The Bostonians (63 page)

Chapter XVI

1
(p. 115)
the current “serials” in the magazines:
Novels in the nineteenth century were often serialized, with sections coming out in magazines one at a time, in installments.
The Bostonians
itself was serialized in
Century Magazine
in 1885 and 1886 before being published in book form.

Chapter XVII

1
(p. 130)
Electra or Antigone:
Olive is being compared to two strong but tragic women from Greek legend, both of whom are devoted to their men. Electra was the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. When her beloved father was killed by her mother, she helped her brother Orestes to slay Clytemnestra (and the latter’s lover) in retribution. Antigone was the daughter born of the incest between Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. After Oedipus blinded himself upon discovering that Jocasta was his mother and that he had slain his father, Antigone served as his guide into exile until his death near Athens. Returning to Thebes, Antigone attempted to reconcile her dueling brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices. Both brothers were killed, and while Eteocles was given a funeral, the burial of Polyneices was forbidden by the new king, Creon. Antigone buried the body anyway and was punished with execution.

Chapter XX

1
(p. 158)
sleeping constantly at Parker’s:
The Parker House, founded in 1855 by Harvey D. Parker, claims to be the longest continuously operating hotel in the United States. Beginning in the 1850s, intellectuals, including Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, and several members of the James family, held festive Saturday afternoon roundtable discussions there. The hotel, now the Omni Parker House, still exists (though not in the original building) at 60 School Street on the Freedom Trail.

2
(p. 159)
Papanti’s:
Lorenzo Papanti taught dancing at his academy in Boston to upper-class children in the mid-nineteenth century.

3
(p. 160)
Cremona violins:
Cremona, in the Lombardy region of northern Italy, is famous for the violins and violas made there in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries by the Amati family and their pupils, the Guarneris and Stradivaris.

4
(p. 161)
Athenæum:
The Athenaeum (founded in 1807) in Boston is an independent research library containing more than 500,000 volumes and housing an art gallery featuring the works of Bostonian artists. The library moved into its present building (designed by Edward Clarke Cabot) on Beacon Street in 1849.

5
(p. 164)
Charlestown:
A section of Boston, Charlestown is situated on a small peninsula between the estuaries of the Charles and Mystic Rivers and was home to the employees of the now decommissioned navy yard.

6
(p. 165)
Bloody Mary:
Mary I (1516-1558), also called Mary Tudor, was the first queen to rule England (1553-1558) in her own right. She was known as Bloody Mary for her persecution of Protestants in a vain attempt to restore Roman Catholicism in England.

7
(p. 165)
Faustina, wife of the pure Marcus Aurelius:
Annia Galeria Faustina (A.D. 125-176) was the younger cousin and disloyal wife of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (ruled 161-180) and was his companion on several of his military campaigns.

8
(p. 168)
the heroic age of New England life—the age of plain living and high thinking:
“Plain living and high thinking” comes from line 11 of English Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s poem “Written in London, Sept. 1802,” in which he laments the decadence of city life: “Plain living and high thinking are no more: / The homely beauty of the good old cause / Is gone.” This “heroic age” for New England gave way to what is referred to as the Gilded Age of the 1870s, plagued by mass materialism and political corruption.

9
(p. 168)
transcendentalism:
Transcendentalism was a nineteenth-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were influenced by Romanticism, Platonism, and Kantian philosophy, and were bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths. The Transcendentalists contributed to many of the reform movements of the time, including socialistic/communal living, women’s suffrage, temperance, etc. Famous Transcendentalists include: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Bronson Alcott. In 1840 Emerson and Fuller founded
The Dial
(1840-1844), in which some of the best writings by minor Transcendentalists appeared.

10
(p. 168)
Emerson:
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American Transcendentalist (see chapter XX, note 9), philosopher, poet, essayist, and lecturer influenced by English Romantics and thinkers such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and especially Carlyle (see chapter XXI, note 5). His famous essay “Nature” helped to further the ideas of Transcendentalism.

11
(p. 169)
Chickering piano:
A Chickering piano is one made by the Boston firm founded by Jonas Chickering, who in 1843 patented a one-piece cast-iron frame for use in grand concert pianos; previous piano makers had used only wood in construction.

Chapter XXI

1
(p. 172)
New York, rather far to the eastward, and in the upper reaches of the town:
Basil Ransom lives on the Upper East Side; his neighborhood is newer and thus poorer than the westward and more fashionable Fifth Avenue and the southward, genteel Washington Square.

2
(p. 173)
the fantastic skeleton of the Elevated Railway:
Before the development of New York’s subway system, passengers traveled by Els (elevated railways) running north-south at Ninth Avenue, Sixth Avenue, Third Avenue, and Second Avenue. The Ninth Avenue line, designed by Charles T. Harvey, was the first, and was constructed from 1867 until 1891. The Second and Third Avenue lines, therefore, would only have been under construction during the time of the novel.

3
(p. 175)
De Tocqueville:
French statesman and author Alexis-Charles-Henri-Maurice-Clérel de Tocqueville (1805-1859) wrote one of the most significant books about the United States and its institutions,
Democracy in America,
from 1835 to 1840. He was especially concerned with the civic elements of democracy and its socialized problems.

4
(p. 175)
Astor Library:
John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) was a German immigrant and a New York City fur magnate whose American Fur Company is considered the first U.S. business monopoly. The wealthiest person in the United States at the time of his death, Astor bequeathed $400,000 for the founding of a public library, the Astor Library, in New York City, which was consolidated with others as the New York Public Library in 1895. The Astor Library opened in 1849 and was located in the building on Lafayette Street that is now the Joseph Papp Public Theater, just north of the SoHo district of Manhattan.

5
(p. 176)
Thomas Carlyle:
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was an influential Victorian historian, essayist, philosopher, and critic. He was known for affirming moral values—the dignity of duty and hard work at a time of industrialization and political turbulence.

Chapter XXII

1
(p. 184)
Darby and ]oan:
The term “Darby and Joan” comes from the hero and heroine of a mid-eighteenth-century ballad by Henry Wood-fall, and has come to be used to signify a loving, virtuous married couple.

2
(p. 190)
Panama Canal:
The Panama Canal, spanning the Isthmus of Panama between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, was built on and off from 1881 until its completion in 1914. However, even before its construction, the development of the canal was hotly negotiated by the United States, Britain, and France. Although construction began with the French, they eventually withdrew due to bankruptcy, and the United States took over construction in 1902. The United States continued to oversee the canal until its return to the Republic of Panama in 1999.

3
(p. 192) gentilhomme de province
after the Revolution:
The French words mean “a gentleman from the country”; men of leisure from the country often found themselves poor and fallen after the French Revolution.

4
(p. 192) émigré
from the Languedoc:
Originally, an émigré was a political exile during the French Revolution (1789-1799). Languedoc is in the south of France between the Rhone Valley and the eastern Pyrenees.

Chapter XXIII

1
(p. 203)
Monadnoc Place:
The Tarrant address is a reference to Monadnock Mountain in New Hampshire; “monadnock” is used more loosely to refer to any isolated hill or erosion-resistant rock.

Chapter XXV

1
(p. 222)
the library:
Harvard College Library, then housed in Gore Hall, contained more than 41,000 volumes by 1841. In the twentieth century it was replaced by the Widener Memorial Library, named for an alumnus who was killed in the sinking of the
Titanic
in 1912.

2
(p. 223)
the great Memorial Hall:
Harvard University’s Memorial Hall was built after the Civil War to commemorate Harvard graduates who had died fighting for the Union cause (see chapter II, note 1). The building was dedicated in 1874. On the advent of construction, Oliver Wendell Holmes composed a hymn for the ceremony:

Not with the anguish of hearts that are breaking
Come we as mourners to weep for our dead;
Grief in our breasts has grown weary with aching,
Green is the turf where our tears we have shed.

While o’er their marbles the mosses are creeping
Stealing each name and its record away.
Give their proud story to memory’s keeping,
Shrined in the temple we hallow today.

Hushed are their battlefields, ended their marches.
Deaf are their ears to the drumbeat of mourn—
Rise from the sod ye far columns and arches!
Tell their bright deeds to the ages unborn.

Emblem and legend may fade from the portal,
Keystone may crumble and portal may fall;
They were the builders whose work is immortal,
Crowned with the dome that is over us all.

Chapter XXVII

1
(p. 239)
kind of New Jerusalem boarding-house, in Tenth Street:
While the Church of the New Jerusalem came to America from England in about 1785, the General Convention of the New Jerusalem was established in 1877, and the General Church of the New Jerusalem (also called the New Church) in 1897. The Church of the New Jerusalem was based on the ideas of eighteenth-century Swedish thinker Emanuel Swedenborg (an influence on Henry James, Sr.), who believed in a spiritual interpretation of the Scriptures. Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a neoplatonist who saw the spiritual world as containing various groupings of deceased human beings that made up a single great human being; for him, the trinity was a division of essences, not of persons. The Church of the New Jerusalem was meant to be a supplement to, not a replacement for, existing churches—a collective of all who accepted its doctrines.

2
(p. 239)
a ballerina from Niblo’s:
Niblo’s Garden in New York City was considered the most fashionable theater in the mid-nineteenth century. Built in 1828 on the corner of Broadway and Prince Street in what is now the SoHo district, it included an outdoor garden and approximately 3,000 seats. It was demolished in 1895.

Chapter XXVIII

1
(p. 244)
A New England Corinna:
Corinna is most likely a reference
to Corinne,
an 1807 novel by Madame de Staël in which a lonely Englishman falls in love with Corinne, a poetess, even though he is already bound to a young English girl, instigating a tragic love triangle.

2
(p. 250)
the cynosure of every eye:
This much-used phrase appears in the works of Thoreau, Milton, Carlyle, and many others. Cynosure is the northern constellation of Ursa Minor, but often refers to the North Star; it also means something that attracts through its brilliance, or that serves to direct or guide.

Chapter XXX

1
(p. 265)
The Park ... the Museum of Art:
Central Park, opened in 1876, occupies approximately 840 acres in Manhattan, spanning east to west from Fifth Avenue to Eighth Avenue (known today as Central Park West along this stretch) and south to north from 59th Street to 110th Street. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, located on the edge of the park facing Fifth Avenue, opened in its current location in 1880. These would have been new destinations for the residents of New York.

Chapter XXXI

1
(p. 276)
“Lohengrin”:
This opera by the German composer Richard Wagner, first performed in 1850, is based on the German legend about a knight who arrives on a boat pulled by a swan to rescue a distressed maiden. He marries her under the condition that she never ask from where he came. When she breaks her promise, he leaves her.

Chapter XXXII

1
(p. 292)
Washington Square:
In the 1840s and 1850s, the James family resided on Washington Square, at the southern end of Fifth Avenue, which becomes the setting for Henry’s 1881 novel of the same name. (See Lewis,
The Jameses: A Family Narrative.)