Towards 1850 he decided to leave England and go to America. His original intention was to settle in Canada. He had met with severe pecuniary reverses. The collected edition of his works was illustrated with steel engravings, but after a few volumes had appeared the publisher failed. The engraver sued James as a partner in the enterprise, and poor James had to pay several thousand pounds. In this plight he sought his friend, the Duke of Northumberland, who endeavored to dissuade him from leaving England and offered him a signed check, with the amount left blank, asking him to accept it and fill the blank himself. To his credit, James declined the generous gift.[[33]]
When he reached New York in July, 1850, he took lodgings in the old New York Hotel. He had many letters of introduction, including one to Horace Greeley, who, he said, had “the head of a Socrates and the face of a baby.” Hotel life proving unsatisfactory, he rented Charles Astor Bristed’s house at Hell Gate, opposite Astoria. Of his many troubles in getting into his new home, he wrote an amusing account in verse which Mr. Field prints.[[34]] Field tells a story of a wealthy man of New York who was introduced to James, and remarked that he was a great admirer of the works, that he believed he had read all that were published, and that there was one “which he vastly preferred to all the others.” “And which is that?” asked James. “The Last Days of Pompeii,” was the answer. “That is Bulwer’s, not mine,” replied the mortified novelist. He also tells of a lady who found in a village library what she supposed to be a copy of an English edition of one of James’s novels in two volumes. She read them with much enjoyment, and did not discover until she had finished them, that she had been reading the first volume of one and the second volume of another. With admirable tact and discretion Field told this to James, and says “he winced under it.”
In 1851 he hired a furnished house at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and later he bought property there, making some laudable efforts at farming, Mr. Field says:
“In the meantime he was also industriously pegging away at book-making, although to the casual observer he appeared to be the least occupied man in the place. He never did any literary work after eleven o’clock A. M. until evening. He was not accustomed to put his own hand to paper, when composing, but always employed an amanuensis. At this time he had in his service in that capacity the brother of an Irish baronet, who spoke and wrote English, French, German and Italian, and whom I had procured for him at the modest stipend of five dollars a week. When James was dictating, he always kept a paper of snuff upon the table on which his secretary wrote, and he would stride up and down the room, stopping every few minutes for a fresh supply of the titillating powder. He never looked at the manuscript, or made any corrections except upon proof-sheets.”
During that summer James and Field produced Adrian, finishing it in five weeks. Notwithstanding Field’s assertion that “it was very kindly received by the critics,” it does not appear to have enjoyed any marked success.
In 1852 he was appointed British Consul at Norfolk, Virginia. He was not contented there, as we may see from his letters; but he received many kindnesses, and on the last night he spent in the United States he spoke to Field of the Virginians, as “a warm hearted people.” His health suffered and his spirits also; the yellow fever raged in the city and caused him great trouble and anxiety. While in the United States he wrote Ticonderoga, The Old Dominion, and other novels; his fertile pen was always busy. His latest work was The Cavalier, published in 1859. In 1856 the Consulate was removed to Richmond. At his earnest request he was transferred from Virginia in September, 1858, and was appointed Consul General at Venice, where it was hoped that his health would improve. The war between France and Austria soon broke out, his labors and anxieties were increased and in April, 1860, his illness became serious. On June 9, 1860, he died of an apoplectic stroke, “an utter break up of mind preceding the end” as Lever wrote. He was buried in Venice—some accounts say in the Lido cemetery, but the monument, erected by the English residents in Venice, is in the Protestant portion of the cemetery of St. Michele, which is on an island not far from the Lido. Laurence Hutton, in his Literary Landmarks of Venice, refers to a vague tradition among the older alien residents that he was buried in the Lido, where, Hutton says, there are a few very ancient stones and monuments marking the graves of foreign visitors to Venice, none of them seeming to be of a later date than the middle of the eighteenth century. But Sir Francis Vincent, the last British Ambassador to the Venetian Republic, is buried there. Mr. Hutton adds that the stone in St. Michele is “a tablet blackened by time, broken and hardly decipherable”; but when I saw it in the summer of 1906 it was only slightly discolored, and not broken at all. It showed no evidence of restoration, and was blackened only as much as much as might be expected of a stone forty-five years old in a climate like that of Venice. The epitaph, written by Walter Savage Landor, is absolutely distinct and easily read.
“George Payne Rainford James.
British Consul General in the Adriatic.
Died in Venice, on the 9th day of June, 1860.
His merits as a writer are known wherever the English language is, and as a man they rest on the hearts of many.