1845–47

Family returns to New York. Garth Wilkinson James (Wilky) born July 21, 1845. Family moves to Albany at 50 N. Pearl St., a few doors from grandmother Catharine Barber James. Robertson James (Bob or Rob) born August 29, 1846.

1847–55

Family moves to a large house at 58 W. 14th St., New York. Alice James born August 7, 1848. Relatives and father’s friends and acquaintances—Horace Greeley, George Ripley, Charles Anderson Dana, William Cullen Bryant, Bronson Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (“I knew he was great, greater than any of our friends”)—are frequent visitors. Thackeray calls during his lecture tour on the English humorists. Summers at New Brighton on Staten Island and Fort Hamilton on Long Island’s south shore. On steamboat to Fort Hamilton in August 1850, hears Washington Irving tell his father of Margaret Fuller’s drowning in shipwreck off Fire Island. Frequently visits Barnum’s American Museum on free days. Taken to art shows and theaters; writes and draws stage scenes. Described by father as “a devourer of libraries.” Taught in assorted private schools and by tutors in lower Broadway and Greenwich Village. Father claims in 1848 that American schooling fails to provide “sensuous education” for his children and plans to take them to Europe.

1855–58

Family (with Aunt Kate) sails for Liverpool, June 27. James is intermittently sick with malarial fever as they travel to Paris, Lyon, and Geneva. After Swiss summer, leaves for London where Robert Thomson (later Robert Louis Stevenson’s tutor) is engaged. Early summer 1856, family moves to Paris. Another tutor engaged and children attend experimental Fourierist school. Acquires fluency in French. Family goes to Boulogne-sur-Mer in summer, where James contracts typhoid. Spends late October in Paris, but American economic crash of 1857 returns family to Boulogne where they can live more cheaply. Attends public school (fellow classmate is Coquelin, the future French actor).

1858–59

Family returns to America and settles in Newport, Rhode Island. Goes boating, fishing, and riding. Attends the Reverend W. C. Leverett’s Berkeley Institute, and forms friendship with classmate Thomas Sergeant Perry. Takes long walks and sketches with the painter John La Farge.

1859–60

Father, still dissatisfied with American education, returns family to Geneva in October. James attends a pre-engineering school, Institution Rochette, because parents, with “a flattering misconception of my aptitudes,” feel he might benefit from less reading and more mathematics. After a few months withdraws from all classes except French, German, and Latin, and joins William as a special student at the Academy (later the University of Geneva) where he attends lectures on literary subjects. Studies German in Bonn during summer 1860.

1860–62

Family returns to Newport in September where William studies with William Morris Hunt, and James sits in on his classes. La Farge introduces him to works of Balzac, Merimée, Musset, and Browning. Wilky and Bob attend Frank Sanborn’s experimental school in Concord with children of Hawthorne and Emerson and John Brown’s daughter. Early in 1861, orphaned Temple cousins come to live in Newport. Develops close friendship with cousin Mary (Minnie) Temple. Goes on a week’s walking tour in July in New Hampshire with Perry. William abandons art in autumn 1861 and enters Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. James suffers back injury in a stable fire while serving as a volunteer fireman. Reads Hawthorne (“an American could be an artist, one of the finest”).