Learning to Read Childishly with “Master James”

Abstract

This essay will read over the shoulder of Henry James as he reads a “boy's book” by Robert Louis stevenson, with the Design of using that seemingly unlikely encounter to think about children, books, and learning to read. An attentive reader of Stevenson's books for children and adults, James shared an affection and admiration for the man and the works with many of his contemporaries. The two became friendly after communicating in the pages of Longman's Magazine in 1884, beginning with James's essay “The Art of Fiction.” Often overlooked in discussions of this much cited essay is, first, the venue, a magazine that would become largely devoted to boys' adventure serials, and, second, the weight that James gives there to the recently published Treasure Island (1883), which he treats as exemplary in that it “succeeded wonderfully in what it attempts.” He contrasted it to Edmond de Goncourt's Chérie, which “deplorably” failed in its effort to depict “the development of the moral consciousness of a child” (61), as much as James thought that particular “country” worthy of the art of fiction (62). The reader will “say Yes or No, as it may be, to what the artist puts before” him, and, as to childhood, James asserts expert personal knowledge. After all, he writes, “I have been a child in fact, but I have been on a quest for a buried treasure only in supposition” (62).