the Ladder: a Henry James website

What’s new here

by Adrian Dover

2008-02-18 : I am sorry that for personal reasons there has been little work on this site for some three years now. Also, such new features as have appeared, like the edition of the novel and play versions of The outcry and the page about identifying versions of the tales, have not been heralded on this page.

Following an enquiry about such things a few months ago, I have now prepared a web version of my personal initial list of editions of James’s novels, showing, where known, which textual variant is reprinted. There is also a list of first and last differences in some of the novels (mostly New York edition ones.

2005-02-23 : My edition of The turn of the screw has now been published and lacks only some entries in the ‘critical work’ section of the bibliography (where to begin with that, hey?). As ever, the text is that of the first British book publication, providing an authoritative electronic source of the first reliably distributed publication, as opposed to the more anonymous texts, with no critical apparatus, generally available in this medium. (As a worst example, the version on Bibliomania.com – I won’t even link it – is missing the introductory ‘frame’ section entirely, starting at ‘Chapter 1’.) As a bonus I have included also the texts of three letters James wrote to correspondents shortly after the October 1898 issue of the book, in which he ‘explains’ (or doesn’t!) about the tale, in answer to questions. This edition completes the two-tale collection The two magics.

2005-02-11 : About a dozen corrections and some other alterations have been made to the Notebook name-lists’ index after an excellent proof-reading of it by Sarah Koch.

2005-01-17 : My electronic editions of the 1885, London texts of Master Eustace, The romance of certain old clothes and A most extraordinary case are now available, completing the Stories revived tales which were not available in etexts when I started that volume.

2005-01-10 : My electronic edition of the 1885, London text of Poor Richard, an early tale by James (1866), with a Civil War background, is now available. This is the tale in which the few commentators (chiefly Edel, followed by Buitenhuis) see James working out the situation of the young men, including himself, clustered around Minny Temple on holiday in August 1865. Also, for the more anorak-nophile among you, I have at last updated my index to the name-lists which appear in James’s notebooks, with the promised details of where particular names were used.

Forthcoming developments

I am mindful of the need to continue updating the existing novel etexts here, where they still need notes, bibliographies and so on, to ‘edition’ status. This is all the novels except The Princess Casamassima and The ivory tower. After that, or possibly in parallel to it, to some extent, I can move on to upgrading other pages to full XHTML 1.0 compatibility and to adding further etexts of tales from the collections already started.