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Henry James and the Reverend William Rounseville Alger Gary Scharnhorst, University of New Mexico Henry James occasionaUy satirized a type of Unitarian minister in his fiction , most notably the Reverend Benjamin Babcock in The American. Much as he modeled Roderick Hudson, GUbert Osmond, Juliana Bordereau, Mary Prance, little Bilham, and other characters on people he knew personaUy or by reputation, James may have caricatured a historical figure in Babcock.1 From boyhood he had been acquainted with such prominent American Unitarian ministers as Theodore Parker and Frederic Henry Hedge. When he entered the Harvard Law School in the autumn of 1862, moreover, James occupied "quiet cloistered rooms in the comparatively sequestered Divinity Hall," which mainly housed "post-graduates and others, of a Unitarian colour, enrolled under Harvard's theological faculty" (AB 418). Yet the sanctimonious Babcock is neither a transcendentalist Unitarian like Parker and Hedge nor a caUow ministerial student like the residents of Divinity HaU. Indeed, though the joke went around at the time that a typical class at the Divinity School contained "two mystics, two sceptics, and two dyspeptics" (Morison 395), James referred but once in his fiction, and without a hint of irony, to "the young men who were studying for the Unitarian ministry in that queer little barrack at the end of Divinity Avenue" (TB 120). Could his satire have another source? The model of middlebrow Unitarianism most available to James was, in fact, the Reverend WiUiam Rounseville Alger (1822-1905). As I have explained elsewhere ("W. R. Alger"), Alger was a weU-known Unitarian minister and man of letters, especially popular throughout his native New England during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. His works were read by Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, his lectures approved by Parker, Whittier, and William Lloyd Garrison. In early 1865, depressed by the recent deaths of two of his children, Alger took leave from his Boston pulpit and traveled alone in Europe for six months. During a stop in Venice, he befriended the American consul, William D. HoweUs (Scharnhorst "The History"). He later incorporated a brief memoir of part of this tour in The Friendships of Women (1867), a compilation of essays about types of feminine friendship, published a few weeks before he succeeded Parker as minister of the largest congregation of liberal Christians in America. In 1871, while again traveling in Europe for his health, he suffered a mental collapse. He would continue to write and lecture for thirty more years, but his later projects were justly neglected. Still, a generation after his death Alger was admitted to the circle of prominent figures sketched in the Dictionary of American Biography. Although there is no evidence that James and Alger ever met personaUy, there can be no doubt that James knew the Unitarian minister at least by reputation . They shared common friends, HoweUs in particular. Each contributed to the magazine The Galaxy between 1866 and 1868. Certainly their families were acquainted. Either William Alger or his cousin Horatio interviewed the elder Volume VIII 71 Number 1 The Henry James Review FaU, 1986 Henry James in the spring of 1870 for a biography of the actor Edwin Forrest on which the cousins coUaborated, and the elder James reported details of the interview in a letter to his son Henry (AB 401, Scharnhorst 53-55). In 1881, Henry James, Jr., briefly corresponded with WUliam Alger's daughter Abby (HJL 363).2 More to the point, in late 1867 James reviewed Alger's book The Friendships of Women for the Nation, and his comments there merit brief summary. The anonymous review, some 1800 words in length, is one of James's few works of criticism never to have been reprinted from the original source. "Mr. Alger has already made himself favorably known as a scholar, a writer, and a connoisseur in matters of sentiment," James began (FW 522). "He is, to our perception, a purely sentimental writer" and "an optimist" who "abounds in that tepid gentleness of charity which has an instinctive aversion to the critical spirit," he added. Alger "thinks it the wiser and better plan to direct one's vision along the level spaces of history—or rather, we should...

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