The Time-Scheme of The Golden Bowl

This essay, undertaken as part of the editing of The Golden Bowl for the Cambridge University Press edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James, attempts to determine the internal and external time-scheme of the novel from the many clues, often oblique and implicit, which James distributes through the work. It reveals a minor internal inconsistency in James's dating, which will be emended in the Edition; and reflects on the importance of this firm framework of dates in the calendar for the novel's portrayal of complex, evolving psychological relations.

This eternal time-question is accordingly, for the novelist, always there and always formidable.

—Henry James, Preface to Roderick Hudson (FW 1048)

Edith Wharton’s notorious mock-innocent question to Henry James about The Golden Bowl—“What was your idea in suspending the principal characters in ‘The Golden Bowl’ in the void?”—presumes a failure in the novel, a fault, to which James’s “disturbed” response, in her telling, appears to concede all the ground: “My dear—I didn’t know I had!” (Wharton 191).¹ The exchange was recounted only in 1934, eighteen years after James’s death, as an anecdote in A Backward Glance, and no action replay of the original conversation is available that would allow us to gauge its tone—to judge whether the Master’s seeming consternation more reflects a horrified recognition of Wharton’s perspicacity or, on the contrary, a shocked sense that his friend, though highly civilized, may nonetheless have quite misconstrued his novel.

For some James readers, Wharton’s “void” usefully names something distinctive about The Golden Bowl, James’s heroic proto-modernist neglect of day-to-day practicalities—so that one could see an anticipation of his young friend Virginia Woolf’s mockery in her 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” of his contemporary, the Edwardian Arnold Bennett, for deploying exhaustive material descriptions as a basis for psychological insight: “House property was the common ground from which the Edwardians found it easy to proceed to intimacy” (Woolf 17). James’s focus is certainly narrow. There is no question but that our chief attention in the novel is directed to the six royal, rich, or at least upper-class characters at its center, with slight deviations for others—for the Jewish Gutermann-Seuss family in Brighton, the American Mrs. Rance and the Miss Lutches, the Castledeans and Mr. Blint at Matcham, the Bloomsbury antiquario presumed to be Jewish by Amerigo, the Catholic Father Mitchell at Fawns. Other names figure without much or any vividness of evocation: Mrs. Betterman (GB1 1: 50), Miss Maddock (163), Mrs. Noble and Mr. Brady (203), Sir John Brinder (256), and Mr. Crichton (2: 151). Beyond that we occasionally have mention of unlabeled functionaries—maids, servants, cabmen, or, with a bit more color, “the sweetest . . . of little country doctors” (1: 203)—in the grey anonymous margins.

This isn’t exactly or necessarily a “void,” we might say—but more a vivid way of representing a world of the very rich who pay others to attend to the everyday for them. James renders this world mainly through the consciousness of a Prince and a Princess—that is, filtered by their elevated consciousness and habits of mind, yet still present and circumscribing the action. Perhaps too his approach reminds us that in a series of events taking place in England (and briefly Paris) none of the four main characters is English (or French), so that such detachment from the textures of English (and Parisian) life characterizes them as cosmopolites, emphasizes their distance from the society in which they temporarily lodge. The abstraction in the novel—which serves and enables a refinement of attention to nuance, the tracing of accumulated impressions into often nameless or undefined conceptual bundles, especially as Maggie gropes her way to a form of mastery—is not simply to be understood as the inevitable or involuntary style of late James. One should recall, for instance, how a story like “The Papers” of 1903, finished in November 1902 shortly before the composition of The Golden Bowl, can intensively invoke the gritty Fleet Street world of its young journalist protagonists. The novel’s abstraction rather serves to register the characters’ protected social sphere and perhaps also to reflect the hyperbolic-obfuscatory enterprise of Amerigo and Charlotte (e.g., “It’s so beautiful . . . that it’s not a question of anything vulgar or horrid” [1: 309]) and the characters’ emotional concentration on the constantly shifting balance of love and power.

How does this relate to the novel’s time-scheme? Just as James’s process of composition depends on his holding in mind a concretely structured world to which, then, the novel makes only glancing though frequent reference, so he needs to have a firm temporal framework for the action—at least for his own guidance and consistency. He doesn’t incite the reader to develop a very precise sense of the overall scheme of the novel. And indeed it takes us a conscious effort to reconstruct sequences, since James presents the details in a far from straightforward way. Thus we don’t learn on what day of the week it is (a Wednesday) that Maggie has waited for the Prince to return from his Easter stay with Charlotte at Matcham—a day we begin with Amerigo at volume 1: 356—until volume 2: 10, sixty-six pages later.

On numerous previous readings I don’t think I’ve ever felt able to pin down the dates of particular events—beyond a vivid sense of scenes: the half-empty August London of the opening build-up to Maggie and Amerigo’s marriage; the Indian summer October afternoon when Maggie and Adam retreat to a sequestered bench at Fawns and decide to call in Charlotte; the breezy Easter at Matcham where Amerigo and Charlotte find themselves finally alone; the scorching August at Fawns when Maggie and Charlotte are confronted in a remote corner of the garden. Now, seeing this as one of the issues I should tackle as part of the task of editing the novel for the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James, I was curious to see what, reading for the calendar, as it were, would emerge from a gathering and analysis of the evidence (a version of this article will appear as an Appendix in the Cambridge volume).

It transpires, then, that James seems to have had a time-scheme for the novel worked out (though I have found a few errors and puzzles), much of it deducible from signposts and clues in the text. The action as such (dating it from the events in the first chapter, a few days before the wedding of Maggie Verver and Prince Amerigo) covers a span of just over five years, from the August of what we may call 0000 or Year Zero, to the September of 0005. We can put together his often glancing and sometimes complicated references to the timing of the action in a way that allows us to see the temporal architecture more clearly than when as involved readers, taking our lead from James’s style and its immersive approach, we’re with him as he gets down into the arena and does his best, as he says in the preface, “to live and breathe and rub shoulders and converse with the persons engaged in the struggle” (FW 1323).

Some of the difficulties in teasing out the internal timing of the action in The Golden Bowl may derive from its compositional history. James wrote to his agent James Brand Pinker on 20 May 1904 that

I have really done it fast, for what it is, and for the way I do it—the way I seem condemned to which is to overtreat my subject by developments and amplifications that have, in large part, eventually to be greatly compressed, but to the prior operation of which the thing afterwards owes what is most durable in its quality. I have written, in perfection, 200,000 words of the G. B.—with the rarest perfection!—and you can imagine how much of that, which has taken time, has had to come out.

(LL 400)

The novel as we have it is nearly 210,000 words, but as James would continue finishing the novel into July, it seems likely that scenes were written that are absent from the text we know, at least in their original form (it seems possible that some scenes were on first drafting directly presented as dialogue or action but in the texts we have are subsequently digested by characters in retrospective summary—a characteristic Jamesian technique). When the appealing—but soon-to-be-dispelled—prospect of serial publication of The Golden Bowl had been raised, James told Pinker on 30 June 1904 that in the eleven out of twelve “Parts, or monthly Instalments” he was sending, “the total of the paging doesn’t represent the real number of pages, but is considerably in excess of it, various heartbreaking excisions having been ruthlessly practised” (JB2) (in addition, that is, to the removal of three chapters for magazine purposes, to be restored in the book).

This process of excision is probably relevant to the issue of the dating of the action, as there are sections of the text where the exact sequence and timing of events are tricky to ascertain; and I have found points where James himself seems to make an error and contradict his own scheme. He has, for instance, Maggie say to the Prince that she visited the Bloomsbury shop and bought the golden bowl “on Monday last” (GB1 2: 195), when we can work out from several other indications that it was on the previous Friday (the scene where she says this takes place on a Monday, which may explain James’s muddle; and there seems no special psychological reason for her to make an error; see below for more detailed discussion). It seems plausible that having stuck to his evidently quite careful but intricate plan James may in compressing and summarizing material have lost his bearings for a moment. (He did not, however, revise this in the Methuen edition of 1905 or for the New York Edition in 1909).

What follows, then, attempts to bring together and lay out clearly the evidence for the time-scheme on which James’s plot is built, which it is hoped may be of assistance to the reader, as James’s signposting in the novel can seem perverse. For instance, the very first indication of a date in the novel is this, in its third sentence, where the Prince is thinking: “If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner” (GB1 1: 3). The reader, grasping for co-ordinates, may start to assume the Prince is in one of these places, and on such a May afternoon. In fact, however, it’s August, and he is in Bond Street, as the next sentence goes on to clarify—perhaps with the effect of side-lining British imperial pomp to make way for the new American power of purchase of which he himself is a proof.

On a larger scale, James does not tell us that the grand reception that begins Part Third on 1: 246, a party at which we stay till 1: 279, is at “the Foreign Office”—until, remarkably, thirty-nine pages later, at 1: 318—and then we can look back and realize that this setting makes it much more likely that the “Royalty” (1: 256) to which the Prince has been talking and to which Charlotte will be introduced has been British royalty. Since it is the “greatest possible Personage” (1: 266), and Charlotte says “What in the world does he want to do to me?,” this must be Edward VII, just possibly as Prince of Wales or more likely (being “the greatest possible”) as King. But I will defer till the end of this essay consideration of the evidence for external dating of the action, the placing of it in actual historical years.

Such precisions and punctualities of plotting are, however, only glancingly treated by James, and it is to the psychological time experienced by his characters that he emphatically directs the reader’s attention. Thus when Adam Verver realizes that his new exposure to the fortune-hunting Mrs. Rance has made him a source of anxiety to his now-married daughter Maggie, “Here of a sudden was a question that concerned him alone, and the soundless explosion of it somehow marked a date” (1: 156). This takes place on a September Sunday of Year 0002, and that date is indeed rhetorically marked, but though it’s tied to external appearances and is an “explosion,” it’s an inner, private, mental event and “soundless,” like so many of the dawning suspicions, realizations and so forth that give The Golden Bowl its texture.

________

At various points in the novel characters recall or we are told of events that precede its opening in Bond Street on an August afternoon. It seems useful to pull these together.

Of the Prince and his relations with Charlotte Stant and the history and pre-history of his marriage to Maggie we are told at the start that although susceptible to female charms he has no interest now in “the idea of pursuit,” because “He had been pursuing for six months as never in his life before” (1: 4); this is a Wednesday in August of Year Zero, which we will call Year 0000, in which the action begins—so “six months” takes us back to February 0000. In chapter 4 Fanny Assingham recalls to her husband Bob “the way, a year ago [i.e., in Year -0001], everything took place. They had parted before he had ever heard of Maggie. . . . It was I who named Maggie to him—a year from last May. He had never heard of her before” (1: 74, 75). Since the events recalled are “a year ago,” the ambiguous “a year from last May” must, I think, refer to May of -0001; and it seems to have been through Charlotte that Fanny and Bob have got to know him, in Rome in the Spring of -0001 (they arrived in late February -0001: “You can’t make out,” Fanny tells Bob, “that we got to Rome before the end of February” [1: 75]): “I thought him charming, from the first of our knowing him; and now, after more than a year, he has done nothing to spoil it” (77). Fanny also recalls that:

“Charlotte, who had been there, that year, from early, quite from November [so from late -0002], left suddenly, you’ll quite remember, about the 10th of April. She was to have stayed on—she was to have stayed, naturally, more or less, for us; and she was to have stayed all the more that the Ververs, due all winter, but delayed, week after week, in Paris, were at last really coming. They were coming—that is Maggie was—largely to see her, and above all to be with her there. It was all altered—by Charlotte’s going to Florence. She went from one day to the other—you forget everything. She gave her reasons, but I thought it odd, at the time; I had a sense that something must have happened. . . . I didn’t know her relation with him had been, as you say, a ‘near’ thing—that is I didn’t know how near. The poor girl’s departure was a flight—she went to save herself.”

(76)

The Ververs see Charlotte in Florence on their way down to Rome, and she, “after their days with her in Florence, had decided about America” (78). The Prince begins to make up to Maggie, Fanny recalls, “the moment he came up to our carriage that day in Villa Borghese—the second or third of her days in Rome, when . . . the Prince, who had got into the carriage with us, came home with us to tea. They had met; they had seen each other well; they were in relation” (80–81). The Prince’s serious courtship only starts in February of 0000.

Of Charlotte we know about “her birth in Florence and Florentine childhood,” of parents American but “demoralised, falsified, polyglot well before her” (57); she is educated—as a Catholic, evidently, since the question of her missing a Catholic church service arises later with Father Mitchell (2: 309)—in “the poor convent of the Tuscan hills,” before going to “the much grander institution in Paris at which Maggie was to arrive, terribly frightened, and as a smaller girl, three years before her own ending of her period of five” (1: 57). If the girls arrive at the school at the same age, this would make Charlotte two years older than Maggie; though we have otherwise no particular indication of their ages at the time of the action.

We do know Adam Verver’s age: he is “a man of forty-seven” (1: 128) in September of Year 0002, and since we know his birthday is 21 July (“the twenty-first of the month” [2: 162]), he is forty-five as the novel begins in 0000 and will turn fifty shortly before the end of the novel in September 0005. At forty-seven, he is “quite at the top of his hill of difficulty, the tall sharp spiral round which he had begun to wind his ascent at the age of twenty” (1: 132)—twenty-seven years earlier than Year 0002, which is probably somewhere around 1900, so presumably his career begins during the Gilded Age (c. 1870–75), a boom period for railroads, manufacture, mining, and finance. Dating his sense of mission as a collector cannot be precise: we learn that

It was during his first visit to Europe after the death of his wife, when his daughter was ten years old, that the light, in his mind, had so broken—and he had even made out at that time why, on an earlier occasion, the journey of his honeymoon year, it had still been closely covered. He had “bought” then, so far as he had been able, but he had bought almost wholly for the frail, fluttered creature at his side [in the Rue de la Paix].

(1: 143)

Maggie is in the book’s terms a “girl” becoming a young woman, so probably somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five, and this later European trip seems likely to be the same one referred to when Adam recalls “his freedom as dawning upon him, like a sunrise all pink and silver, during a winter divided between Florence, Rome, and Naples some three years after his wife’s death” (1: 152)—so that Maggie’s mother died when she was seven. He has probably therefore been collecting seriously for about a decade in Year 0000, since his mid-thirties.

BOOK FIRST: THE PRINCE

Part First

Chapter 1 (1: 1 in the New York Edition [NYE] [GB2])² opens the action with the Prince in Bond Street not long after “three o’clock” (GB1 4) on an “August afternoon” (3) in Year 0000, the first year of the action, deciding what to do with “the immediate two or three hours” (20) between making legal settlements with Mr. Verver (at “three o’clock” [4]) and dinner with the Ververs in Portland Place “at half-past eight o’clock” (5). It is a Wednesday.³ After the wedding, we learn later, the couple will go to America for some time: “In a month or two—it seems to be the new idea” (58). At the end of the chapter, he has taken a cab straight from Bond Street the oneand-a-half miles to Cadogan Place to see Fanny Assingham, the friend who has in effect arranged the marriage for him.

In Chapter 2 (1: 2 in the NYE), at teatime on this August Wednesday, the Prince is given tea in Cadogan Place by Fanny Assingham. At the end of the chapter the cab of Fanny’s unexpected visitor, Charlotte Stant, the Prince’s former lover, pulls up at the door; she is bringing her baggage from her hotel to stay with Fanny (40).

In Chapter 3 (1: 3 in the NYE), with no break in the action, Charlotte joins the Prince and Fanny in Cadogan Place; Fanny briefly absents herself (50). Though not invited, Charlotte has returned from America for the wedding, and “disembarked at Southampton” this morning (65); she tells the Prince that “I want, between this and Saturday, to make Maggie a marriage-present” (63).

Chapter 4 (1: 4 in the NYE) takes place at Cadogan Place later the same day—or rather, early the next (Thursday), because it is “after midnight” (65). Bob and Fanny Assingham have had dinner guests, who have gone, and Charlotte has retired to bed: they discuss the situation, and the events that have led up to it.

Chapter 5 (1: 5 in the NYE) begins with Charlotte and the Prince in Hyde Park “a couple of days” (92) after they have met in Fanny Assingham’s drawing-room. It is thus Friday, the day before the wedding: he has called for her “by half-past ten—as also by definite appointment” (94). (She has reminded him in a snatched minute at the Ververs’ in Portland Place of her wish to buy a wedding present.) “[A]fter brief delay, the two had walked together up Sloane Street and got straight into the Park from Knightsbridge” (93), a fifteen-minute walk, so it’s about 11.00 a.m. They walk north on the east side of the Park near Park Lane, sitting for ten minutes en route in some “penny-chairs” (99).

Chapter 6 (1: 6 in the NYE), later on the Friday August morning, finds the Prince and Charlotte in the Bloomsbury antique shop of a “small but interesting dealer”: “They had come to him last, for their time was nearly up; an hour of it at least, from the moment of their getting into a hansom at the Marble Arch, having yielded no better result than the amusement invoked from the first” (1: 108). It seems to be at least half-past twelve: “They had been out more than two hours” (112). They discuss buying the golden bowl, but do not do so; as the scene ends he has hailed a cab for her. Part First thus ends in the early afternoon of a Friday in August 0000, the day before the Prince and Maggie marry.

Part Second

Chapter 7 (2: 1 in the NYE) opens with “Adam Verver, at Fawns, that autumn Sunday” (1: 126), later recalled as “one September day” (2: 23). He has stayed home, as he did “a week before” (1: 130), while Maggie and Amerigo have gone to a Catholic church, and the Assinghams, with the American visitors the Miss Lutches, have gone to “the little old [Anglican] church, ‘on the property’” (154). Adam is found in the billiard-room by the predatory American Mrs. Rance, but before she reaches him—and stretching into chapter 8—we have a long retrospective summary of the situation and Adam’s life to date. It is a September Sunday in Year 0002 (the Prince and Maggie have made “their return from their twenty months in America” [135], which have included “the birth of their boy, in New York” [150] and which began in September or October 0000 [i.e., “In a month or two” from the wedding (58)]). So they must have returned three or four months previously, in May or June of 0002.

Chapter 8 (2: 2 in the NYE), on the same September Sunday of 0002, simply continues Adam’s retrospect of his career as a collector and the account of his plan now, which involves “A couple of years of Europe again” (1: 148)—which would mean until about September 0004. Mrs. Rance reaches Adam some time before the others “came back from church” (153); when they arrive, Maggie and the others see Adam as in danger from Mrs. Rance in a way that marks the difference made by Maggie’s marriage (157).

In Chapter 9 (2: 3 in the NYE), on the same day, Maggie and Adam, after lunch and a visit to her son the Principino, make their way to a bench in “one of the quietest places” at Fawns (1: 162). Maggie concludes that even if Mrs. Rance is rebuffed, “There’ll be others” in pursuit of Adam (171).

Chapter 10 (2: 4 in the NYE) has Maggie and Adam’s discussion on the bench continue, leading to Maggie’s declaration that they don’t “lead, as regards other people, any life at all” (1: 173) and suggestion that Charlotte be invited to join them—at Charlotte’s own prompting (“She writes me, practically, that she’d like to if we’re so good as to ask her” [181]). At the end of the scene they leave the bench (193). This is the last of the sequence of four chapters set at Fawns on the September Sunday of 0002.

In Chapter 11 (2: 5 in the NYE), still at Fawns, it is an “October afternoon” (1: 194), part of “the general golden peace that the Kentish October had gradually ushered in” (195), and, rather complicatedly, “Mrs. Assingham and the Colonel, quitting Fawns before the end of September, had come back later on; and now, a couple of weeks after, they were again interrupting their stay”—but possibly not to return (194). It is therefore at least the middle of October 0002. Charlotte has come: “The Lutches and Mrs. Rance had also, by the action of Charlotte Stant’s arrival, ceased to linger.” Before leaving, Fanny discusses with Adam Charlotte’s fineness, declaring “it’s she who’s the real thing” (198). In the second half of the chapter, “It was to come to pass, by a pressure applied to the situation wholly from within, that before the first ten days of November had elapsed he [Adam] found himself practically alone at Fawns with his young friend [Charlotte]; Amerigo and Maggie having, with a certain abruptness, invited his assent to their going abroad for a month”⁴ [to Rome] (201)—to which Adam has advised them to add “three or four weeks of Paris as well,” in which case “Charlotte and he would go over to join them there for a small look” (202).

Adam’s developing sense of Charlotte’s value as they jointly take care of the Principino recalls an occasion, probably after Amerigo and Maggie’s departure, as it seems to qualify his newly awakened sense of her: “Late as it was on a particular evening toward the end of October [c. 29–31 October 0002], there had been a full word or two dropped into the still-stirring sea of other voices” (206). The words in question seem to be Adam’s “Can you really then come if we start early?” (207) and Charlotte’s assent—and they provoke Adam to a long meditation late at night on the terrace with a cigar. The question—since Charlotte answers saying “she promised to content herself, for their journey, with a toothbrush and a sponge” (207)—must refer to the suddenly urgent trip in pursuit of the Damascene tiles in Brighton (“of which he had lately got wind” [200]) rather than the already-planned journey to Paris.

Chapter 12 (2: 6 in the NYE) finds Adam “at Brighton . . . during the three wonderful days he spent there with Charlotte. . .” (1: 213), planning to propose marriage. Presumably these days begin “toward the end of October” as he has asked Charlotte to “start early”; and “the sense on the first day that he should probably have taken the great step before the second was over conduced already to make him say to his companion that they must spend more than their mere night or two” (213–14). On the second day they see “Mr. Gutermann-Seuss” and Adam purchases his rare tiles (215): that evening Adam proposes to Charlotte (220), who doesn’t immediately assent but makes a condition of Maggie’s approval. They agree that they will go to Paris and await Maggie’s reply (229). It is the evening of the second of the three days in Brighton, late October or early November 0002.

In Chapter 13 (2: 7 in the NYE) Adam and Charlotte are in Paris.

He had talked to her of their waiting in Paris [referring back to 1: 229: ‘Wait in Paris. That will be charming in itself’] a week later [i.e., after the proposal in Brighton?], but on the spot there this period of patience suffered no great strain. He had written to his daughter, not indeed from Brighton, but directly after their return to Fawns, where they spent only forty-eight hours before resuming their journey [no more than a week into November, then]; and Maggie’s reply to his news was a telegram from Rome, delivered to him at noon of their fourth day [c. 10 November, perhaps, allowing a day for travel to Paris on the 6^th or so] and which he brought out to Charlotte, who was seated at that moment in the court of the hotel, where they had agreed that he should join her for their proceeding together to the noontide meal.

(233)

Maggie telegraphs Adam that “We start to-night to bring you all our love and joy and sympathy” (234)—and Charlotte comments that “We’ve hurried them, you see. . . . They weren’t to have started for another week” (235). If it is about 10 November, and Maggie and the Prince were to spend a month in Rome as announced (201), they will have left Fawns c. 17 October. Just before lunch another “telegraphic message” (243) arrives—this time from the Prince for Charlotte. The chapter thus ends not long after midday on something like 10 November 0002—and there is a long interval before we rejoin the characters in Part Third.

Part Third

Chapter 14 (3: 1 in the NYE) begins with “Charlotte, halfway up the ‘monumental’ staircase” (1: 246), at a reception at what is revealed much later (318) to have been the Foreign Office. “For a couple of years now,” we learn, “she had known as never before what it was to look ‘well’” (246); so this is about two years after her marriage to Adam Verver, which will possibly not have taken place until some months after the Paris scene in chapter 13 in November 0002 (and then Charlotte and Adam have spent “many months in America” [260], a “visit to America that had immediately succeeded her marriage” [293]). Fanny speaks to her, uneasy that with Adam absent Charlotte and Amerigo are so publicly seen behaving as a couple.

The present occasion is “a great official party in the full flush of the London spring-time” (246), so it is the spring of 0005, the year in which the rest of the action will take place. We can place it in March rather than February, which hardly qualifies as “the full flush of the London spring-time”; and March rather than April because three chapters later chapter 17 takes place on a “March afternoon” (299), and seems to cover later events. Also, the Eaton Square dinner that follows in chapter 19 occurs “a few evenings before Easter” (326), and also shortly before the visit to Matcham, and we will learn in chapter 20 that our characters are “at Matcham during the Easter days” (333), and later the Matcham visit is described as occurring in “the sunny, gusty, lusty English April” (338). And at that Eaton Square dinner Fanny reverts to “the solicitude of which she had, already, three weeks before, given him a view” (335)—referring presumably back to her insistence at the Foreign Office reception that “It only appears to me of great importance that . . . Charlotte should be known, for any presentation . . . as, in particular, her husband’s wife” (269–70).

In Chapter 15 (3: 2 in the NYE), still at the Foreign Office reception in probably March of 0005 and without a break, Fanny now talks to the Prince, whose attitude resembles Charlotte’s so much she finds it disturbing (1: 277).

Chapter 16 (3: 3 in the NYE) takes place on the same evening, with Fanny and Bob Assingham discussing the situation in their brougham going home to Cadogan Place—and ends as they enter their house (1: 291).

Chapter 17 (3: 4 in the NYE) begins with a review of the situation from the point of view of Charlotte and the Prince, taking Charlotte’s perspective first (1: 292ff). Then we have a fuller account of the Prince’s view; he “had been living these four or five years, on Mr. Verver’s services” (296): since this is March 0005, and he married in August 0000, the period concerned is close to four-and-a-half years, so this equivocation is in fact pretty accurate. The general account becomes particular on “one dark day” (298) when the Prince is alone in Portland Place, a rainy “March afternoon” that “had blundered back into autumn”—at some point, then, in the last ten days or fortnight of the month, and after the Foreign Office reception. Charlotte arrives in a “slow-jogging four-wheeled cab” (299).

Chapter 18 (3: 5 in the NYE) continues without a break the conversation between Charlotte and the Prince in Portland Place. Charlotte insists to the Prince on their neglect by their spouses—that “it can’t have been later than half-past ten—I mean when you saw them [Maggie and the Principino]. They had got to Eaton Square before eleven” (1: 308). Charlotte has left the Eaton Square house and wandered through rainy London—to “the British Museum, . . . the National Gallery, . . . a cookshop in Holborn, . . . St. Paul’s” (307–08). “We must act in concert” (313), she says. The chapter ends with their kiss (317).

Chapter 19 (3: 6 in the NYE) deals with the Prince and Charlotte’s stance now, generally and towards Fanny Assingham: “He had taken it from her, as we have seen, moreover, that Fanny Assingham didn’t now matter”—and thus “he kept postponing the visit he had promised his old friend on the occasion of their talk at the [now at last named] Foreign Office” (1: 318). He finally sees Fanny at one of the rare dinners given at Eaton Square by Adam and Charlotte, “a few evenings before Easter” (326), so probably either in late March or early April 0005. The dinner reinforces for the Prince “the intensity of his accord with Charlotte” (331).

Chapter 20 (3: 7 in the NYE) begins with the Prince recollecting his conversation with Fanny during a Brahms quartet performance on the evening of the Eaton Square dinner after “a short interval” (1: 332). We learn that he is recalling it from “Matcham during the Easter days” (333) in “the sunny, gusty, lusty English April” (338) of 0005. The slightly complicated layering of this episode suggests that James may be compressing material that originally took a longer form: “it was at Matcham during the Easter days, that it most befell him, oddly enough, to live over, inwardly, for its wealth of special significance, this passage” (333). The chapter ends with the Prince and Charlotte feeling at Matcham “an exquisite sense of complicity” (342).

Chapter 21 (3: 8 in the NYE) begins with Fanny’s moral discomfort at Matcham and the ironic commentary on it of Charlotte and the Prince—who meet for a serious talk “only on the eve of their visit’s end . . . during the half-hour before dinner”—and “this easiest of chances they had already, a couple of times, arrived at by waiting persistently till the last other loiterers had gone to dress” (1: 346), which suggests that this is at least their third day at Matcham out of what we will discover in chapter 26 is for the Prince an absence of “five days” (2: 26) from Maggie. Charlotte explains that Fanny is in a false position, having partly made their marriages, and rejects Fanny’s suggestion that they all travel back to London together on the last morning at Matcham (a Wednesday and after the Easter weekend, so this “eve” must be a Tuesday—since we will find in chapter 25 at 2: 10 that Maggie’s decision to wait at her own house in Portland Place rather than her father’s in Eaton Square for Amerigo occurs “on a certain Wednesday”).

In Chapter 22 (3: 9 in the NYE), it is (thus) the Wednesday morning after Easter in April 0005, and Charlotte and Amerigo are alone at Matcham with Lady Castledean and her young lover Mr. Blint. Charlotte’s planning for their visit to nearby Gloucester on the way back to London is more daring than the Prince’s, involving immediate departure: “we shall be able easily to lunch there, and, with our luggage and our servants off our hands, we shall have at least three or four hours” (1: 369). She has even worked out the trains: to Gloucester “A local one—11.22” (371) and later for “Paddington—the 6.50 ‘in’” (370)—allowing them much time for intimacies and still getting them home for dinner in Eaton Square.⁵

Chapter 23 (3: 10 in the NYE) begins with “Fanny, on her arrival in town” from Matcham, on the same April Wednesday of 0005, sending Bob “to his club for luncheon,” and she spends the afternoon in Eaton Square, so that “the day practically passed without fresh contact between them”; with the result that though they dine out together it is only on their return to Cadogan Place “at midnight” (1: 373), and thus in the early hours of Thursday, that they can discuss the situation. Fanny talks about a change in Maggie, who has decided to drive home to Portland Place to await the Prince even though aware that he and Charlotte were coming to find her at Eaton Square (383).

Chapter 24 (3: 11 in the NYE) continues the Assinghams’ discussion without a break. They see the possibility that Maggie will become “a little heroine” (1: 406). Bob refers to “Mr. Verver’s . . . two years of Charlotte” (407)—implying that they married by about April of 0003. The chapter and the novel’s first volume and book end with Fanny saying, before she goes into her bedroom for the night, that Maggie will ensure Adam Verver shows no suspicion of the putative adultery—“She’ll die first” (412).

BOOK SECOND: THE PRINCESS

Part Fourth

Chapter 25 (4: 1 in the NYE) opens with the image of Maggie’s situation, “for months and months,” as “like some strange, tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda”—in which Maggie realizes she has made a difference only when “many days had passed” (2: 3)—many days since, presumably, the April evening after Easter when “She had merely driven, on a certain Wednesday, to Portland Place, instead of remaining in Eaton Square” (10) and chosen to wait there for the Prince on his return from Matcham and Gloucester—for “dinner which had been so late, quite at nine o’clock, that evening, thanks to the final lateness of Amerigo’s own advent” (11). We learn that Maggie “had ever been, in respect to her clothes, rather timorous and uncertain; for the last year, above all, she had lived in the light of Charlotte’s possible and rather inscrutable judgment of them” (13). This is since about April 0004, presumably since Charlotte’s return from America. Maggie recalls vividly the Wednesday evening and Amerigo’s return—and his evasive behavior, his need to have a bath and dress, and his delay in coming downstairs (20).

Chapter 26 (4: 2 in the NYE) opens on the same recollected Wednesday evening with Maggie waiting for the Prince to come down: “She had seen him last but five days since, yet he had stood there before her as if restored from some far country” (2: 22)—in other words, the Matcham excursion took five days—meaning he will have left London either late on Good Friday or early on Easter Saturday. When Amerigo reappears, “He was already holding out his arms” (26). Maggie recalls going to Eaton Square the next day, the Thursday, as part of her new policy, to see Adam and Charlotte, “Joining them after luncheon, reaching them . . . before they had quitted the breakfast-room, the scene of their mid-day meal” (31). The impetus of this policy carries Maggie “for three or four days” (34); Charlotte starts to spend time with her so they are “very much the companions of other days” (38); at the end of the chapter Maggie realizes that “Amerigo and Charlotte were arranged together, but she—to confine the matter only to herself—was arranged apart. It rushed over her, the full sense of all this, with quite another rush from that of the breaking wave of ten days before” (46–47). Thus, the chapter ends ten days after the Wednesday, at some point in April 0005.

Chapter 27 (4: 3 in the NYE) continues to render Maggie’s view of the situation—beginning with the project, “from far back—that is from the Christmas time on,” that Adam and Maggie should go somewhere together—which has become a trip to Spain to look “at the Madrid pictures” (2: 48), taking “three or four weeks of springtime for the total adventure” (49). But with the suspicions she now entertains Maggie sees the plan, leaving as it does Amerigo and Charlotte to each other’s devices, as expressing “an ecstasy of confidence” (50). Therefore, “Day after day she put off the moment of . . . speaking . . . to her father. . . . Finally, at the end of April, she decided that if he should say nothing for another period of twenty-four hours she must take it as showing that they were . . . lost,” since they are approaching the start of “a summer that already promised to be hot” and thus too hot for Spain— and further delay by Adam in confirming the plan, given that the timing has now become so pressing, could imply he too is suspicious. It seems to be “at the end of April,” or following “another period of twenty-four hours” and thus just possibly on 1 May,⁶ then, that “What he wanted, at any rate, and what he didn’t want were, in the event, put to the proof for Maggie just in time” (50). This is at a dinner given in Eaton Square in reciprocation for the Matcham party, “hospitality offered by Mr. and Mrs. Verver to Lord and Lady Castledean” (50–51), when Adam declares, “I guess we won’t go down there after all, will we, Mag?—just when it’s getting so pleasant here” (55). The second part of the chapter renders the dinner, and then Maggie’s ride home in the brougham with the Prince (also in the pluperfect: “She had kept it up and up” [61]), on a tighter and more intense time-scale: “five wonderful minutes” (56), “Ten minutes later” (57), “during a minute or two” (58), “for fifty seconds” (63). The Prince asks Maggie about Adam’s plans for going to Fawns this summer: “Will he go at Whitsuntide, and will he then stay on?” (64). (Whitsuntide being the Christian festival of Pentecost, which falls on the seventh Sunday after Easter.) The chapter ends as the carriage arrives at their home in Portland Place (69)—probably then in late April or early in May 0005.

In Chapter 28 (4: 4 in the NYE) we jump forward another week, rendering Maggie’s “new uneasiness” at the dominance of the Prince and Charlotte over their social life—she “recognised by the end of a week that if she had been in a manner caught up her father had been not less so” (2: 70). It must (in terms of social form) be at least a week, also, maybe more, till the unspecified “day the Matcham party [the Castledeans, and this time the Assinghams, excluded from the Eaton Square dinner by Charlotte] dined in Portland Place” (71)—when Maggie behaves like a “little princess” (72)—a week, or very possibly two, into May 0005. A reference to “much of the ensuing time” (74) takes us forward again, leading to “an hour . . . when she knew, with a chill, what she had feared and why; it had taken, this hour, a month to arrive” (77)—probably a month from the Eaton Square dinner, which would mean in late May or just possibly in early June. This is clarified when on 2: 80 we get another definite date: one of Maggie’s suspicions arises “one morning late in May, when her father presented himself in Portland Place alone,” on a “day, bright and soft,” with “the breath of summer,” recalling “the way Fawns invited” (81). Maggie and Adam go to nearby Regent’s Park to find the Principino who has been taken there by Miss Bogle (86).

Chapter 29 (4: 5 in the NYE) follows them into Regent’s Park on the same summery day in late May 0005 for an hour-long excursion. They plan for Fawns—and to have the Assinghams there (2: 101)—and return to find Amerigo and Charlotte waiting on the balcony at Portland Place (102).

Chapter 30 (4: 6 in the NYE) deals with Maggie’s recruitment of Fanny Assingham in her campaign: she has not much seen her “for weeks,” since “the afternoon of that lady’s return from the Easter party at Matcham; but the intermission was made up as soon as the date of the migration to Fawns . . . began to be discussed” (2: 104)—so not long after the talk between Maggie and Adam “late in May” in the previous chapter. The account of their resumed relations crystallizes “at the end of a fortnight” (108), on “one afternoon in Portland Place” when she asks Fanny, “What awfulness, in heaven’s name, is there between them?”—it is after a “Sunday luncheon they had partaken of alone together,” on a day of “cold perverse June rain” when “Amerigo and Charlotte were again paying together alone a ‘week end’ visit which it had been Maggie’s plan infernally to promote—just to see if, this time, they really would” (112). Their conversation ends with Maggie and Fanny embracing, in tears (125)—in June 0005, probably earlyish in the month.

In Chapter 31 (4: 7 in the NYE), which focuses on the Assinghams and their repeated discussions of the situation, presumably in June-July of 0005, the movement of all six characters to Fawns, at different times, is confirmed:

The understanding appeared to have come to be that the Colonel and his wife were to present themselves toward the middle of July for the “good long visit” at Fawns on which Maggie had obtained from her father that he should genially insist; as well as that the couple from Eaton Square should welcome there earlier in the month, and less than a week after their own arrival, the advent of the couple from Portland Place.

(2: 126)

Thus Adam and Charlotte go down first, either in late June or at the start of July, and Maggie and Amerigo under a week later, with Bob and Fanny arriving “toward” mid-July.

In Chapter 32 (4: 8 in the NYE), we are in the period that was announced in the previous chapter as “less than a week” (2: 126) for Maggie but has now become “the week spent in London with her husband after the others had adjourned to Fawns for the summer” (142).⁷ In this period of potential isolation when she is in danger of being charmed into submission by the Prince, “these days of more unbroken exposure” (146), Maggie arranges for Fanny to be constantly present: contrives “to bring it about that she should join them, of an afternoon. . . . Then there were such combinations, later in the day, as her attendance on them, and the Colonel’s as well, for . . . visits to the opera . . . and sudden outbreaks of curiosity about the British drama” (149). We are told that Maggie “mentioned to [Fanny] one evening a small project for the morrow, privately entertained—the idea, irresistible, intense, of going to pay, at the Museum, a visit to Mr. Crichton” (151)—a repetition of the visit “one day, long before” (152).

We can deduce that this British Museum visit occurs on a Friday (and thus that this mention “one evening” comes on a Thursday, the day before), from James’s account of Fanny’s perception of the visit:

After the occasion had come and gone she was confirmed in her optimism; she made out, in the evening, that the hour spent among the projected lights, the annals and illustrations, the parchments and portraits, the emblazoned volumes and the murmured commentary, had been for the Princess enlarging and inspiring. Maggie had said to her some days before, very sweetly but very firmly, “Invite us to dine, please, for Friday . . .” and the pair in Cadogan Place had bent to this mandate.

(154)

It is explicitly at the Assinghams’ dinner, and thus on the Friday, that Maggie talks of “the lessons learned, in the morning, at the altar of the past” (155). But more happens later on this British Museum day, and more comes out later:

The lady of Cadogan Place was to read deeper, however, within three days, and the page was turned for her on the eve of her young confidant’s leaving London. The awaited migration to Fawns was to take place on the morrow, and it was known meanwhile to Mrs. Assingham that their party of four were to dine that night, at the American Embassy.”

(156)⁸

“[W]ithin three days” of the Friday dinner seems to mean that the following Monday is the day meant, when Maggie summons Fanny to Portland Place—and it is the day of the U.S. Embassy dinner (probably about a week into July).⁹ The turning of the page for Fanny occurs when she receives from Maggie, “under date of six o’clock, a telegram requesting her immediate attendance. ‘Please come to me at once; dress early, if necessary, so that we shall have time: the carriage, ordered for us, will take you back first.’” “Mrs. Assingham . . . by seven o’clock was in Portland Place” (156) (standard London dinner times were 8.00, 8.15 or 8.30). On Fanny’s arrival, Maggie herself is dressed already—”rather ‘bedizened’” (157).

Chapter 33 (4: 9 in the NYE) gives us the dialogue between Maggie and Fanny, in which Maggie narrates what has happened: “Something very strange has happened, and I think you ought to know it” (2: 160). On the afternoon of the British Museum visit, that is the previous Friday, Maggie has had lunch with Mr. Crichton “at his incorporated lodge hard by” (160), and then walked home, starting therefore in Bloomsbury—and she is inspired by “an allusion of Charlotte’s, of some months before—seed dropped into her imagination in the form of a casual speech about there being in Bloomsbury such ‘funny little fascinating’ places” (161). It is, we learn, “her father’s birthday” on “the twenty-first of the month” (162)—so Maggie wants to get Adam a present.¹⁰ James seems to get confused about his own time-scheme when Fanny first speaks to Maggie in this scene: “You mean you were so at your ease on Monday—the night you dined with us?” (165). This surely should refer back rather to the previous Friday (154) when Maggie and Amerigo came to dine with the Assinghams: there has been no reference to anything happening on the Monday before that, and much is made of the rarity of the Assinghams entertaining. (I have therefore emended this in my edition for the Cambridge Complete Fiction of Henry James to “so at your ease on Friday.”) At the end of the chapter Fanny smashes the bowl just as Amerigo enters (186).

Chapter 34 (4: 10 in the NYE), a scene between Maggie and the Prince, following on immediately from the previous chapter on this early July Monday evening (between six and seven) in 0005, repeats what seems to be James’s slip about the days, as Maggie explains to the Prince how she came to buy the bowl: “I came upon it, extraordinarily, through happening to go into the same shop on Monday last; in walking home, in prowling about to pick up some small old thing for father’s birthday, after my visit to the Museum” (2: 195).¹¹ This too should be “Friday last.” (I have again emended accordingly.) The shopman, she tells Amerigo, has felt uneasy about taking Maggie’s money for the bowl, and has written, and then, on Maggie’s reply, come to the house (204).¹² She talks of “My possession at last . . . of real knowledge” (209).

Part Fifth

Chapter 35 (5: 1 in the NYE) carries the action again to Fawns, to the moment where “the little party was again constituted at Fawns—which had taken, for completeness, some ten days” (2: 212)—meaning the Assinghams too (126), and that it is now, as in the plan given in chapter 31, “toward” mid-July 0005 or a little later (and perhaps that Maggie and the Prince have gone down ten days earlier, c. 5 July). Maggie is seeking company to save herself from too much unmitigated exposure to Amerigo and Charlotte, so welcomes now “the knowledge of the descent upon adjacent shores, for a short period, of Mrs. Rance and the Lutches” and “the fancy of the quaint turn that some near ‘week-end’ might derive from their reappearance” (215). She has already for the same reason asked “the Castledeans and several other members, again, of the historic Matcham week” down to Fawns: they seem to arrive quickly, as we soon hear of their effect on Maggie in “these particular days.” During the Castledeans’ stay, Maggie finds “one evening” (217) to talk to Fanny alone and review events. In an account of Maggie’s private consciousness we are told that she and the Prince “had dealt with this crisis again, face to face, very briefly, the morning after the scene in her room” (224–25); that is, on the Tuesday morning of the day of their departure to Fawns. (It seems possible that this scene is one of those James drafted but then cut or compressed in his shortening of the novel—since it is now summarized in retrospect.) It is in this remembered scene that “He had had it over with her again, the so distinctly remarkable incident of her interview at home with the little Bloomsbury shopman”—and thus that we have it too; the shopman’s “writing, first, in the spirit of retraction, to a lady with whom he had made a most advantageous bargain, and . . . then coming to see her so that his apology should be personal” (228). Returning to the present at Fawns, James tells us that “There were meanwhile, after the Castledeans and those invited to meet them had gone, and before Mrs. Rance and the Lutches had come, three or four days during which she was to learn the full extent of her need not to be penetrable” (232). We are by the time the Castledeans depart well on into July 0005 (probably at least the 20^th, if the Assinghams arrived “toward” mid-July). The chapter ends with Maggie seeing Charlotte as a caged animal; then “Charlotte finally struck her as making a grim attempt” to escape (236).

In Chapter 36 (5: 2 in the NYE), the chapter of the bridge game and Charlotte’s pursuit of Maggie on the terrace at night, we are first told that “They had been alone that evening—alone as a party of six” (2: 237)—so this is presumably during the “three or four days” of interval between the Castledeans and the Rance-Lutches mentioned in chapter 35. James might seem inconsistent then when he tells us that “It was the first evening there had been no one else. Mrs. Rance and the Lutches were due the next day” (238)—but of course there’s no reason why other visitors should not also have been at Fawns. The chapter describes a single dramatic sequence of events occurring well into the second half of July 0005, culminating in Maggie’s “embrace of Charlotte” in view of the others and thus taking on “a high publicity” (259).

Chapter 37 (5: 3 in the NYE) takes place “three days later” (2: 260), with the Lutches, “Dotty and Kitty, and . . . the once formidable Mrs. Rance” now visiting. Adam and Maggie go off together “toward six o’clock of a July afternoon” (2: 263)— probably at least the 23^rd—to the same secluded bench in the Fawns gardens on which they talked in chapters 9 and 10 on the September Sunday in 0002 for a guarded, or coded, conversation. Adam discloses his thought that “You make me quite feel as if American City would be the best place for us” (269)—meaning himself and Charlotte.

Chapter 38 (5: 4 in the NYE), which focuses on Charlotte’s pain, returns to a more general view of the situation as Maggie perceives it, with the “aftersense” of “the whole evening” of the kiss on the terrace (2: 286). “[W]ithin the week, Maggie had occasion to suspect” (288) that Charlotte realizes her stance may look exaggeratedly relieved—so perhaps we are on 25 or 26 July 0005. Maggie’s attention now, “day after day” (291–92), falls on Charlotte: “There were hours of intensity, for a week or two, when it was for all the world as if she had guardedly tracked her stepmother” (292). In the aftermath of Adam and Maggie’s conversation on the bench, “the month [July] waned” (293), then “There was a morning when, during the hour before luncheon and shortly after the arrival of a neighbourly contingent—neighbourly from ten miles off—whom Mrs. Verver had taken in charge, Maggie paused on the threshold of the gallery” (298)—and she hears Charlotte’s raised voice as cicerone as “like the shriek of a soul in pain” (300). We can date this: “Amerigo, that morning, . . . had gone to London for the day and the night” and in his absence “there came at last a high dim August dawn when she [Maggie] couldn’t sleep” (301); and Amerigo’s pretext “for going up to Portland Place in the August days [is] that he was arranging books there” (302). This August dawn, moreover, is the start of the day after “the shriek of a soul in pain”: “The sound was in her own ears still—that of Charlotte’s high coerced quaver before the cabinets in the hushed gallery; the voice by which she herself had been pierced the day before as by that of a creature in anguish” (303). The scene in the gallery is probably then either at the very end of July or at the start of August 0005, and Maggie’s dawn meditation is certainly in August.

Chapter 39 (5: 5 in the NYE), in which Maggie follows Charlotte and confronts her in the sun-drenched garden at Fawns, takes place in “the hot, still brightness of the Sunday afternoon,” which is “only the second Sunday, of all the summer, when the party of six . . . had practically been without accessions or invasions” (2: 305). Maggie sees Charlotte leave the house “at so unlikely an hour, three o’clock of a canicular August, for a ramble in garden or grove”—and decides to follow her as Charlotte followed her onto the terrace “three weeks before” (305, 306). “Canicular” means it’s the dog-days, associated with the “rising of the dog-star (either Sirius or Procyon)” (OED).¹³ Sunday luncheon has happened “without Mrs. Verver,” who has pleaded “a bad headache” (306), and Maggie has had a talk with Fanny Assingham; Maggie overlooks the gardens from her apartments and sees Charlotte heading off into the gardens—with a volume of “an old novel that the Princess had a couple of days before mentioned having brought down from Portland Place in the charming original form of its three volumes” (317)—but Maggie has a pretext for pursuit because she knows her maid took Charlotte only one volume, “which happened not to be the first” (318). Maggie pursues her with the correct volume: the encounter gives Charlotte the chance to declare that “Our real life isn’t here” (324) and that she means to restore Adam to America—“To take him home” (325). Allowing Charlotte the appearance of triumph, Maggie sinks on a bench: “Yes, she had done all” (328).

Part Sixth

Chapter 40 (6: 1 in the NYE) finds Maggie and the Prince back from Fawns, at their London house in Portland Place, “on one of the last days of the month” [August 0005], “with the stale London September close at hand,” in the period of preparation for “his father-in-law’s announced departure for America with Mrs. Verver” (2: 332). Maggie offers to “go abroad with you, if you but say the word; to Switzerland, the Tyrol, the Italian Alps, to whichever of your old high places you would like most to see again”—and “either [to] take leave of them now, without waiting—or . . . come back in time, three days before they start” (329). The Ververs’ preparations for departure have caused the return to Portland Place “before the great upheaval of Fawns. This residence was to be peopled for a month by porters, packers and hammerers, at whose operations . . . Charlotte was to preside in force” (332). Assuming the general announcement of departure (a decision made by Adam at 2: 269, and stated quasi-independently by Charlotte at 2: 325) follows hard on the canicular confrontation in the Fawns garden, “a month” implies a departure date (and thus the end of the novel’s action) before 11 September. During this quiet period of waiting Charlotte “didn’t come to Portland Place—didn’t even come to ask for luncheon on two separate occasions when it reached the consciousness of the household there that she was spending the day in London” (336).

Chapter 41 (6: 2 in the NYE) brings us to the last day of the novel’s action, “a month” at least since the dog-days in Fawns, so possibly a good ten days into September 0005. It is the eve of the Ververs’ departure for America: “‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘they go to Southampton’” (2: 348).

A telegram, in Charlotte’s name, arrived early—“We shall come and ask you for tea at five, if convenient to you. Am wiring for the Assinghams to lunch.” This document, into which meanings were to be read, Maggie promptly placed before her husband, adding the remark that her father and his wife, who would have come up the previous night or that morning [we don’t find out which], had evidently gone to an hotel.

(345)

In Maggie’s reflections on her relations with the Prince, we learn that “She had begun, a year ago, by asking herself how she could make him think more of her” (347). Suggestively, this takes us back to September 0004, situating the beginning of her marital awakening in the time-gulf between the end of Part Second in November 0002 and the resumption of the action in Part Third in probably March 0005. The Prince is struck that the Ververs are only coming to tea, and asks if they are “So immensely taken that they can’t—that your father can’t—give you his last evening in England?” (348). After a discussion with the Prince of Charlotte’s fate, Maggie “reverted to the question of tea, speaking as if they shouldn’t meet sooner. ‘Then about five. I count on you’” (360).

Chapter 42 (6: 3 in the NYE) jumps forward to this rendezvous between Maggie and the Prince in “their great eastward drawing-room” (2: 362), that is, not lit by the afternoon sun, presumably at shortly before five—“Later on, in the afternoon, before the others arrived”: “the September hush was in full possession, at the end of the dull day” (362, 363). The timing of the relatively brief final scene with Adam and Charlotte that follows their short dialogue is treated in minutes, so that “what [Maggie] most felt, for the half-hour, was that Mr. and Mrs. Verver were making the occasion easy” (365); Charlotte “carried it off . . . with a taste and a discretion that held our young woman’s attention, for the first quarter-of-an-hour” (366). The “half-hour” takes them till 5.30 and the arrival of the Principino: “I ‘ordered’ him for half-past five—which hasn’t yet struck” (370). When Maggie tells Adam that “Charlotte . . . is incomparable,” she is in suspense: “It took thirty seconds, but she was to know when these were over that she had pronounced one of the happiest words of her life” (372). The tension is expressed in these short timings: “she had just another minute to be nervous”; “while the minutes lapsed” (373); and then, strikingly, when the Principino has gone, we find that so have Adam and Charlotte: “the Principino’s presence, by itself, sufficiently broke the tension—the subsidence of which, in the great room, ten minutes later, gave to the air something of the quality produced by the cessation of a sustained rattle” (375). In the very next sentence “the Prince and Princess returned from attending the visitors to their carriage”—the departure itself is elided. Maggie is on her own in the drawing-room; Amerigo has taken their son back to the nursery; then “He opened the door, however, at last—he hadn’t been away ten minutes” (376). The final declaration of the novel—“‘See’? I see nothing but you” (377)—is made, presumably shortly before 6.00 p.m., on a dull September day in 0005—five years and a month after the action of the novel began.

________

So much for the internal time-span of The Golden Bowl. Is it, finally, possible to place the action of the novel, whether exactly or approximately, in an actual span of historical years? One might wish, as in the case of The Portrait of a Lady, where James gives a single date (telling us that Ned Rosier arrives in Rome on 1 November 1876), to be able to assign actual historical years to the action (PL1 345, chapter 36; see PL2 641–43). In The Golden Bowl, though, there seem at first blush to be few concrete clues to the precise historical timing of the events (one might have expected glancing references to, e.g., the Boer War [1899–1902], the Spanish-American War of 1898, or the death of Queen Victoria in 1901). There are, however, a few points—all occurring in Year 0005 of the action—at which James’s frame of reference intersects with historical markers in one way or another.

First, with respect to the latest possible terminal limit to the chronology, the terminus ante quem, we might think it unlikely James would have had an action end after the planned date of publication of a work (something I’m not aware of his doing elsewhere). It’s therefore just possible the novel’s action could end in September 1904, in time for its publication in the U.S. on 10 November 1904; however, particularly given the delays between the novel’s planning and the completion of its composition, September 1903 seems more plausible as a latest possible notional finishing date for the action, which would entail a corresponding latest possible start to the action of August 1898 because James’s original contract with Methuen (as his agent Pinker wrote to Scribner’s) specified a November 1903 completion date and publication in Spring 1904.¹⁴

Second, there is a limit on the beginning date of the action, and on its ending— given by the Earl’s Court Exhibition to which Maggie refers. Near the end Maggie says to the Prince, about the last evening before Adam and Charlotte leave for America: “If he should carry me off with him to-night, for old sake’s sake, to the Earl’s Court Exhibition, it will be a little—just a very, very little—like our young adventures” (2: 351). The first of the full-blown annual shows mounted by Imre Kiralfy at Earl’s Court in London was the Empire of India exhibition, opened on 27 May 1895, using newly built facilities, so Year 0005 cannot be earlier than 1895 (nor, as this gives us a terminus post quem, Year 0000 than 1890). We may wish to infer more. It is true that the “young adventures” needn’t have been at Earl’s Court and that that could account for the putative adventures being so little like their “young” ones; but “for old sake’s sake” could imply that they have been there together before, before her marriage in Year 0000, in which case the point of difference would be the changed situation and their being older, sadder, wiser. If Adam and Maggie have been to Earl’s Court in the past, one might infer that the earliest date at which the action might start would then be 1895, with Adam being able to take Maggie to see the show as a final gesture before her marriage in August, perhaps before the Prince’s arrival in London. In that case, the action of the novel could not end before September 1900. It seems characteristic of James that such an apparently literal matter should hinge on a question of interpretation.

Third, there is a clue to the year of the action at the end of chapter 14, set in the Foreign Office. Charlotte is summoned to meet the Royalty, “the greatest possible Personage” to whom Amerigo has just been speaking (GB1 1: 266, 267). Her comical question—“What in the world does he want to do to me?” (266)—makes most sense if this “Royalty” refers to Edward VII. He wasn’t yet King in March 1901, though Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901, and it seems unlikely that such a reception would have been held in March 1901, when the court was in deep mourning. Edward VII was crowned only on 9 August 1902, but in March 1902 was traveling and giving public speeches (according to the Morning Post); so this occasion in the final year of the action, Year 0005, seems more likely to be in March of 1902 or 1903.¹⁵

And then, fourth, there is the question of Easter. A central clue to dating is Easter Day (the occasion of the stay by the Prince and Charlotte at Matcham in 0005), made problematic because it is a moveable feast. However, that may also help us to establish probabilities, by a process of elimination—if James has calendars or diaries to hand and real years in mind. Easter Sunday in the novel probably falls in April, as we hear of our characters being “at Matcham during the Easter days” (1: 333) and later, on the Tuesday after Easter, Matcham is described in “the sunny, gusty, lusty English April” (338)—though this could allow for Easter Day falling on 30 March and the Tuesday on 1 April. The Prince and Charlotte then return to London the following Wednesday, three days after Easter; and the next day, Thursday, when Maggie goes early to Eaton Square, would be four days after Easter. James has Maggie, at the subsequent dinner for the Castledeans in Eaton Square, recall the scene “three weeks before, on the morning when the vision of her father and his wife awaiting her together in the breakfast-room had been so determinant” (2: 52), in other words on that Eaton Square Thursday; and he has told us in effect that this dinner takes place “at the end of April,” or following “another period of twenty-four hours,” and thus on 1 May at the latest. If James used diaries or calendars for his time-scheme (and if we are to take his time-markers precisely), this gives a last possible date for that Thursday in Eaton Square of 10 April. Thus for there to be three weeks of April after the Thursday after Easter, Easter in Year 0005 can fall no later than 6 April.

Let us now consider the claims of the years up to 1904.

Since the conception of the novel is first recorded in James’s notebooks on 26 November 1892, it is of course possible that James thought of it as an 1890s subject. If the reference to the Earl’s Court Exhibition means Year 0005 can be 1895 at the earliest, the action could start in any year from 1890 onwards (though the male Royalty at the Foreign Office makes these 1890s years less likely). Of the pre-1900 candidates for 0005, that is the years 1895–99, Easter Day fell on or before 6 April only in 1896 (5 April) and 1899 (2 April). The maleness of the greatest possible (male) royal Personage could make 1900, when Victoria still occupied the throne, an unviable candidate for Year 0005 anyway; but in addition, Easter Day in 1900 was Sunday, 15 April, leaving only two weeks and one day of the month. These considerations make 1900 seem unlikely.

In 1901 Easter fell on Sunday, 7 April; this would mean the Prince and Charlotte returning on Wednesday 10 April, and the Thursday when Maggie goes early to Eaton Square would be the 11^th. “[T]hree weeks” after that Thursday would, however, bring us to 2 May. This is at least close, and within a day of Maggie’s private deadline, and Victoria was at least deceased by March 1901, so with some qualifications this is a just-possible contender for Year 0005.

In 1902 Easter fell on Sunday, 30 March, which seems inconvenient for the impression given by the Matcham “Easter days” and “English April”; however, the Tuesday after Easter would be 1 April, and the Tuesday is the day when Amerigo appreciates the “English April,” so it can’t be altogether ruled out on that ground.¹⁶ Amerigo and Charlotte would then stay at Matcham till Wednesday 2 April; Thursday would be 3 April and “three weeks” would take us to 24 April (and another “twenty-four hours” to the 25^th) for the Eaton Square dinner, five or six days short of “the end of April” as such, though at least reaching the last week of the month. 1902 is therefore not a completely secure contender to be Year 0005 but is perhaps thinkable.

In 1903, Easter Day was Sunday, 12 April, and the Thursday was the 16^th, so “three weeks later” would be 7 May, which can hardly count as “the end of April”— so if James was using a calendar or diary for real years he can hardly have intended the action to close in 1903.

In 1904, Easter Sunday was earlyish—3 April—making the following Thursday 7 April, and “three weeks” later 28 April. This seems in fact a plausible fit for “the end of April,” though, as I’ve said, whether in his planning of the novel James would have had it end in 1904 when it was contracted to be submitted in November 1903 and published in “March-April” 1904 is perhaps dubious (JB1).

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It is difficult, then, predictably enough, to settle on a likely historical year for the temporal setting of the novel, but the two that perhaps best satisfy all the hints James drops seem to be end dates for the action of September 1902 or September 1904, and the seeming reference to Edward VII whether before or after his coronation gives The Golden Bowl an air of extreme modernity—indeed perhaps connects his reputation as “Edward the Caresser” with the adulterous subject-matter James is depicting. As we have seen, James can become confused about his own scheme, so it would not be surprising, especially given the perverse order in which he sometimes reveals information about dates and places, if the hints were not entirely consistent.

The larger question, perhaps, reverting to the unfolding I have attempted of the novel’s internal time-scheme, is that of “the eternal time-question” here and how it affects the reader’s experience. Whatever form James’s plan took—and it may not have been based on actual historic years—it gives him a structure for confident passing reference, where the phases and crises the characters live through, accelerating and slowing to periods of reflective eventlessness, looking forward and back with the movements of thought and memory, achieve a rich and convincing web of relations, and the effect of duration, in particular the sense of Maggie Verver’s long passage to her seizure of power, however we view that, is disturbingly, movingly realized.