“A Restorative Reaction”: Henry James’s “The Altar of the Dead” and Mourning in the Modern City

The death and cremation of Henry James’s sister Alice in London in 1892 offered him a stark example of the changing death-ways of the modern city, to which he responded with a deep ambivalence. Read as a direct response to this now thoroughly documented late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century shift in attitudes toward public expressions of mourning, “The Altar of the Dead” becomes James’s prescient anatomy of morbidity rather than a morbid tale in itself, as well as a commentary on the restorative power of communal expressions of grief.