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4. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
ROMANTIC POET, JOURNALIST, AND LONG-TIME EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK EVENING POST
From Letters from Venice
In 1861, Abraham Lincoln named William Dean Howells American Consul in Venice, a serendipitous choice for at least two reasons. Firstly, it was in Venice that Howells discovered his talent for writing novels; eventually, he turned out to be one of the best American novelists of the nineteenth century. Secondly, his Venetian Life, written between 1863 and 1865, is still one of the finest of the hundreds of books about Venice, recognized not only by his American critics but by many of the most erudite and sensitive English Venetophiles. At first Howells thought of writing letters from Italy for The Atlantic, but its editors rejected them. After that his ‘Letters from Venice’ appeared seriatim in the Boston Daily Advertiser. They were the work not of a journalist but of a novelist.
William Dean Howells with Mark Twain
As he himself wrote later, ‘I was studying manners, in the elder sense of the word, wherever I could get them in the frank life of the people around me. I took lodgings, and I began dining drearily in restaurants’. Howells also wrote, ‘I felt curiously happy in Venice from the first.’ It seems that Venetians had despised his predecessor, J. J. Sprenger, ‘whose unhappy knowledge of German threw him on his arrival among people of that race,’ even though he was a ‘vivid’ Pennsylvania Republican. They loved Howells though.
Howells was wonderfully observant. His official duties were few ‘during a year of almost uninterrupted tranquillity.’ Near the end of his first year in Venice he married Elinor Mead; their first child was born in Venice and given the un-Venetian name of Winifred; they had their Saturday evenings, their conversazioni. They moved to the Casa Falier, with its entrance on a dark calle but with its windows on the Grand Canal. On the wall, a small plaque, affixed in 1961. marks the Venetophile Howells’s residence. Like all other consuls, he rented not a house but an apartment. ‘Our dear little balcony at Casa Falier! Over our heads dwelt