The Henry James Review

Abstract:

Henry James shared a Scots-Irish (Ulster Presbyterian) background with S.S. McClure, proprietor of the Associated Literary Press, and greater attention to ethnic solidarity among Scots-Irish Americans would illuminate "The Real Thing," the James story that McClure syndicated in 1892. The differentiating coinage "Scots/Scotch-Irish" gained currency after the 1840s influx of poor, predominantly Catholic Famine refugees, and in the ensuing ethnic hierarchy, the established Irish cohort ranked above the recent. Indeed, the story that McClure syndicated, which features an Italian immigrant, is concerned with this hierarchy, since Italians, like the post-Famine Irish, were only conditionally "white" in the era of publication.