(1811-1882), an affluent and well-connected journalist who wrote and lectured on religious subjects, designed a "sensuous education" for his namesake and for Henry's elder brother, William (1842-1910). Like her husband, the self-effacing Mary Robertson Walsh James (1810-1882) was descended from Irish immigrants who had prospered in New York State early in the nineteenth century. During the 1840s and 1850s the Jameses relocated from one European or American intellectual and social capital to another, learning foreign languages, reading eclectically, and exploring professional possibilities outside the traditional American world of business. In his first volume of memoirs,
A Small Boy and Others (1913), Henry James Jr. recalled his "very most infantine sensibility" as beholding a "view, framed by the clear window of the [carriage] as we passed" the Napoleonic column and "monumental square" of the Place Vendôme in Paris. This perception in James's second year of life (confirmed by his parents' recollections) portends the "spirit of place" that the mature James later evoked in his travel writing as well as his fiction.
James's accounts of his juvenile travels in England, France, Switzerland, and Germany appear in his memoirs and letters. During the 1860s the Jameses stayed on the American side of the Atlantic (in Boston, New York, Newport, and Cambridge), and Henry spent one academic year at Harvard Law School (1862-1863) and began to publish stories and reviews in American magazines and journals.
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