A Lesson for the Master: Henry James and A. K. Loring

A Lesson for the Master: Henry James and A. K. Loring by Madeleine B. Stern James scholars are aware of the American pirating of "A Bundle of Letters" and of the author's consequent ire; they are, however, misinformed regarding the identity of the pirate. In their turn, students of publishing history are apparently not at all aware of the role played by a pioneer American "cheap book" publisher in the publication of a Henry James story. The following comments may serve to rectify the record for the former and to fill the hiatus for the latter. Although scarcely a major effort on the part of the author of The American, The Europeans, and Palsy Mi I 1er, "A Bundle of Letters" was not only a product of James's "prolific years" in London but "a social satire that is perceptive and humane." Consisting of nine letters written from a Paris boarding house by its residents nine years after the Franco-Prussian War, it presents varying interpretations of the personal and national characteristics both of the writers and of their fellow boarders. For such a story a likely vehicle was the Anglo-French journal the Parisian, published in Paris and edited by the author's friend, the young English journalist Theodore E. Child, whom James had met a few years before at Etretat. "A Bundle of Letters" accordingly was contributed to the Parisian and there published in the issue of 18 December 1879.2 Aaron Kimball Loring of Boston was at that time the proprietor of a Select Library that offered for rental or purchase a variety of magazines as well as books of fiction, biography, travel, and history.3 Not without reason, Loring boasted that "what Mudie's great London Library Is to London, Lorlng's aims to be for Boston." The periodicals he made available to his customers included the Revue des Deux Mondes of Paris, English magazines representing Conservative, Whig, Free Church, and Liberal points of view, the American Godey's, North American, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Magazine—and without doubt the Parisian. A. K. Loring as it happened was also a publisher of many years standing. Indeed, through his library experience he developed the power of gauging popular taste that, as publisher, he aimed to satisfy. Born In Sterling, Massachusetts, in 1826, the son of a saddler, he had clerked in the Boston publishing firm of Phillips, Samson and there had risen to the heights of a junior partnership. Upon the dissolution of Phillips, Samson, Loring set out on his own, opening his Select Library at 319 Washington Street, Boston, in 1859. A few years later he plunged into publishing and developed a literary credo that exalted books of action and narratives that "teach some lesson of life." "Stories 1. Leon Edel, lntrod., The Complete Tales of Henry James, IV (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962), 10. 2. Henry James: Letters, ed. Leon Edel, Il (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), 270, n. 1. 3. For Loring, see Madeleine B. Stern, Imprints on History: Book Publishers and American Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 178-90, 438-41, and Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Madeleine B. Stern (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), pp. 191-98. 87 of the heart," he wrote, "are what live to memory and when you move the reader to tears you have won ——- 4 them Islcl to you forever." This credo, coupled with an ardent belief in cheap prices and mass readership, dominated Lorlng's attitude as a publisher. It Is understandable, therefore, that he should have become the first major publisher of that king of the rags-to-rlches theme, Horatio Alger, Jr. Between 1864, when Frank's Campaign appeared over his Imprint, and 1880, when he saw through the press The Young Explorer, Alger stories and Alger series punctuated the Loring list. In addition, his imprint appeared upon several Louisa May Alcott stories. Including her novel Moods, as well as upon the best-selling Helen's Babies by John Habberton. Lorlng's series of Select Novels, consisting of thirty paperbound titles priced at fifty cents each, was extremely popular. By the 1870s the publisher had moved his stand...