"Singularly like a bad illustration": The Appearance of Henry James's "The Real Thing" in the Pot-Boiler Press

When Henry James has the narrator of the short story "The Real Thing" (1892) say he is the kind of artist "who worked in black and white, for magazines, and for storybooks," James is making an implicit joke that readers commonly miss (RT, 309). "The Real Thing" first appeared for British audiences in a semimonthly periodical entitled Black and White, and it appeared accompanied by simple, single-color illustrations, which were known as paintings in "black-and-white." The story's original readers heard someone say he "worked in black and white" while they read an illustrated magazine called Black and White. The narrator's casual remark that Mrs. Monarch looked "singularly like a bad illustration" appeared on the same pages that showed actual illustrations and another comment from later in the story, that "in those days there were few serious workers in black-and-white," subtly make light of both the magazine's title and the artistic medium (RT, 312, 338-39). "The Real Thing," as it has come down to modern readers a century after its composition, then, is only half of the story's original text. The first readers of James's tale found it to be a combination of the words of James's narrator, an artist in black-and-white, and the paintings of an actual artist, who was faced with the task of illustrating James's story in Black and White.

Indeed, more than this story's modern readers commonly realize, the written text of "The Real Thing" subtly critiques the visual art that the editors of Black and White originally supplied for the story. Robert Gale noted in 1963 that the story's use of the phrase "black and white" probably poked fun at the periodical's title and illustrations. Virtually alone in noting the phrase's significance, Gale determined that James was "surely criticizing the quality of black-and-white magazine illustrations" and concluded that James clearly "had more things in mind" than a periodical's paintings when he wrote the tale (65, 66). What James did have in mind, according to influential readers from Leon Edel and F. O. Matthiessen to Viola Hopkins Winner, was a dramatization of his own anti-mimetic theories. Artists, according to this way of thinking, do not reproduce the world with so-called photographic realism, but refine it and produce something that approaches transcendent "truth" as it subordinates quotidian or sordid details. ¹ As Winner phrases this interpretation, "the finished work . . . is different in kind from the real thing; art clarifies, transforms, stylizes life." "The real thing," as the narrator of the tale demonstrates, "is indeed lost, but what is gained is truer and everlasting" (Winner, 110). A later generation of readers seeks to evaluate the suspicious aesthetics of the story's narrator. These readers do not trust the narrator to voice James's own inclinations, so much as see him trying to obscure the power arrangements that he enacts with and through his art. ² Seeking to integrate the histories of literature and photography, a third group, which often overlaps with the second, reads the narrator's theories and practices in light of Alvin Langdon Coburn's photographic frontispieces for James's New York Edition, or in light of the Merchant/Ivory adaptations of many of his novels. ³ But "The Real Thing" had a more immediate encounter with visual technology than any of these prominent readings of the story recognize, in that black-and-white paintings supposedly aided its first readers when they interpreted the written text. As a verbal artist competing with visual artists for space and for readers' attention, James tries to control the appearance of "The Real Thing" in a popular periodical. While deftly satirizing periodicals and their illustrators, James tries to demonstrate what verbal artists can "do" on a magazine's pages, and in front of reading audiences, that visual artists cannot. James in fact subtly devises "The...