the Ladder : a Henry James website

Historical notes

by Adrian Dover

the Ladder is a re-incarnation and gradual amplification of the erstwhile Adrian Dover’s Henry James web-site formerly hosted at the University of Birmingham (UK). That site had to close down in March 2004 when the University changed its policy on hosting websites to allow only those related to employees’ “academic or adminstrative work”. As my job has nothing to do with Eng. Lit., being involved with library computer systems, the policy prevented me applying for space on the ‘new’ website service. Don’t ask me why the University of Birmingham is unable to support electronic publication of research unless they’re already paying for its creation: I only work for them! But no wonder a recent ‘focus group’ exercise found that peoples’ perceptions of the University of Birmingham are that it is ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘conservative’ (how much did it cost in consultants’ fees to establish that?). At least it has proved that the £250K, plus implementation, spent on a rebranding – with old fashioned logo, font etc. – about 10 years ago achieved the desired effect. Coming soon: another rebranding, even more expensive (for example the official websites don’t use cascading style sheets, so each page has to be individually processed! </rant>).

The previous version of this site was started in 1998 with the intention of promoting Henry James’s tales (short stories). The first electronic text (etext) that I prepared was of one of my favourite ‘obscure’ works of James, The papers. I also compiled an index to reprints of the tales in single-author collections, that is collections containing only Henry James’s works, over the years. Subsequently etexts of many other tales were added to the site, and its aims became rather broader than focussing exclusively on these, to include etexts of some of the novels not available elsewhere. Also texts of two plays related to a particular tale were included, with parallel-text facilities. With the burgeoning amount of James text, I used my programming skills to generate a concordance to these e-texts. All these features have been carried forward into the current site and, having made it my starting point in 1998, The papers has now provided a quotation suggesting the new name.

To answer a question as to ‘why Henry James at all’, here is a little personal history : my first experience of Henry James’s work was through reading The spoils of Poynton, which was lent me by my mother after I caught the tail end of the last episode of the BBC television serialisation – it was the railway scene that drew my attention! I was in my mid-teens and I cannot now claim to remember much about the impression it made on me then; however, it was obviously good enough to prompt me to buy a second-hand copy of the Penguin Modern Classics The portrait of a lady, which I read between sitting my degree finals (mathematics and music) and receiving the results (scraped a II ii, in case you wondered!). Even to a non-Eng. Lit. graduate this was a revelation and I went on, in the course of the next ten years, to read all the novels and as many of the tales as were conveniently available. At the same time my job in a university library helped me get to grips with some of the vast literature about the man and his work.

Adrian Dover – May 2004