The young Henry James. Photograph:
Alice Boughton/Bettmann/CORBIS
Regarded as amongst the most notable novelists, Henry James produced a total of 112 tales, 20 novels, 12 plays and a great number of travel and criticism volumes during his career. James ventured into a range of genres: some of his most notable works include the romance novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881), the Gothic horror novella The Turn of the Screw (1898) and his dark comedy The Ambassadors (1903). Interestingly, James visited Wenlock Priory in Much Wenlock and admired the pastoral countryside of Shropshire and its medieval architecture, which influenced some of the eerie scenery within The Turn of the Screw.
Originally from New York City, Henry James spent much of his adolescence abroad, allowing him to gain an early insight into European life. Like many young upper-class men of the 18th-century, James had the exciting opportunity to journey across Europe on a traditional Grand Tour in 1869, favouring England, France and Italy in particular. He eventually chose to settle in London in 1876. With the help of his close friend, historian Henry Adams, James steadily adjusted to his new life and was introduced to English society, establishing significant connections and lifelong friendships with influential figures such as Charles Milnes Gaskell of Wenlock Priory. James was also a regular guest at Lord Houghton’s breakfast parties, socialising with the poets Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning and many others.
Aware of James’s fascination with medieval castles and abbeys, Adams believed that a visit to Wenlock Priory would not only be an enjoyable trip for James, where he could immerse himself into the history of the place, but would also be the perfect place for James to encounter new opportunities. Friends with both Gaskell and James, Adams ‘sensed that Gaskell and James would be compatible companions with interests in common and that the relationship would be beneficial’. Thus, Adams sent a letter to Gaskell to arrange James’ invitation to Wenlock Priory:
22 June 1887:
Regarded as amongst the most notable novelists, Henry James produced a total of 112 tales, 20 novels, 12 plays and a great number of travel and criticism volumes during his career. James ventured into a range of genres: some of his most notable works include the romance novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881), the Gothic horror novella The Turn of the Screw (1898) and his dark comedy The Ambassadors (1903). Interestingly, James visited Wenlock Priory in Much Wenlock and admired the pastoral countryside of Shropshire and its medieval architecture, which influenced some of the eerie scenery within The Turn of the Screw.
Originally from New York City, Henry James spent much of his adolescence abroad, allowing him to gain an early insight into European life. Like many young upper-class men of the 18th-century, James had the exciting opportunity to journey across Europe on a traditional Grand Tour in 1869, favouring England, France and Italy in particular. He eventually chose to settle in London in 1876. With the help of his close friend, historian Henry Adams, James steadily adjusted to his new life and was introduced to English society, establishing significant connections and lifelong friendships with influential figures such as Charles Milnes Gaskell of Wenlock Priory. James was also a regular guest at Lord Houghton’s breakfast parties, socialising with the poets Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning and many others.
Aware of James’s fascination with medieval castles and abbeys, Adams believed that a visit to Wenlock Priory would not only be an enjoyable trip for James, where he could immerse himself into the history of the place, but would also be the perfect place for James to encounter new opportunities. Friends with both Gaskell and James, Adams ‘sensed that Gaskell and James would be compatible companions with interests in common and that the relationship would be beneficial’. Thus, Adams sent a letter to Gaskell to arrange James’ invitation to Wenlock Priory:
22 June 1887:
‘Harry James writes me that you called on him of which I am glad, for I like him though I don’t read his books. Some people admire them. If you ask him to Wenlock, you will I doubt not, find him much after your own taste. He would appreciate Wenlock, which is quite after his theory of life and imagination, so I hope you will try him.’
James initially met Gaskell and his wife, Lady Catherine in the early summer of 1877, at house of the poet Francis Turner Palgrave, Gaskell’s brother-in-law. In a letter to Henry James, Adams stated that ‘if Gaskell asks you to Wenlock don’t for the world fail to go’, and James prepared for his visit to Shropshire. Little did he know that this would be the beginning of a valuable, lifelong friendship.
Prior to his visit, James turned to Murray’s Handbook for Shropshire, Cheshire and Lancashire (1870), as the account on Much Wenlock focused on the abbey. After reading the handbook, James was enthusiastic about the abbey in another letter to his brother:
‘It is’ [the Abbey] [...] according to Murray’s Shropshire, a very exquisite place: a medieval Abbey, half ruined, half preserved and restored.’
James initially met Gaskell and his wife, Lady Catherine in the early summer of 1877, at house of the poet Francis Turner Palgrave, Gaskell’s brother-in-law. In a letter to Henry James, Adams stated that ‘if Gaskell asks you to Wenlock don’t for the world fail to go’, and James prepared for his visit to Shropshire. Little did he know that this would be the beginning of a valuable, lifelong friendship.
Prior to his visit, James turned to Murray’s Handbook for Shropshire, Cheshire and Lancashire (1870), as the account on Much Wenlock focused on the abbey. After reading the handbook, James was enthusiastic about the abbey in another letter to his brother:
‘It is’ [the Abbey] [...] according to Murray’s Shropshire, a very exquisite place: a medieval Abbey, half ruined, half preserved and restored.’
Wenlock Priory
Source: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/wenlock-priory/
On 12 July 1877, James travelled by train to Wenlock and was immediately exposed to the historic beauty of the town on his way to the guest house, passing the Almshouses, Holy Trinity Church, Guildhall and St. Milburga’s mystical Well. James developed a deep appreciation for Shropshire’s pastoral views and medieval architecture, and in particular, the abbey. James documented his admiration for the abbey in his essay Abbeys and Castles, describing the tower:
‘You may life upon the grass at the base of an ivied fragment, measure the girth of the great stumos of the central columns, half smothered in soft creepers, and think how strange it is that in this quiet hollow, in the midst of lonely hills, so exquisite and elaborate a work of art should have risen.’
Immersed in the medieval atmosphere of the priory, the gothic elements influenced James’s writing for The Turn of the Screw, which is an eerie Gothic novella about a governess who acquires a new situation at a country house in order to look after the mysterious niece and nephew of her employer, both of whom are secretly aware of and communicate with the ghostly figures of previous employers. Interestingly, James included the roof-top tower in the story, while the dreary monastic fishponds behind the abbey supposedly inspired the lake, where the governess encounters the ghost of her predecessor. Having read The Turn of the Screw for a module last year, it was highly interestingly to learn that this uncanny scene was based on a location here in Shropshire.
Illustrations for the serialised printing of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw:
(2 April 1898) Caption: ‘I must have thrown myself, on my face, on the ground’
Source: https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3439864
Source: https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3444462
During his visits at the priory, James documented his outings with Charles Gaskell in Portraits of Places. In a letter dating from 15 July 1877, James displays his fondness of Shropshire, describing his first experiences at Wenlock:
‘This is a Sunday morning, with a great raw rain-storm howling outside’, ‘but though this unpleasantness has lasted forty-eight hours it has really not put me out of humour with Wenlock.’
‘The morning after my arrival, luckily, Gaskell and I started off and made an heroic day of it - a day I shall always remember most tenderly. We went to Ludlow, to Stokesay and to Shrewsbury and we saw them all in perfection. You spoke of Stokesay, and I found it of course a gem. We lay there on the grass in the delicious little preau, beside the well, with every feature of the old place still solid and vivid around us, and I don’t think that, as a sensation, I ever dropped back, for an hour, more effectually into the past.’ (p.122)
‘I have rarely had, for a couple of hours, the sensation of dropping back personally into the past in a higher degree than while I lay on the grass beside the well in the little sunny court of this small castle, and idly appreciated the still definite details of mediaeval life.’ (p.123)
During his stay, James also admired the Milnes Gaskell’s library, writing:
The ‘Gaskell’s beautiful & interesting library; for whenever I was not walking or talking, lunching or dining, I was turning over the charming collection of books, in that charming great room’.
Over the next few years, James was not deprived of his admiration for Wenlock Priory and Shropshire, as he would visit the Gaskells again in 1878 and 1883, as ‘it was the essence of what was lacking in America and exactly what James craved’
Phoebe Yip (undergraduate English student, UCS)
References
Gamble, Cynthia, John Ruskin, Henry James and the Shropshire Lads (London: New European Publications Limited, 2008)
Monteiro, George, Reading Henry James: A Critical Perspective on Selected Works (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2016), p.122
Zacharias, Greg.W. & Pierre A. Walker, The Complete Letters of Henry James 1878-1880: Volume 1 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), p.70
Phoebe Yip (undergraduate English student, UCS)
References
Gamble, Cynthia, John Ruskin, Henry James and the Shropshire Lads (London: New European Publications Limited, 2008)
Monteiro, George, Reading Henry James: A Critical Perspective on Selected Works (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2016), p.122
Zacharias, Greg.W. & Pierre A. Walker, The Complete Letters of Henry James 1878-1880: Volume 1 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), p.70
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