Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [6]
Delays in typesetting, the pressures of correcting proofs, the vagaries of transatlantic mail, and the task of trying to coordinate the dates of publication in New York and London, as well as continuing problems with The Ambassadors, brought further delays. The Wings of the Dove finally appeared on August 20, 1902 (ahead, as it turned out, of The Ambassadors, which was serialized in the North American Review from January to December 1903). The print run for Wings was 3,000 copies in America and 4,000 in England. Initial sales of Wings were disappointing. In addition, there were numerous typos, misspellings, misprints, and other errors in both editions. Worse yet, differences appeared between the British and American editions, evidence that James corrected the respective proofs at different times and did not correlate the versions sent to the different publishers.
The errors were largely corrected in the New York Edition, the series in which James painstakingly revised and reissued an authoritative text for a large part of his entire literary output. James finished his revisions of Wings in 1909; it was the eleventh novel issued in the New York Edition. It is a tribute to his artistic conscience that he persevered, for by the time he set to work on Wings it was clear that sales of the whole New York series were well below what he had hoped for. He could expect no profits on Wings, and the publisher reduced the print run to only 1,000 copies. Unknown to James, his friend Edith Wharton colluded with his publisher to subsidize in part the New York Edition and make it possible for the series to appear.
James made no substantive textual changes in the New York Edition of Wings comparable, for example, to what he did with The Portrait of a Lady, in which he made significant alterations, including most notably changes in the novel’s ending, or with some of the other works that he drastically revised. In Wings, in addition to correcting mistakes, he sharpened the language of the text, by substituting more active and concrete images, and made his symbols more truly poetic.
This Barnes & Noble Classics edition is based on the 1909 New York Edition and incorporates a small number of additional editorial changes made by subsequent scholars. The aim is to present a text that is authoritative without burdening the general reader with an elaborate scholarly apparatus. Brief explanatory notes appear at the bottom of the page where necessary for clarity, and endnotes and a list of suggested references for further study are also included. But, as with all great works of literature, the reader will gain his or her greatest satisfaction by engaging the text directly, without being constrained by a critic’s interpretative framework.
As with much else in the Jamesian oeuvre, however, we can gain important clues to The Wings of the Dove by noting James’s own views on what he was trying to accomplish. James was an astute critic of his own work, and in his preface to the New York Edition (included in this edition), he gives us an illuminating statement of his aims. “The idea [of Wings],” he says, “reduced to its essence, is that of a young person conscious of a great capacity for life but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamored of the world ... and passionately desiring to ‘put in’ before extinction as many of the finer vibrations as possible, and so achieve however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived” (p. 3). The story, however, was not to be “the record predominantly