William Dean Howells - Complete Works of William Dean Howells

The Complete Works of

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

(1837-1920)

Contents

Delphi Classics 2015

Version 1

The Complete Works of

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

By Delphi Classics, 2015

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Martisville, Ohio (now Martins Ferry) Howells birthplace

The waterside, Martins Ferry the site of the house in which Howells was born

William Dean Howells first novel, Their Wedding Journey , was published in 1872. By this point, Howells had already made a name for himself as a poet, but his novels mark a departure from the Germanic romanticism of his poetry to a new realism, in which he drew on first-hand observations of New York and other locations (as recorded in his diary) as material for the descriptions in the novel. The book was well received by contemporary reviewers, with Henry Adams praising its idealization of the commonplace. Adams comment reflects Howells approach to his subject matter, focussing on a faithful record of the early married life of an ordinary newly-wed couple, rather than on tight plotting and sensational events.

An illustration from the 1916 edition of the novel

Howells in 1866

CONTENTS

Another illustration form the 1911 edition

I. THE OUTSET

They first met in Boston, but the match was made in Europe, where they afterwards saw each other; whither, indeed, he followed her; and there the match was also broken off. Why it was broken off, and why it was renewed after a lapse of years, is part of quite a long love-story, which I do not think myself qualified to rehearse, distrusting my fitness for a sustained or involved narration; though I am persuaded that a skillful romancer could turn the courtship of Basil and Isabel March to excellent account. Fortunately for me, however, in attempting to tell the reader of the wedding-journey of a newly married couple, no longer very young, to be sure, but still fresh in the light of their love, I shall have nothing to do but to talk of some ordinary traits of American life as these appeared to them, to speak a little of well-known and easily accessible places, to present now a bit of landscape and now a sketch of character.

They had agreed to make their wedding-journey in the simplest and quietest way, and as it did not take place at once after their marriage, but some weeks later, it had all the desired charm of privacy from the outset.

How much better, said Isabel, to go now, when nobody cares whether you go or stay, than to have started off upon a wretched wedding-breakfast, all tears and trousseau, and had people wanting to see you aboard the cars. Now there will not be a suspicion of honey-moonshine about us; we shall go just like anybody else, with a difference, dear, with a difference! and she took Basils cheeks between her hands. In order to do this, she had to ran round the table; for they were at dinner, and Isabels aunt, with whom they had begun married life, sat substantial between them. It was rather a girlish thing for Isabel, and she added, with a conscious blush, We are past our first youth, you know; and we shall not strike the public as bridal, shall we? My one horror in life is an evident bride.

Basil looked at her fondly, as if he did not think her at all too old to be taken for a bride; and for my part I do not object to a womans being of Isabels age, if she is of a good heart and temper. Life must have been very unkind to her if at that age she have not won more than she has lost. It seemed to Basil that his wife was quite as fair as when they met first, eight years before; but he could not help recurring with an inextinguishable regret to the long interval of their broken engagement, which but for that fatality they might have spent together, he imagined, in just such rapture as this. The regret always haunted him, more or less; it was part of his love; the loss accounted irreparable really enriched the final gain.

I dont know, he said presently, with as much gravity as a man can whose cheeks are clasped between a ladys hands, you dont begin very well for a bride who wishes to keep her secret. If you behave in this way, they will put us into the bridal chambers at all the hotels. And the cars theyre beginning to have them on the palace-cars.

Just then a shadow fell into the room.

Wasnt that thunder, Isabel? asked her aunt, who had been contentedly surveying the tender spectacle before her. O dear! youll never be able to go by the boat to-night, if it storms. Its actually raining now!

In fact, it was the beginning of that terrible storm of June, 1870. All in a moment, out of the hot sunshine of the day it burst upon us before we quite knew that it threatened, even before we had fairly noticed the clouds, and it went on from passion to passion with an inexhaustible violence. In the square upon which our friends looked out of their dining-room windows the trees whitened in the gusts, and darkened in the driving floods of the rainfall, and in some paroxysms of the tempest bent themselves in desperate submission, and then with a great shudder rent away whole branches and flung them far off upon the ground. Hail mingled with the rain, and now the few umbrellas that had braved the storm vanished, and the hurtling ice crackled upon the pavement, where the lightning played like flames burning from the earth, while the thunder roared overhead without ceasing. There was something splendidly theatrical about it all; and when a street-car, laden to the last inch of its capacity, came by, with horses that pranced and leaped under the stinging blows of the hailstones, our friends felt as if it were an effective and very naturalistic bit of pantomime contrived for their admiration. Yet as to themselves they were very sensible of a potent reality in the affair, and at intervals during the storm they debated about going at all that day, and decided to go and not to go, according to the changing complexion of the elements. Basil had said that as this was their first journey together in America, he wished to give it at the beginning as pungent a national character as possible, and that as he could imagine nothing more peculiarly American than a voyage to New York by a Fall River boat, they ought to take that route thither. So much upholstery, so much music, such variety of company, he understood, could not be got in any other way, and it might be that they would even catch a glimpse of the inventor of the combination, who represented the very excess and extremity of a certain kind of Americanism. Isabel had eagerly consented; but these aesthetic motives were paralyzed for her by the thought of passing Point Judith in a storm, and she descended from her high intents first to the Inside Boats, without the magnificence and the orchestra, and then to the idea of going by land in a sleeping-car. Having comfortably accomplished this feat, she treated Basils consent as a matter of course, not because she did not regard him, but because as a woman she could not conceive of the steps to her conclusion as unknown to him, and always treated her own decisions as the product of their common reasoning. But her husband held out for the boat, and insisted that if the storm fell before seven oclock, they could reach it at Newport by the last express; and it was this obstinacy that, in proof of Isabels wisdom, obliged them to wait two hours in the station before going by the land route. The storm abated at five oclock, and though the rain continued, it seemed well by a quarter of seven to set out for the Old Colony Depot, in sight of which a sudden and vivid flash of lightning caused Isabel to seize her husbands arm, and to implore him, O dont go by the boat! On this, Basil had the incredible weakness to yield; and bade the driver take them to the Worcester Depot. It was the first swerving from the ideal in their wedding journey, but it was by no means the last; though it must be confessed that it was early to begin.