Born, in London, 9 Aug. 1801. Educated at school at Putney. Travelled on Continent in youth. Contributed to periodicals, and eventually adopted literary career. Historiographer Royal, 1839. British Consul at Massachusetts, 1850[?]–52; at Norfolk, Virginia, 1852–56; at Venice, 1856–60. Died, at Venice, 9 May 1860. Buried in the Lido Cemetery. Works: “Life of Edward the Black Prince,” 1822; “The Ruined City,” 1828; “Adra,” 1829; “Richelieu” (anon.), 1829; “Darnley” (anon.), 1830; “De L’Orme” (anon.), 1830; “Philip Augustus” (anon.), 1831; “Henry Masterton” (anon.), 1832; “History of Charlemagne,” 1832; “Memoirs of Great Commanders,” 1832; “The String of Pearls” (anon.), 1832; “Mary of Burgundy” (anon.), 1833; “Delaware” (anon.), 1833; “Life … of John Marston Hall,” 1834; “One in a Thousand,” 1835; “On the Educational Institutions of Germany,” 1835; “My Aunt Pontypool” (anon.), 1835; “Gipsey,” 1835; “The Desultory Man,” 1836; “Attila,” 1837; “Life … of Louis XIV,” 1838; “The Huguenot,” 1838; “The Robber” (anon.), 1838; “Brief Hist. of the U. S. Boundary Question,” 1839; “Henry of Guise,” 1839; “Charles Tyrrell,” 1839; “Blanche of Navarre,” 1839; “The Gentleman of the Old School,” 1839; “A Book of the Passions,” 1839; “The King’s Highway,” 1840; “Man-at-Arms,” 1840; “The Jacquerie,” 1841; “The Ancient Regime,” 1841; “Corse de Leon,” 1841; “Some Remarks on the Corn Laws,” 1841; “Morley Ernstein,” 1842; “The Woodman,” 1842; “Hist. of … Richard Cœur-de-Lion” (4 vols.), 1842–49; “Hist. of Chivalry,” 1843; “The Commissioner” (anon.), 1843; “Forest Days,” 1843; “The False Heir,” 1843; “Eva St. Clair,” 1843; “Arabella Stuart,” 1844; “Rose D’Albret,” 1844; “Agincourt,” 1844; “Works” (collected; 21 vols.), 1844–49; “The Smuggler,” 1845; “Arrah Neil,” 1845; “The Stepmother,” 1845; “Heidelberg,” 1846; “Russell,” 1847; “Life of Henry IV of France,” 1847; “A Whim” (anon.), 1847; “The Convict,” 1847; “The Castle of Ehrenstein,” 1847; “The Last of the Fairies” [1848]; “Beauchamp,” 1848; “Margaret Graham,” 1848; “Cameralzaman,” 1848; “Sir Theodore Broughton,” 1848; “Delaware,” 1848; “The Forgery,” 1849; “The Fight of the Fiddlers,” 1849; “An investigation of the Murder of John, Earl of Gowrie, and Alexander Ruthven, etc.,” 1849; “John Jones’s Tales for Little John Jones’s,” 1849; “Dark Scenes of History,” 1849; “The Old Oak Chest,” 1850; “Gowrie,” 1851; “The Fate,” 1851; “Henry Smeaton,” 1851; “Pequinillo,” 1852; “A Story Without a Name,” 1852; “Revenge,” 1852; “Adrian” (with M. B. Field), 1852; “Agnes Sorrel,” 1853; “The Vicissitudes of a Life,” 1853; “Arabella Stuart,” 1853; “An Oration on the … Duke of Wellington,” 1853; “Ticonderoga,” 1854; “Prince Life,” 1856; “The Old Dominion,” 1856; “Leonora d’Orco,” 1857; “Lord Montagu’s Page,” 1858. Posthumous: “Bernard Marsh,” 1864. He edited: “Memoirs of Celebrated Women,” 1837; the “Vernon Letters,” 1841; Ireland’s “David Rizzio,” 1849

Personal

  We have not the means of verifying the number of Mr. James’s publications, nor the period within which they were produced. But, we believe, we are sufficiently accurate for general purposes in saying that he commenced his career about fifteen years ago, and that from that time to the present, he has published nearly two novels of histories, annually…. If all these works were gathered together, and a scrivener employed to copy them, it would probably occupy him a longer period of fair average daily labour in the simple task of transcription than the author expended upon their composition…. How Mr. James, although he might compose faster than another person could copy, contrived both to compose and write so much within so short a period? But the problem is set at rest by the fact that Mr. James did not write any of his works. Like Cobbett, he employs an amanuensis, and all his long and brilliant array of historical narratives with which the public have been so pleasantly entertained for such a series of years have been dictated by the author, while he was walking up and down his study, one after another, or, sometimes, possibly, two or three at a time!

  If he was sometimes a tedious writer, he was always the best story-teller that I ever listened to. He had known almost everybody in his own country, and he never forgot anything. The literary anecdotes alone which I have heard him relate would suffice to fill an ordinary volume. He was a big-hearted man, too—tender, merciful, and full of religious sentiment; a good husband, a devoted father, and a fast friend. If I dwell longer upon him than some others who occupy a higher niche in the temple of fame, it is because I knew him so well, and there always existed so affectionate a regard between us.

  In the same year [1850] G. P. R. James, whose first three initials were interpreted by George William Curtis as “George Prince Regent” (which interpretation was locally adopted), came to Stockbridge, where he lived till the end of 1852. He was a generous and public-spirited townsman, and gave a clock to the tower of the Episcopal Church. The industry for which he was so famous was conspicuous there, and he dictated romances to three or four secretaries simultaneously. Mr. James was a vigorous snuff-taker, and was one of the last in the society of that day to sport the red bandana, which that beguiling habit rendered indispensable.

  I caught sight of this great necromancer of “miniver furs,” and mantua-making chivalry—in youngish days, in the city of New York—where he was making a little over-ocean escape from the multitudinous work that flowed from him at home; a well-preserved man, of scarce fifty years, stout, erect, gray-haired, and with countenance blooming with mild uses of mild English ale—kindly, unctuous—showing no signs of deep thoughtfulness or of harassing toil. I looked him over, in boyish way, for traces of the court splendors I had gazed upon, under his ministrations, but saw none; nor anything of the “manly beauty of features, rendered scarcely less by a deep scar upon the forehead,”—nor “of the gray cloth doublets slashed with purple;” a staunch, honest, amiable, well-dressed Englishman—that was all.

General

  North.—“‘Richelieu’ is one of the most spirited, amusing, and interesting romances I ever read; character well drawn—incidents well managed—story perpetually progressive—catastrophe at once natural and unexpected—moral good, but not goody—and the whole felt, in every chapter, to be the work of a—Gentleman.”

  Mr. James may be regarded as not less fortunate in the choice of his subject than meritorious in its treatment; indeed, his work is not so much the best as the only “History of Charlemagne” which will hereafter be cited. For it reposes upon a far greater body of research and collation than has hitherto been applied even in France to this interesting theme; and in effect it is the first account of the great emperor and his times which can, with a due valuation of the term, be complimented with the title of a critical memoir.

  He belongs to the historical school of fiction, and, like the masters of the art, takes up a real person or a real event, and pursuing the source of history, makes out the intentions of nature by adding circumstances and heightening character, till, like a statue in the hands of the sculptor, the whole is in fair proportion, truth of sentiment and character. For this he has high qualities; an excellent taste, extensive knowledge of history, a right feeling of the chivalrous, and an heroic and a ready eye for the picturesque; his properties are admirable; his sympathy with whatever is high-souled and noble is deep and impressive. His best works are “Richelieu” and “Mary of Burgundy.”

  To genius of any kind, it seems to us that he has little pretension. In the solemn tranquility of his pages we seldom stumble across a novel emotion, and if any matter of deep interest arises in the path, we are pretty sure to find it an interest appertaining to some historical fact equally vivid or more so in the original chronicles.

  Incomparably good and great in all his works, words, and thoughts.

  For the last ten years, he has been repeating his own repetitions, and echoing his own echoes. His first novel was a shot that went through the target, and he has ever since been assiduously firing through the hole. To protect his person from critical assault, he might pile up a bulwark of books many volumes thick and many feet high. Yet the essence of all that he has written, if subjected to a refining process, might be compressed into a small space, and even then would hardly bear the test of time, and journey safely down to posterity…. As space has no limits, and as large portions of it are still unoccupied by tangible bodies, it seems not very philosophical to quarrel with any person who endeavors to fill up its wide chasms; yet, in the case of Mr. James, we grudge the portion of infinite space which his writings occupy. We dispute his right to pile up matter, which is the type or symbol of so small an amount of spirit. We sigh for the old vacuum, and think, that though nature may have abhorred it in the days of Aristotle, her feelings must have changed since modern mediocrity has filled it with such weak apologies for substance and form.

  He is a picturesque writer, and paints his canvas-deep figures in bright costume, and in the midst of excellent landscape. Often when I have been very unwell, I have been able to read his books with advantage, when I could not read better ones. You may read him from end to end without a superfluous beat of the heart,—and they are just the sort of intellectual diet fitted for persons “ordered to be kept quiet” by their physicians. Do not mistake, I am writing quite gravely, and not, I hope, ungratefully. I am grateful to Mr. James for many a still, serene hour. I have every respect for him as a sensible level writer—a very agreeable writer—pure-minded, and with talents in his own province. But to give him place as a romance writer over Bulwer, the prose poet of the day, and over Banim, the prose-dramatist, is, must be, a monstrous exaggeration of his actual claim.

  The number of James’s works is immense, but they bear among themselves a family likeness so strong, and even oppressive, that it is impossible to consider this author otherwise than as an ingenious imitator and copyist—first of Scott, and secondly of himself…. His great deficiency is want of real, direct, powerful human passion, and consequently of life and movement in his intrigues. There is thrown over his fictions a general air of good-natured, frank, and well-bred refinement, which, however laudable, cannot fail to be found rather tiresome and monotonous.

  I read everything that is readable, old and new, particularly fiction, and philosophy, and natural history…. And hail every fresh publication of James, though I know half what he is going to do with his lady, and his gentleman, and his landscape, and his mystery, and his orthodoxy, and his criminal trial. But I am charmed with the new amusement which he brings out of old materials. I look on him as I should look upon a musician, famous for “variations.” I am grateful for his vein of cheerfulness, for his singularly varied and vivid landscapes, for his power of painting woman at once lady-like and loving (a rare talent), for his making lovers to match, at once beautiful and well-bred, and for the solace which all this has afforded me, sometimes over and over again, in illness and in convalescence, when I required interest without violence, and entertainment at once animated and mild.

  There is a constant appeal in his brilliant pages not only to the pure and generous, but to the elevated and noble sentiments; he is imbued with the very soul of chivalry, and all his stories turn on the final triumph of those who are influenced by such feelings over such as are swayed by selfish or base desires. He possesses great pictorial powers and a remarkable facility of turning his graphic pen at will to the delineation of the most distant and opposite scenes, manners, and social customs…. Not a word or a thought which can give pain to the purest heart ever escapes from his pen; and the mind wearied with the cares, and grieved at the selfishness of the world, reverts with pleasure to his varied compositions, which carry it back, as it were, to former days, and portray, perhaps in too brilliant colours, the ideas and manners of the olden time.

  The shelves of the circulating libraries still groan under his endless volumes; and there are readers of peculiar taste who enjoy his monotonous fictions. His great field is modern history; and perhaps his first historical novel, “Richelieu” (1829), is his best. But to read one of James’s novels is to read all. His famous opening scene of two travellers winding on horseback down a mountain road, in the red light of sunset—the one dark and elderly, the other young and fair, &c., has been often turned into fun.

  We have all been accustomed to laugh at the time-honoured scene with which his stories were wont to open—where the last beams of the setting sun gilded the valley along which rode two horsemen, one of whom appeared to be some six or seven summers older than the other; but we have had time since then to become accustomed to even more bombastic and inflated styles, with perhaps even less literary merit to redeem them.

  Flimsy and melodramatic as James’s romances are, they are highly popular. The historical setting is for the most part laboriously accurate, and though the characters are without life, the moral tone is irreproachable; there is a pleasant spice of adventure about the plots, and the style is clear and correct. The writer’s grandiloquence and artificiality are cleverly parodied by Thackeray in “Barbazure, by G. P. R. James, Esq., &c.,” in “Novels by Eminent Hands,” and the conventional sameness of the openings of his novels, “so admirable for terseness,” is effectively burlesqued in “The Book of Snobs,” chaps, ii and xvi.

  James wrote better than Ainsworth: his historical knowledge was of a much wider and more accurate kind, and he was not unimbued with the spirit of romance. But the sameness of his situations (it became a stock joke to speak of the “two horsemen” who so often appeared in his opening scenes), the exceedingly conventional character of his handling, and the theatrical feebleness of his dialogue, were always reprehended and open to reprehension.

  Even more prolific than Ainsworth…. More perhaps than Ainsworth he has suffered from time, because he remains more constantly on a dead level of mediocrity. James trusted, and in his own day trusted not in vain, to adventure; but unless there is some saving virtue of style, or of thought, or of character, each generation insists on making its own adventures. James has sunk under the operation of this law, and he is not likely to be revived.

  An excellent, industrious man, who drove his trade of novel-making—as our engineers drive wells—with steam, and pistons, and borings, and everlasting clatter.

  Had also a faint touch of Scott’s romantic spirit; but almost all his novels are of that one inadmissible genre defined by the French critic as le genre ennuyeux. And the intolerable slowness of their movement as individual stories was hardly compensated by the speed with which they followed one another from his too prolific pen.