Henry James
Notebook name-lists
An index
compiled and edited by Adrian Dover
Among the most striking features, to me at least, of the contents of Henry
James’s surviving notebooks are the occasional lists of names which he
jotted down for possible future use, either when encountered in real life,
say in the Times newspaper, or when conjured into existence
from his fertile imagination. Because of the way these variously-sized
lists occur throughout the nine notebooks, and are therefore scattered in
both the printed editions
of them that have been published, I have often felt the need for an index
– which the volumes’ two sets of editors signally have failed to
provide!
Here is that index: an alphabetical list of all the names in the
“notebooks’ name-lists” showing the date (or date-range)
James wrote them down and the page references in, first, the more recent
Edel & Powers edition (EP) and then the older Matthiessen & Murdock
one (MM).
There are several important points for you to note before
using the index:
- only names in the lists of possible fictional names have been indexed:
real and fictional names in all other notebook entries have been ignored
(the printed volumes have indexes which cover the real names and
James’s works)
- title elements such as ‘Mrs’, ‘Miss’, ‘Lord’
etc. are not indexed, but are shown with the name element
- names with multiple ‘words’ are indexed under all the elements
(except titles), but show the whole name each time, in the form James
noted
- most of the individual lists of names in the notebooks are not
dated (at least, in the editions), so the dates of the entries before
and after the list in which a name occurs are given:
where a list is dated, that date is labelled ‘on’ in the
index
- James’s emphasis, shown in the editions as italic names,
is here given as underlining, which more closely matches the
manuscript
- alternatives, additions and notes in round brackets ( ) are
James’s own, although I have italicised the text for
clarity
- notes in square brackets [ ] are mine, highlighting differences
between the two published editions (EP is given priority, even when their
reading is almost certainly a misprint) or showing where James noted the
same name twice in the same block
- details of use, including use before the note was made, are
shown where known; titles available on
the Ladder
have a link to my edition, but I apologise that, for those which are not
yet ‘laddered’, I have not linked other etexts (you’ll have
to use the
Henry James scholar’s guide to web sites
or a search engine)
- the ‘used’ column is not guaranteed to be complete;
please
notify
additions and corrections, thanks
- very occasionally the ‘used’ column includes an additional
explanatory note
Especial thanks go to Sarah Koch, who very kindly proof-read this index
in January-February 2005, a task which is obviously much more difficult
and time-consuming than proofing a ‘linear’ text. As a result
of her work I have been able to remove more than a dozen errors from the
index. Thank you, Sarah.
For full bibliographical details of the two editions of the notebooks, and for
additional work, I have provided a separate small
bibliography
for this index. Included there are details of Gale’s
A Henry James encyclopedia
which is useful for checking up on any of James’s fiction or characters
(by surnames).
February 2005
this introduction
© 2002-2005
part of an
index to names
in the
name lists of Henry James’s notebooks;
on
the Ladder : a Henry James website