The Education of Henry Adams

572 Pages·1999·2.54 MB·English

by  Henry Adams

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1999
First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback in 1999
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
IRA B. NADEL
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
HENRY ADAMS, essayist, historian, novelist, and autobiographer, was born in
Boston in 1838, a great-grandson of the second president of the United States,
John Adams, and grandson of the sixth, John Quincy Adams. He graduated from
Harvard in 1858 and later studied in Europe, where he also worked as private
secretary to his father, then minister to England. He was professor of history at
Harvard from 1870 to 1877 and editor of the North American Review. He moved
permanently to Washington in 1877 to begin work on a biography of Albert
Gallatin, an American statesman, and what would become a nine-volume
History of the United States under the administrations of Jefferson and Madison,
published between 1885 and 1891. He also published two novels: Democracy
(1880) and Esther (1884). Following the death of his wife in 1885, he began to
make annual trips to Europe, especially France, until the beginning of the First
World War; he also travelled widely in the Far East and Caribbean. In 1904 his
narrative of medieval churches and culture, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres,
appeared to great acclaim; in 1907 The Education of Henry Adams was privately
printed and circulated among friends including Henry James and President
Theodore Roosevelt. In September 1918, six months after Adams’s death, the
Education appeared in a trade edition; it was widely reviewed, became a
bestseller, and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1919.
IRA B. NADEL is the author of Biography: Fiction, Fact & Form (1984), Joyce
and the Jews (1989), and Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (1996).
He has also edited The Dead Secret by Wilkie Collins for Oxford World’s
Classics (1997) and The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (1998). He is
professor of English at the University of British Columbia.
CONTENTS
Abbreviations
Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Henry Adams
THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Explanatory Notes
Index
ABBREVIATIONS
BD Chalfant, Edward, Better in Darkness, A Biography of
Henry Adams, His Second Life, 1862–1891 (Hamden,
Conn.: Archon Books, 1994).
HA Samuels, Ernest, The Young Adams (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948), HA I; Henry
Adams: The Middle Years (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), HA II; Henry Adams:
The Major Phase (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1964), HA III.
LA Adams, Henry, Novels, Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres, The Education of Henry Adams, Poems
(New York: Library of America, 1984). Introduction
and notes by Ernest and Jayne Samuels.
Lett. The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson,
Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee, and Viola
Hopkins Winner, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1982–8).
INTRODUCTION
‘I must know whether America is right or wrong.’…
‘I grant it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is
worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its
instincts.… Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the
past.’ (LA 39–40)
The voice is not Henry Adams’s but the explanation is. The vexed question
about America is put by Madeleine Lee, the heroine of Adams’s popular novel
of 1880, Democracy; the reply is by John Carrington, a fictitious Washington
observer of the political scene. But it could just as easily be Adams in the
Education or in his History of the United States During the Administrations of
Jefferson and Madison. As a journalist, historian, novelist, and autobiographer,
Adams was constantly focused on the American experiment, testing a statement
offered by another figure in Democracy: ‘You Americans believe yourselves to
be excepted from the operation of general laws. You care not for experience’
(LA 37–8). The Education of Henry Adams, privately printed in 1907, is a
response to this claim, exploring the potential of laws and theories and
experience to guide America through a turbulent present based on Adams’s atlas
of the past. The author, who embodies the ambivalency of the country’s
direction, searches for a narrative as well as a theory to explain his life and that
of the nation.
The fact that Adams was born into a family which helped to shape the values
and principles of the country—his great-grandfather was the second president of
the United States, his grandfather the sixth—lends irony to his journey. Adams
was duty bound to attend to the growth, reform, and renewal of the country, a
task he undertook with confused dedication. A critic of political life, he none the
less lived mostly within the shadow of the White House; refusing to run for any
elected office, he none the less hoped for various political appointments; a
constant student of American history, yet he formed his ideas about the past and
the future in Europe. A closed and private individual (Democracy, as well as his
later novel Esther, was published anonymously), Adams is nevertheless best
known for a work that is ostensibly an autobiography and work of confession but
is in fact a carefully constructed and artfully arranged text reflecting literary skill
and historical consciousness. It is not only incomplete, with twenty crucial years
omitted, but replete with factual errors. Yet since its first appearance from a
trade publisher in 1918, the Education has become a classic, equivalent in
importance to Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography or the earlier Diary of Cotton
Mather for understanding the evolution of the American psyche.
Legacy
The Adams family legacy ensured both an identity and a burden for Henry
Adams. He had no difficulty in escaping from obscurity; the challenge was to
find his own identity. The family was perhaps the most distinguished in
America, the source of presidents and diplomats, individuals who shaped the
direction of the nation. Adams began as a minor diplomat and then became a
journalist, academic, biographer, historian, and, finally, an autobiographer. His
career took him from Quincy to Cambridge, Massachusetts, then to Berlin,
London, and Washington, with long residences in Paris and journeys throughout
Europe. Adams also travelled to the American far West, the Caribbean
(including Cuba) and the Pacific, including Tahiti, Singapore, and Australia.
But fame and success haunted him. Adams’s family had been defined by both
and he was constantly aware of his heritage. As the fourth-generation heir to
America’s most illustrious family name, Henry Adams possessed a system of
order he called ‘the family mind’ which sometimes challenged his need for
independence. Surrounding him were constant reminders of what he inherited in
terms not only of accomplishments but of possessions and relationships: the
family home known as The Old House purchased by John Adams in 1788; the
many aunts and uncles who repeated stories of past successes; the histories,
diaries, and autobiographies written by preceding generations of Adamses.
Rigorous self-examination was a documented family habit, as the numerous
pages of diaries and notebooks confirm.1 The family also possessed carefully
defined principles and interests which reinforced a set of fixed concerns from
one generation to the next, unified in a statement linking politics, religion,
science, and history made by John Adams (1735–1826). ‘Politics’, he wrote in
1778, ‘are the divine science after all.’2 Political and diplomatic service at local,
national, and international levels was the path to fame. A lawyer who became
the second president of the United States, John Adams believed in reason as the
instrument to good government. But sceptical of human perfectibility, he upheld
the need for checks and balances to ensure effective government, a system he