"The Education of Henry Adams," Henry Adams

 

Reading an autobiography of a man largely forgotten today and who has been dead for over a hundred years may seem odd, but if you enjoy history, skillfully writing with a goodly share of bon mots you will enjoy this book. The copy I read was a paperback published in 1999, with an introduction by the historian Edmund Morris whose trilogy on Theodore Roosevelt garnered a Pulitzer.  

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams

March 29, 2024

 

“…why should anybody today want to read The Education of Henry Adams? One reason is obvious.

Adams is a bewitching writer. In terms of style, only the young Henry James could match him,

And even James the Master never attained Adams’ unique blend of elegance and erudition.”

                                                                                                                Edmund Morris

Introduction to the 1999 edition

The Education of Henry Adams

Originally published privately 1907

 

Henry Adams was fascinated with the way the Industrial Revolution had altered history. He was born in 1838, twenty years after the Savannah became the first steamship to cross the Atlantic, ten years after the first gas streetlights were installed in Boston, and eight years after the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company operated the first passenger train. In 1839 the first photograph was taken, and Adams was six-years-old when Samuel Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought?” “…he had seen,” he wrote near the end of his autobiography, “the number of minds, engaged in pursuing force – the truest measure of its attraction – increase from a few score or hundreds in 1838, to many thousands in 1905…The railways alone approached the carnage of war; automobiles and fire-arms ravaged society, until an earthquake became almost a nervous relaxation.” What would he think of the internet and Artificial Intelligence?

 

The grandson and great grandson of U.S. presidents, he was born in Boston where he, following generations of Adamses and other ancestors, attended Harvard College, graduating in 1858: “Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously.” Two years later Lincoln was elected President, and the Civil War broke out. “Not one man wanted the Civil War, or expected or intended it. A small minority wanted secession. The vast majority wanted to go on with their occupations in peace.” Adams’ father Charles Francis Adams was appointed minister to the United Kingdom in 1861. Henry accompanied him as his secretary. The father’s main purpose was to ensure that the England (and France) did not recognize the Confederacy, despite their mills relying on southern U.S. cotton: “British society had begun with violent social prejudice against Lincoln, Seward, and all the Republican leaders except Sumner.”  For the next seven years London would be Adams’ home, where “…he was, like all Bostonians, instinctively English.”

 

While politics had been in the family’s blood for generations, Henry Adams distained politics, preferring the role of observer: historian, journalist, and, to a lesser extent, teacher: “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatred.” He saw himself as a seeker of truth. He writes of his ignorance of mathematics, “…but this never stood in his way.” As for economics: “By rights, he should also have been a Marxist, but some narrow trait of the New England nature seemed to blight socialism, and he tried in vain to make himself a convert.”

 

While his story is notable for missing twenty years – 1872-1892, years in which he was married – his is a fascinating history of the second half of the 19^th Century by a brilliant, observant man who was equally at home in London, Rome, and Paris, as he was in Quincy, Boston, and Washington. He knew political leaders in Washington and London, and he had met many of the era’s scientists, authors, and artists, like Darwin, Dickens, John LaFarge, and Whistler. His writing of them and of the unfolding industrial revolution, as the historian Edmund Morris wrote in the epigraph, is lively and witty. You won’t be disappointed.