A Calendar of the Letters of Henry James and A Biographical Register of Henry James's Correspondents (review)

Steven H. Jobe and Susan Elizabeth Gunter. A Calendar of the Letters of Henry James and A Biographical Register of Henry James's Correspondents. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. http://jamescalendar.unl.edu

Long-time readers of the Henry James Review will remember the Winter and Spring 1990 issues for Steven Jobe's chronological catalogue of James's published letters as having provided a valuable service. James's 2,322 published letters at the time appeared in 113 publications, and Leon Edel's recently completed four-volume selection (for Harvard University Press) offered less than half of the letters then published. As a result, reading all of James's published letters over any given time span required a large library, much legwork, and the thorough catalogue Jobe provided.

Once the catalogue of the published letters appeared, Jobe blithely embarked on cataloguing James's unpublished letters (Daniel Fogel, HJR's founding editor, almost as blithely promised to publish the completed catalogue). If Jobe had known that completing the new catalogue would take almost a decade, I suspect that he would have taken on some other project.

Fortunately for James studies, Jobe did not know what he was getting into. Fortunately, too, the University of Nebraska Press has published A Calendar of the Letters of Henry James, supplemented by Susan Gunter's A Biographical Register of Henry James's Correspondents, on the Internet and free of charge. Fortunately, because the Calendar is arguably the most significant development in James studies since Henry James II gave the family papers to Harvard.

The Calendar lists 10,423 letters, their dates, the names of the recipients (along with a biographical blurb on each recipient), the places from which each letter was written, publication information if applicable, the current location, and when possible a catalogue number. Since the Calendar also takes into account citations of letters, it lists 835 letters, including 159 published ones, whose manuscripts are lost or currently unavailable. Jobe found 674 of these citations in Edel's working notes, which are in the Edel Archive at McGill University.

The Calendar, then, is the catalogue of all of James's known letters. Without it, the University of Nebraska Press's project to publish all of James's letters would be unthinkable. For some archives, the Calendar is a better catalogue than what the repository itself offers, since the Calendar itemizes each and every letter and in chronological order, while many library catalogues do neither. Finally, the Calendar has assigned reliable dates to many previously undated letters.

The Calendar includes a statistical summary, which yields some interesting information. For example, we now know that James had over a thousand correspondents. Nineteen of those received over a hundred known letters from James. J. B. Pinker received the most--531. Edmund Gosse (382), William James (277), and Jessie Allen (224) were James's next most favored correspondents. A hundred or more letters each also survive to Elizabeth Robins, Grace Norton, Edith Wharton, Alice H. James, Howard Sturgis, William Dean Howells, Charles Scribner's Sons, Thomas Sergeant Perry, Frederick Macmillan, Edward P. Warren, Mary Cadwalader Jones, Henrietta Reubell, Louisa Wolseley, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Ariana Curtis.

The summary also shows that 132 different repositories have James letters. The largest single collection is at Harvard, with over 4,000 letters (3,917 at the Houghton Library alone), and the second largest holding is Yale's (which now has 1,033 letters). Five other institutions also have over two hundred letters: the University of Virginia (630), the University of Texas (486), Princeton University (241), the New York Public Library (287), and Leeds University (288). The Morgan Library, the Library of Congress, the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum all have at least a hundred James letters, and so too do Colby College...