And to see him die the victim of heartless womankind, as Cargill suggests James intended, is a sentimental simplification (Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James London, 1971, p. 174.Īs John Colmer has pointed out, it is not the case that Hyacinth has been abandoned by his friends, as he thinks (see Coleridge to Catch-22 London, 1978, p. Julia Wordsworth in the Contemporary Review Dec. 68–74, and Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York, 1957), pp. 61–3.įor conflicting views on the accuracy of James’s picture of anarchism, see Trilling, Liberal Imagination pp. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (London, 1951), pp. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. So she consults her friend Mr Vetch, an impoverished musician and a man of culture and intelligence, whose affectionate concern for Hyacinth comprises, unlike Pinnie’s, a degree of realism and psychological insight. She fears that taking her delicate Hyacinth to see his mother will expose him to a scene upsetting in itself, and which might lead him later to uncover the scandal of his origins. A bit of a snob, Pinnie takes refuge from the tawdry reality of her cheap dressmaking business in fantasies about the boy’s noble lineage. The child’s guardian, Miss Pynsent or ‘Pinnie’, believes the pretty, curly-headed little boy whom she has kept in ignorance of these events to be Lord Frederick’s son, and would much rather he were told that than that his mother is a convicted murderess. The woman in question, a French seamstress, is serving a life-sentence for stabbing her lover, Lord Frederick Purvis, to death. Mrs Bowerbank, a wardress at Millbank Prison, bears a request from one of the inmates that she should see her child before she dies. ‘Certainly, in her position, I should go off easier if I had seen them curls.’ It is with this optimistic appeal to maternal sentiment that James begins his novel of radical conspiracy.

The Princess Casamassima by Henry James