Henry James is most often thought—quite rightly—as a novelist of manners, typically taking for his subject the clash of sensibilities between his American subjects and their European counterparts. His world—the one in which he moved personally, felt most at home, and which occupied the largest space in his work—was evidently that of the well-born and well-traveled, the cultivated, and (to use a current pejorative) the privileged. It is impossible to imagine a fictional milieu farther removed from today’s American literary concerns. Jamesland is a place where aristocrats and heiresses, expatriate artists and poets, titled continentals and landed gentry meet and mingle in English country houses or Venetian palaces or Swiss mountain resorts.

Yet James was not so limited by the rarefied atmosphere in which he lived to ignore that, just beneath the glittering surface of late-Victorian London, flushed with the prosperity of empire, there swirled some distinctly unlovely currents. In his masterly biography of James, Leon Edel makes clear that the novelist was fully aware of the social pathologies of poverty in the great metropolis—the malnutrition, the substandard housing, the excessive alcoholism, in short, the brutal living conditions of the working poor. Nor was he blind to the gathering force of political radicalism with its potential for acts of revolutionary violence. The proof lies in one of his lesser known masterpieces, The Princess Casamassima, published in 1886. What makes this book particularly remarkable is the way it manages to combine a compassionate portrayal of those at the