George P. James

George P. James. A Gentleman of the Old School

London:  G. Routledge, 1839.

 

Biographical Sketch of George P. James

George Payne Rainsford James was born in Hanover Square in London on August 9, 1799. His father was an American Revolutionary war veteran and physician, and his mother died when he was a young child. At a young age, James learned several Eastern and Western languages, among them, Persian, French, Italian, and German, (although he failed to master Arabic). At age thirteen, however, he told his father he had decided not to obtain a university education and requested permission to join the navy, to which his father replied: "You may go into the army if you'd like; it's the life of a dog, but the navy is a life of a damned dog, and you shan't try it" (Joline 8). Thus, James joined the army and was wounded in battle.

After his release from the army, James had a series of encounters with prominent writers which helped launch his literary career. He had met Lord Byron as a boy, but it was his encounter with Washington Irving during his travels through Europe that encouraged James to write his first novel, Richelieu, in 1825. Published in 1829, Richelieu was publicly acclaimed, particularly by Sir Walter Scott, who after having read it "advised him to adopt literature as a profession" (Joline 12). Only three years after finishing his first novel, he married Frances Thomas, a daughter of a physician, with whom he had two children.

By 1830, James's career had begun in earnest, averaging two to three novels per year, including works such as The String of Pearls (1832), The Gentleman of the Old School (1839), and Castleneau; or The Ancient Regime (1841). James's career continued to expand and blossom when, during the final years of William IV's reign, he was appointed Historiographer Royal. This post not only increased James's professional career, leading him to write historical texts as well as novels, but it also widened his social sphere, giving him connections with members of the aristocracy such as the Duke of Wellington.

Throughout the 1840s, he continued his prolific career, publishing dozens of novels, and no fewer than nine separate titles in 1847 alone. In 1850, James moved to the United States, settling at first in New York, then in Massachusetts, where he became active in the literary community, meeting Nathanial Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Soon after, in 1852, he was appointed the post as the British Consul, in Norfolk, Virginia. Gradually, his health deteriorated, and as a result, he requested to obtain the General Consul at Venice, in the hopes that the Mediterranean climate would improve his health. The request granted, James moved to Venice in 1858 where he published The Cavalier, his 91st and last publication. On June 9, 1860, James died of an apoplectic stroke in Venice, though the exact location of his interment is still disputed.

The epitaph, written by Walter Savage Landor, reads as follows:

George Payne Rainsford James. British Consul General
in the Adriatic. Died in Venice, on the 9th of June, 1860.
His merits as a writer are known wherever the English
language is, and as a man they rest on the hearts of many. (17)

-- Prepared by Whitney Helms, Dave Madden, Joe Rein, University of Nebraska, Spring 2006
© Whitney Helms, Dave Madden, Joe Rein, 2006.

 

Biographical information specific to The Gentleman of the Old School

G. P. R. James, according to one biographer, "was a congenital wanderer" (Ellis 76). His history of residence while living in England in the 1830s and 1840s is scattered among handfuls of houses around the countryside. And always the countryside. "James found his chief pleasure in a rural life," Ellis writes (82), and from 1837 to 1839, his rural life was lived out at Fair Oak Lodge near the town of Petersfield in Hampshire, a manor home he rented from Sir Charles Paget. It was here that James composed The Gentleman of the Old School, which is telling in the ways that this landscape and environment fills the novel. Indeed, with London present only in passing mention in the novel, the story feels removed from the global culture, isolated.

Which isn't to say James himself was isolated. He was, prior his stay at Fair Oak Lodge, appointed Historiographer Royal by William IV. Shortly before penning The Gentleman of the Old School, this office was up in the air, so to speak, as William IV was succeded by Queen Victoria. In November of 1837, James sent an impassioned letter to the prime minister asking to retain his office under the new monarch. The letter must have been effective, for he remained Historiographer Royal and released, in 1838, his Life and Times of Louis the Fourteenth. That he spent much of the year previous to The Gentleman of the Old School's release working on a history text, telling stories of monarchy and revolution, is fascinating for the lack of these in the novel at hand, suggesting that perhaps with this novel, James was returning to a simpler tale of his idyllic surrounds, and the romance plots upon which he built his career.

James's influence as a writer may seem minimal to contemporary literary scholars, but in the 19th century, among both casual readers and leading writers, he was quite reknown. In an 1888 letter, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to a friend requesting that he send a few James titles from his own library with which he could "make or renew acquaintance" (Ellis 268). Later in the same letter, Stevenson described one of James's novels aptly: "a good, honest dull, interesting tale, with a genuine old-fashioned talent in the invention ... and a good old-fashioned feeling for the English language" (268-9). James may not be elevated to the heights of the literary canon in the future — his works are too varied, and too numerous, to be easily assessed as an oeuvre; but his output and his influence in his own time suggest that any history of English literature would be incomplete without him.

SOURCES

Ellis, S.M. The Solitary Horseman; or The Life & Adventures of G.P.R. James. Kensington: Cayme Press, 1927.
Joline, Adrian Hoffman. George Payne Rainsford James: A Writer of Many Books. Privately published, 1906.

-- Prepared by Dave Madden, University of Nebraska, April 2006
© Dave Madden, 2006.