Introduction

Summary

The Genesis of the Text

The last novel that Henry James completed and published in his lifetime derived directly from his 1909 play of the same name. This had been commissioned for the 1910 repertory season at London's Duke of York's Theatre produced by the American theatre-manager Charles Frohman (1856–1915) which, with new work promised from Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), John Galsworthy (1867–1933), Harley Granville Barker and others, looked set to follow the ground-breaking 1904–7 Court Theatre seasons of avant-garde plays organized by Barker (1877–1946) and John Vedrenne (1867–1930). James set about the project enthusiastically, telling his agent, James Pinker (1863–1922), on 14 October 1909, that he was ‘very ardent and interested; feeling, the more I get into it—into the whole thing— that that way, for me the Future (what is left me of it!) lies’. It lay there particularly, perhaps, because his 1908 royalty statement for the New York Edition of his novels, after years of intensive revision work, had been he said, ‘a greater disappointment than I have been prepared for’ and his literary income his lowest for twenty-five years (LL 468). In mid-December, 1909, having completed the play, he noted that ‘the “dramatic” way’ was the only way he would ‘henceforth be able, with any vital, or any artistic, economy, to envisage [his] material at all’, his ‘so absorbing and endearing plunge into the whole process of “The Outcry”’ having cast ‘so large and rich and vivid a light’ on ‘the whole matter of method’. The novel James was then contemplating, ‘The Ivory Tower’, would remain unfinished at his death; the one that did eventuate was The Outcry, published almost simultaneously in England and America, in October 1911.

The novel's dust-jacket gloss,most likely, as Leon Edelmaintains, to have been printed fromJames's own prospectus, locates the plot in current events:

‘The Outcry’ deals with a question sharply brought home of late to the conscience of English Society—that of the degree in which the fortunate owners of precious and hitherto transmitted works of art hold them in trust, as it were, for the nation, and may themselves, as lax guardians, be held to account by public opinion.