Young Men from the Provinces

Abstract

Abstract Beginning from Lionel Trilling’s argument that “Young Men from the Provinces” are key to the development of the nineteenth century, this chapter reads Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima in the context of that tradition. Tracing how the novel understands key political ideals from the French Revolution—liberté, égalité, fraternité—the chapter shows James exploring what it means that tyrannies and tyrants can be aligned with movements for social justice as from impulses for conservative counter-revolution. Not only does James’s interest in people, both as an abstraction and as a verb, raise questions about to whom obligations might be owed; it also shows James navigating the vexed relationship between the social and the political.