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The Limited Realism of Howells' Their Wedding Journey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John K. Reeves
John K. Reeves*
Affiliation:
Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, N. Y.
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Extract

It is well known that as a young man William Dean Howells was an unabashedly romantic poet with a special fondness for the German romantics, notably Heine. It is even better known that at a later period Howells was the great champion of realistic fiction and one of its leading practitioners. These facts have led to an extensive discussion of what influences brought about the change, of when he became a realist in theory and in practice, and even of whether he ever became a complete realist. Some new light is thrown on these questions by the manuscripts of two of his early pieces of fiction, the unpublished “Geoffrey Winter” and Their Wedding Journey (1872).

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 5 , December 1962 , pp. 617 - 628
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

Note 1 in page 617 The manuscript of “Geoffrey Winter” is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University (Howells Papers. Manuscripts in Schedule A of the Agreement of 30 June 1948). The manuscript of Their Wedding Journey is in the possession of the writer. For a bibliographical description of both, see John K. Reeves, “The Literary Manuscripts of W. D. Howells: A Descriptive Finding List,” Bull. N. Y. Pub. Lib., lxii (July 1958), 350–351, 361. Permission to quote unpublished material from the manuscripts has been granted by Professor William White Howells of Harvard University for the heirs of the Howells Estate, and by William A. Jackson, Librarian, for the Howells Committee of the Houghton Library. Republication of this material also requires such permission.

Note 2 in page 617 An early version of what became the first chapter, entitled “A Dream,” was accepted by the Knickerbocker Magazine and belatedly published in August 1861. The complete novel was rejected by a number of editors and publishers between 1861 and 1865. See Years of My Youth, p. 209, and Olov W. Fryckstedt, In Quest of America: A Study of Howells' Early Development as a Novelist (Upsala, 1958), pp. 67–68.

Note 3 in page 617 Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia, 1954), p. 43.

Note 4 in page 617 For a summary of these and other suggestions see Fryckstedt, pp. 63–64.

Note 5 in page 618 Howells and the Age of Realism, p. 43.

Note 6 in page 618 Professor William M. Gibson has made a detailed study of Howells' use of this source of material for Their Wedding Journey. He estimates that about a tenth of it is drawn, often with little or no change, from the travel articles which Howells, as a young correspondent of the Ohio State Journal and the Cincinnati Gazette, wrote in the summer of 1860, when he covered some of the same ground over which he later sent his fictional honeymooners. See “Materials and Form in Howells's First Novels,” Amer. Lit., xix (May 1947), 158–166.

Note 7 in page 618 Their Wedding Journey (Boston, 1872), p. 255. All later references will be to this first edition unless otherwise specified, and the book will be referred to as TWJ.

Note 8 in page 618 “En Passant,” Ohio State Jour., 4 Aug. 1860, p. 1. Since this passage was later canceled, it does not appear in Gibson's list of parallel passages.

Note 9 in page 618 TWJ, p. 24. In a later passage Howells radically changed, between serial and book publication, the degree of Isabel's responsibility for the break. In the Atlantic (xxviii, 730) Basil said, “Yes, you're greatly to blame, … but I forgive you.” In the first edition (p. 256) Basil's remark was changed to: “O, you're not greatly to blame, … and I forgive you the little wrong you've done me.”

Note 10 in page 619 Gibson says that the fancied poet “resembles Howells's objective, mildly satirical self-portrait as the poet of the editorial convention at Tiffin” in the Ohio State Jour., 29 June 1859, p. 2 (Amer. Lit., xix, 164).

Note 11 in page 620 In Quest of America, chap. v.

Note 12 in page 620 “Doorstep Acquaintance,” Atlantic Monthly, xxiii (April 1869), 486.

Note 13 in page 620 “A Pedestrian Tour,” Atlantic Monthly, xxiv (Nov. 1869), 593.

Note 14 in page 620 Atlantic Monthly, xxv (March 1870), 305–312.

Note 15 in page 621 “A Pedestrian Tour,” p. 602.

Note 16 in page 622 In Quest of America, pp. 96–97, 108.

Note 17 in page 623 Atlantic Monthly, xxv (April 1870), 512.

Note 18 in page 623 The three added passages of the final expansion are: “To us of the hither side of the foot-lights … playing rather than living the life of strolling players” (TWJ, pp. 276–277); “He would not have detracted … an episode of fiction” (p. 277); “‘could I have asked?‘ … pities the whole world” (p. 277).

Note 19 in page 624 Howells and the Age of Realism, pp. 139–152.

Note 20 in page 624 Lewisohn, Expression in America (New York, 1932), p. 244; Brooks, Howells: His Life and World (New York, 1959), pp. 88–89.

Note 21 in page 624 Edwin H. Cady, The Road lo Realism: The Early Years, 1837–1885, of William Dean Howells (Syracuse, N. Y., 1956), pp. 135–137, 101.

Note 22 in page 624 Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed. Mildred Howells (Garden City, N. Y., 1928), i, 311.

Note 23 in page 624 Although Howells made references to breast feeding in at least three other manuscripts, written at widely separated times in his life, he canceled them all at some stage of composition. The other references are in the manuscripts of “Geoffrey Winter” (circa 1860, unpublished); “Police Report” (Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1882); and The Lealherwood God (1916).

Note 24 in page 626 For example, see Fryckstedt, In Quest of America, pp. 256–259. However, Van Wyck Brooks suggests its probable origin in Howells' Civil War years in Venice (Howells: His Life and World, p. 25), and notes its presence in the early novels and absence in later ones (p. 50).

Note 25 in page 628 Unpublished letter at Craigie House; quoted by Fryckstedt, p. 73, n. 67.

Note 26 in page 628 Quoted in George Arms and William M. Gibson, “‘Silas Lapham,’ ‘Daisy Miller,’ and the Jews,” New England Quart., xvi (March 1943), 121.