大象传媒

Henry James was not only a great novelist - he also wrote a great deal of entertaining non-fiction, producing reviews and essays on a wide variety of subjects. To mark the centenary of his death, these five anthologies reveal James through his letters, memoirs, essays and private notebooks.

Episode 4: Encounters with Famous People
Henry James ended his career in London in the early twentieth century as a figure of great dignity, known to his admirers as 'the Master'. But as a shy child, and a bashful young man, early in his career he had met some of the literary giants of the Victorian age. James's father Henry James Senior was a well-known and well-connected intellectual figure - though very eccentric - so all sorts of eminent people passed through the house. Towards the end of his life, James still remembers being overwhelmed by embarrassment and self-consciousness during an encounter with the most famous novelist of the day - the author of Vanity Fair.

"Still present to me is the voice proceeding from my father's library, in which some glimpse of me hovering, at an opening of the door, prompted him to the formidable words, 'Come here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary jacket!'"

We hear what happened next in that meeting with Thackeray - and of meetings with Dickens, Tennyson, and George Eliot.

The anthology has been selected by Professor Philip Horne of University College London, who is founding General Editor of a major scholarly edition of James's fiction and has re-transcribed the notebooks for an authoritative new edition.

Reader: Henry Goodman
With introductions by Olivia Williams

Producer: Elizabeth Burke
A Loftus Media production for 大象传媒 Radio 4.