University of Virginia Library

II

"The Old Things" appeared in seven installments in The Atlantic Monthly from April to October, 1896. About a year earlier James had written to William Dean Howells that he was really not sorry he was rarely able to sell his fiction to magazines anymore:

Excepting Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, about all that can be said for the quality of the fiction that kept "The Old Things" company is that it was not so bad as the magazine's poetry. But what the fiction lacked in quality, it made up for in quantity. Including James's and Sarah Orne Jewett's work, for example, the September, 1896, issue of the Atlantic contained the installments of six different fictional serials. Among the objectionable "magazine conditions" that affected "The Old Things" was the absence, after the first installment, of any indication that the serial would be continued; nor was there any evidence that the seventh installment was the last. Given the characteristic inconclusiveness of the last chapter, one wonders how many Atlantic readers waited patiently for another installment.

James was quite fortunate, however, in the "magazine form" imposed upon "The Old Things" by its division into installments. James knew in advance, of course, that his work was to be serialized, but what kept him from planning any definite structure through the installments was his inability to tell how long his fiction was going to be. He had contracted with Horace Scudder, the editor of the Atlantic, for a fifteen-thousand-word story and he delivered an eighty-thousand-word novel.[8] Up until very nearly the end of the novel James did not

know how many chapters or installments his novel would make. Yet with or without James's help—it is impossible to tell now—the Atlantic's seven installments of "The Old Things" preserve the scenic structure of the novel.[9] Nowhere do the installment divisions interrupt a scene that is continued for more than one chapter, although there are some tempting opportunities, such as Mrs. Brigstock's dramatic entrance at the end of Chapter XIV. As printed in the Atlantic, the installments emphasize not suspense but the rhythm of increasingly long scenes. Even the lengthy scene of three chapters between Mrs. Gereth and Fleda near the end of the novel is not interrupted, but presented as the entire penultimate installment.

If he could not complain about its division into installments, James had good grounds for objecting to the systematic overpunctuation that the "magazine form" seems to have imposed on "The Old Things." Almost all dashes in James's text were preceded by commas; all pauses in a sentence, all non-restrictive and quite a few restrictive modifiers, and numerous adverbs and adverbial phrases were surrounded with punctuation. The following sentence illustrates the result:

Since James's typescript of "The Old Things" was apparently destroyed by the Atlantic after the serial was set, it is impossible to tell how closely his copy was followed. Yet with the exception of "Glasses"— which the Atlantic published in February, 1896, and punctuated in the same way as "The Old Things"—none of James's printed or holograph writings around the time of "The Old Things" shows the proliferation of commas to be found in that novel.[10] And when "Glasses" reappeared in Embarrassments in June, 1896, the superfluous commas had been omitted. It is improbable that James would have been taking out commas in one text at the same time that he was putting them into another.

Apart from the Atlantic's overpunctuation, there is no evidence

that the serial is not a reliable reproduction of James's typescript.[11] Yet "The Old Things" is far from being the best text of The Spoils of Poynton. In addition to the less significant title, the serial has a number of grammatical errors, infelicitous sentences, and unfortunate ambiguities. There is also one unnoticed miracle in the story with the death and resurrection of Fleda's father. Such an error is not particularly surprising, however, for James did not consider serial publication a permanent form for his work. An unpublished letter to Scudder shows that James did not even see proof for "The Old Things."[12] His main purpose in serialization was simply money; a carefully revised text could wait until the work appeared as a book. There is a less important, though for bibliographers perhaps more interesting, reason for serialization to be found in the description of the writer Dencombe in James's story "The Middle Years." Dencombe was "a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style" whose Serializing a novel in The Atlantic Monthly was hardly publishing it secretly, yet the process did approach Dencombe's ideal in providing an opportunity for a "revise"—terrified or not—before The Spoils of Poynton appeared in book form.