Henry James loved Venice. He first sought as a young man in his mid-20s.

Henry James had been born in America, but over the course of his life was to transition to living in England and in many ways became almost thoroughly European in his sensibilities.

Much of his writing, which includes such well-known works as the portrait

of a lady, the Americans, and Daisy Miller, deals with the blending of social culture in the

years we call the Gilded Age and late Victorian and Edwardian eras in England.

As James wandered through Europe on his own for the first time that year in the late

1860s, he included Venice at the end of his travels. Armed with travel guides and volumes

instructing visitors on the richness of Venetian art, James perhaps didn't realize the indelible mark

the city was going to leave on him

in the years to come. Henry James, as those familiar with his life and work will know, had a

complex and many-layered emotional and psychological life, and a full look into that would

fill many episodes. Here, however, we will look at a place that over many years came to mean both life and death

to Henry James, and whether exhilarating or tragic, it was a place that elicited in him the most

passionate of emotions. Venice, perhaps even like Henry James himself, held

much below the surface and what the public saw were merely shadows and reflections.

Music Hello, I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast where every two weeks we journey into corners light and dark for a look at America's

Gilded Age, France's Belle-Ipac, and England's late Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Venice has taken many writers and artists by surprise.

Yes, there is a sense of a crumbling yet magnificent past,

and yes, of course, there is that light reflecting off the canals

and the lagoon onto the facades of century-old palaces.

But perhaps most of all, there is the sea.

...