The Princess Casamassima and Tennyson's The Princess

The first book that Hyacinth Robinson binds for the Princess Casamassima is his own “copy of Tennyson’s poems—a single, comprehensive volume, with a double column on the page, in a tolerably neat condition, though he had handled it much.” Newly acquainted with the Princess and charmed by her offered friendship, Hyacinth returns home, takes the book “to pieces that same evening, and during the following week, in his hours of leisure,” rebinds it in an exotic “morsel of delicate, blue-tinted Russia leather. . . .” Working “with passion, with religion,” he produces “a masterpiece of firmness and finish. . . .” Soon after, he tries to deliver the volume as an “offering” to the Princess, but he learns that she has left on a journey to a duke. Instead of leaving the book with her butler, Hyacinth keeps the “little package.”

Later, it seemed to create a sort of material link between the Princess and himself, and at the end of three months it almost appeared to him, not that the exquisite book was an intended present from his own hand, but that it had been placed in that hand by the most remarkable woman in Europe. Rare sensations and impressions, moments of acute happiness, almost always, with Hyacinth, in retrospect, became rather mythic and legendary; and the superior piece of work he had done after seeing her last, in the immediate heat of his emotion, turned into a kind of proof and gage, as if a ghost, vanishing from sight, had left a palpable relic.

(253–54)

This is the book he takes with him when he visits the Princess at Medley, the country estate she has taken for a season, to show what fine work he will do as her bookbinder (323).

The language of this passage at the end of chapter 17 insists upon Hyacinth’s adoration of the Princess, as well as his familiarity with at least some of Tennyson’s verse. Since Hyacinth is a devoted, imaginative reader, it seems quite possible that he has identified the Princess Casamassima with one of Tennyson’s characters, and just such an identification seems to be playfully implied by the name of her rented estate—Medley—which recalls The Princess: A Medley, one of Tennyson’s best-known works in the nineteenth century. First published in 1847, at a time when the effects of higher education for women were hotly debated, the plot of The Princess concerns an idealistic princess who spurns marriage to found a women’s college where she lectures on philosophy. Tennyson’s poem captured the public imagination. According to John Killham, “No less than seventeen editions appeared in England in the thirty years after [its] publication” (5). It was so popular in English girls’ schools, where it was often produced as a play, that it entered into the plot of at least one book about school life (Mitchell 71), and it provided the plot for Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Princess Ida, which was first performed in January, 1884, just two years before the publication of The Princess Casamassima. Thus James might reasonably have expected almost any contemporary reader to catch a reference to Tennyson’s poem, especially in a novel named for an intellectually gifted and rebellious princess with an interest in social reform.

This is not the only allusion to Tennyson in The Princess Casamassima. His work provides at least one other place name, Audley Court. Tennyson’s “Audley Court,” one of the “English Idylls,” is a celebration of apolitical individualism and domestic peace as the traditional English way of life. For example, one of the lyrics in this poem asks “Who’d serve the state? For if I carved my name/Upon the cliffs that guard my native land,/I might as well have traced it in the sands;/The sea wastes all: but let me live my life” (Tennyson 138). Fittingly, in The Princess Casamassima, Audley Court is the home of the politically conservative invalid Rose Muniment and her brother Paul, who, despite his anarchistic politics, shows great familial and domestic loyalty toward her. Nor is this the only case...