Philanthropy, Desire, and the Politics of Friendship in The Princess Casamassima

In what amounts to a recurring gag in The Princess Casamassima (1886), Henry James has his upper-class characters bump into each other and into most of his working-class characters in the invalid Rosy Muniment's bedroom. As if by chance, and as if there were no other poor or ailing people to tend to in London, everybody converges on the Muniments, who are (by their own admission) neither especially poor nor evidently in want of extra company for Rosy. Rosy herself is a rather obnoxious character (privately, Hyacinth Robinson and the Princess confess to each other their antipathy for her), yet she nonetheless presides regally over this unusually diverse company in her sickroom-turned-salon. Disagreeable as she is, and as abusive as both siblings are towards their upper-class visitors, Rosy and Paul Muniment have drawing power--they have something to offer that their visitors come to get. James's joke consists in reversing the roles at the site of need: the "needy" aren't, and the helpers have come, in revealing unison, to help themselves.

While James's representation of eagerness on the visiting scene is satirical, it also corresponds closely to contemporary accounts of an immensely popular practice among the English middle and upper classes. If reports relating the prevalence of charitable visiting can be believed--and I'm not completely convinced they should be, for reasons I hope to make clear later on--so-called "friendly visitors" were so enthusiastic in their mission, or the mission itself had become so fashionable, that middle- and upper-class visitors simply overwhelmed the poor they came to see. ¹ In his depiction of the eagerness of the Princess, Lady Aurora, and Captain Sholto to make contact with the poor, James is directly engaging in a contemporary social debate. His engagement, I will be arguing here, goes so far as to constitute a pointed, even a radical, social critique. To appreciate what James has to say, however, we will need to consider the novel within the context of late Victorian philanthropic culture, and, more specifically, within the context of the Victorian pursuit of a healing friendship across the classes.

In recent years, James has begun to be recognized (or rehabilitated) as a social critic. Sara Blair's Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation and Joseph Litvak's Caught in the Act, among other works of criticism, have rejected the idea that this author of difficult and hermetic texts belongs among the ranks of the supposedly politically unconscious, status-quo-happy elite or, on the other hand, of the prison-wardens and the police. Yet while these reappraisals of James as a creative social and political thinker have gone far to rescue him from consignment to some smug, high-culture or supersurveillant zone (see Mark Seltzer's Henry James and the Art of Power for an example of this latter tendency), they tend nonetheless to fix rather tight limits on the scope of his critical powers.

Critics who do read The Princess Casamassima as a politically meaningful novel tend to limit their focus to the working-class Hyacinth as James's principal vehicle of political expression. There are good reasons for this: James's preface encourages us to view his "little bookbinder" as the pivotal figure, and, furthermore, Hyacinth's consciousness filters the greater part of the narrative. My purpose here is to read the novel's politics through its representation of upper-class benevolent--or benevolent-seeming--characters, not because I believe Hyacinth-centric readings are wrong, but because they need to be supplemented. For what the upper-class characters do in The Princess Casamassima does not take place in some unmarked sphere outside the realm of the political. By attending only to Hyacinth's position(s) in the novel, we ignore the fact that the upper-class characters are behaving just as...