Chapter 29 - Social sciences and the disciplines

Summary

Henry James’s erratic education, culminating in a year at Harvard Law School (1862), might seem poor preparation for the career of novelist. From the perspective of the American mid-century, colleges and careers, outside the study and practice of the ministry, law and medicine, had not yet become mainstream. Between 1870 and 1900 the middle class began to recognize and promote American universities as institutions well adapted to the pursuit of wealth, social mobility, professionalism, technical and practical knowledge, administrative expertise and organizational skills (reflected in the rules, standards, divisions of the educational facility itself). James’s failure to obtain a degree situates him squarely within the context of what historian Burton Bledstein has described in The Culture of Professionalism as the middle-class tension between the ‘ego-satisfying pretensions’ of higher education and the goal of capitalizing on useful knowledge. In the midst of the Civil War an apparently able-bodied young man must do something, but what? When Henry matriculated at Harvard, the college was comprised of thirty teachers and one thousand students. The ‘liberal arts’ consisted merely of classes in Rhetoric and Oratory taught by Francis Child and Language instruction in French and Spanish taught by James Russell Lowell. By 1872 Henry was dispatching reviews of European pictures and exhibitions to American periodicals without the benefit of coursework in art history. It was not until 1873 that James family friend Charles Eliot Norton began lecturing on the Fine Arts at Harvard. James was an autodidact in the field of art appreciation and in much else; his library, friends and family were his college; his brain was his office.