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PREFACE TO
THE CALENDAR OF HENRY JAMES CORRESPONDENCE
In 1984, in an appendix to the final volume of
his selected edition of 1,092 of Henry James's letters, Leon Edel urged upon a new
generation of scholars the considerable task of preparing a census of the extant letters
in James’s voluminous epistolarium. This calendar contributes significantly toward
that needful task by identifying more than 10,400 James letters, published and
unpublished, extant in more than 130 libraries, museums, archives, and private collections
in the United States and abroad. Such a calendar will never take the place of what has for
too long been denied James, a complete edition of his letters. But it will bring students
and scholars a step closer to a wealth of primary materials seminal to a full
understanding and appreciation of the writer, his work, and his world.
The calendar includes information on four
categories of letters:
- extant letters or fragments of letters, in public
repositories or private collections, that have been examined in the original manuscript or
typescript, in photocopy, or on microfilm;
- published letters for which no extant originals
have yet been located;
- advertised letters that have been offered for sale
in auction house catalogs but whose present locations are unknown;
- and unlocated letters for which varying types of
evidence--photocopies, complete or partial typed transcriptions, and occasionally only a
record of a date and a correspondent’s name--can be found (primarily in 77
chronologically ordered loose-leaf binders) in the professional papers of the late Leon
Edel, housed in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, McLennan Library,
McGill University, Montreal.
The database of information on these letters
contains the following fields:
YEAR and DATE: The
calendar’s dates follow dates provided by James or assigned by subsequent editors,
when not demonstrably in error. But James was neither perfectly faithful nor perfectly
reliable in the dating of his letters, nor have subsequent editors and curators always
been accurate in their assignment of dates to undated or partially dated letters. Many
dates have therefore had to be reckoned in part or in whole. Whenever a missing date is
assigned or a previously assigned date is altered on the basis of conclusive internal or
external evidence, brackets ([ ]) surround all portions of the added or altered date
(year, month, or date of month). Whenever a missing date is conjectured or an assigned
date is corrected on the basis of inconclusive but highly credible internal or external
evidence, a question mark is included within the brackets immediately after the portion of
the date in question. Approximately 8% of the letters in the calendar are undated or only
partially dated and, for the moment at least, defy any closer assignment of date. These
letters are alphabetized by addressee and follow the chronologically ordered records.
ADDRESSEE: The calendar
does not maintain James's habitual forms of address in the letters. Names are typically
expanded to first, middle, and last and then entered, last name first, in the ADDRESSEE
field without professional or honorific titles.
PLACE: The calendar does
not attempt to reproduce James’s addresses in facsimile fashion, each of which can
occur in the letters in numerous variations. Instead, the many places from which James
wrote are identified as fully and as consistently as possible for the modern user.
Abbreviations are expanded, omitted elements of similar addresses are added, and variant
spellings and capitalizations are ignored in the process of regularizing the addresses for
the sake of convenient searching of the database. Whenever James wrote from outside of
London, American states, Swiss cantons, French provinces, Italian regions, and English
counties are added (with English county names following the practice of the Administrative
Reorganization Act of 1984 in all cases except one: Lamb House is permitted to remain in
Sussex, the modern day East Sussex).
ORIGINAL: Letters are
identified as either "manuscript," "typescript," "telegram,"
"pneumatique," "postcard," "photocopy," "typed
copy" or some combination of these terms (for instance "typed copy of
telegram"). Minimal descriptive information—"fragment" or
"mutilated"—is provided parenthetically where relevant.
REPOSITORY:
Abbreviated identifications of repositories are keyed to the accompanying alphabetically
ordered list of "Repositories." The list provides full names and addresses of
all repositories cited in the calendar. All letters extant in private collections are
identified as "Private," as are all unlocated letters known to have been
advertised for sale. Letters for which the only evidence comes from the papers of the late
Leon Edel are listed as "Edel Archive."
CATALOG NUMBER: Whenever
available, cataloging information from public repositories is provided both to facilitate
access and to insure unique identification of letters, especially multiple undated letters
to one correspondent or multiple letters of the same date to the same correspondent. For
unlocated letters advertised in auction catalogs, the field is used whenever possible to
identify the auction house, sale date, catalog title, and lot number for each letter.
PUBLISHED: All letters
not identified simply as "unpublished" carry abbreviated references to their
publication source(s). No effort is made to cite a preferred text from alternative
available texts of a letter; instead, all known instances of publication are listed, in
abbreviated fashion, in chronological order. These abbreviated references are keyed to the
accompanying alphabetically ordered list of "Sources." Only letters that have
been published in full or purportedly full versions are identified by their publication
source(s). No attempt has been made to record published extracts of letters.
The Calendar will always remain a
work-in-progress so long as more James letters continue to come to light and continue to
be published. Existing records will be amended and new records will be added as more
information becomes available. Users of the Calendar and Register interested
in the most current figures (total letters in database, total number of correspondents,
total number of published letters, etc.) should consult the "Statistics" page.
Users interested in a summary record of changes made or to be made to the Calendar
should consult the "Update" page. And, finally, users interested in making the Calendar
as complete and as thorough as possible are invited to consult the "Contact"
page—and use the e-mail link—to pass along information on new or elusive
letters.
To Tristram Shandy should go the final words, for
now:
To sum up all; there are archives at every
stage to be look’d into, & rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies,
which justice ever and anon calls back to stay the reading of:--In short, there is no end
of it;--for my own part, I declare I have been at it these six weeks, making all the speed
I possibly could,--and am not yet born:--I have just been able, and that’s all, to
tell you when it happen’d, but not how—so that you see the thing
is yet far from being accomplished. (Volume I, Chapter 15).
Steve Jobe
Hanover, Indiana
18 December 1998
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