastly increasing the speed of information transmittal.
1869 In England James meets George Eliot and writes reviews of her works, including Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, which are published in the Atlantic Monthly and
the Galaxy, a literary journal. Mark Twain publishes the best-selling travel book The Innocents Abroad, based on letters he had written while journeying by steamship to Europe and the Holy Land; it treats hallowed Old World landmarks with irreverence and parodies the manners and mores of Europeans and Americans.
1870 James’s cousin Mary (“Minny”) Temple dies in March, and the author, devastated, moves back to New York. His social opportunities are abundant; he spends time at Emerson’s house in Concord, Massachusetts, and meets Henry Adams, who has just been appointed editor of the North American Review. The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens in New York City.
1871 James publishes his first novel, Watch and Ward, in installments in the Atlantic; it introduces what will be a prominent Jamesian theme: the development of a young girl into womanhood.
1872 Assigned to write a travel series for the Nation, James sails to Liverpool and spends time in Europe. Susan B. Anthony casts a vote in the presidential election in Rochester, New York, and is arrested.
1873 Financial panic grips New York with the failure of Jay Cooke and Company, the nation’s preeminent investment bank. After a ten-year economic boom, the United States enters its worst depression to date, although New York continues its prodigious growth.
1875 James publishes in the Atlantic Monthly the novel Roderick Hudson, about an American sculptor in Rome and his struggle to reconcile art and passion. During his early period (also called his international period), he compares the people and cultures of the United States and Europe, focusing especially on the differences. While living in Paris, James associates with the writers Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola, as well as Russian expatriate authors, including the novelist Ivan Turgenev. He works on his novel The American, about a self-made American millionaire who tries to marry the daughter of French aristocrats.
1876 Roderick Hudson is published in book form. Impatient with
1877 The American is published in book form. James is friendly with Alfred Tennyson, William Gladstone, and Robert Browning. While in Rome, James hears about an American “child of nature and of freedom” who consorted with a “good-looking Roman, of vague identity.” James is immediately inspired to turn this story into a novel, Daisy Miller.
1878 James publishes the short novel The Europeans. The Macmillan Publishing Company of London asks him to write a biography of either Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne.
1879 James publishes Daisy Miller, about a young American woman in Rome, in book form. He signs a contract for the British copyright on Hawthorne, which is published in the English Men of Letters series in London.