The Bostonians

A novel of reform-era Boston, mapped to real ground. Olive Chancellor's house stands on the water side of Charles Street, on the flat of Beacon Hill, looking over the new-made Back Bay; the reformer Miss Birdseye holds her meeting out in the South End; Verena crosses to Cambridge and the great Memorial Hall at Harvard; and the climax comes at the Music Hall, the concert hall where she is to give her big address. Summer takes them to "Marmion" on the southern cape, James's name for the real village of Marion, Massachusetts. A run of scenes moves the fight to New York.

Olive Chancellor

Charles Street, Beacon Hill: Olive's house

Ch. III · 3% through the novel

Miss Chancellor having the good fortune to dwell on that side of Charles Street toward which, in the rear, the afternoon sun slants redly, from an horizon indented at empty intervals with wooden spires, the masts of lonely boats, the chimneys of dirty "works," over a brackish expanse of anomalous character, which is too big for a river and too small for a bay.

The novel's fixed interior. Basil Ransom, the poor Mississippi cousin, comes to call and reads Olive's wealth off her Charles Street drawing-room, its books and watercolours and "organised privacy," while the reddened light dies over the Back Bay embankment. An address on the water side of the Hill is a statement of exactly how rich and how cultivated a Bostonian is, and James makes it one.

inferred Olive Chancellor's house is invented, but James sites it exactly: on the water side of Charles Street, the flat street at the foot of Beacon Hill, so that her back windows look west over the newly filled Back Bay. Charles Street and that view are real; the pin marks the water side of Charles Street on the Hill.

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Verena Tarrant

The South End: Miss Birdseye's meeting

Ch. III · 4% through the novel

Miss Birdseye lived at the South End; the distance was considerable, and Miss Chancellor had ordered a hackney-coach, it being one of the advantages of living in Charles Street that stables were near.

The reformers' Boston, a coach-ride down from the Hill. In the old abolitionist Miss Birdseye's parlour Olive and Ransom first hear Verena Tarrant speak, and both are struck: Olive wants to capture the girl for the cause, Ransom to carry her off from it. The whole plot starts in the South End.

inferred Miss Birdseye's rooms are fiction, but the district is named and real: she lives out in the South End, the flat grid of bow-front row houses south of the old city, a considerable hackney-coach ride from Beacon Hill. The pin marks the South End.

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