Henry James’s Tones of Time

Abstract This essay explores the importance of the phrase ‘the tone of time’ and its variants in Henry James’s writing. James often thought of historical ‘moments’ in terms of tonality rather than teleology, a tendency partly developed from his early engagement with the practices of historiography as well as a response to the limitations of historical fiction. Yet whilst this appeal to the historical dimensions of tone offers a way of consolidating the contested claims of fiction, James increasingly explores tone’s capacity for prodigious and even perfidious modes of historical representation. This is more than simply a deceptive trick however, but in ‘The Tone of Time’ (1900) implies more felicitous sleights of hand, exposing real as well as fabricated histories. Comparing this story to James’s unfinished and posthumously published novel, The Sense of the Past (1917), the essay argues for a more affirmative sense of the tone of time. In both the ‘Notes’ for the novel and the novel itself, tone emerges as an improvisatory social aid and compositional principle, offering a ‘solution’ to the constraints of history and fiction alike.