Marietta Holley: Life with "Josiah Allen's Wife" (review)
essay, the plot and characters of Washington Square are located in the context of the controversy over paper money and specie that raged during the Jackson administration (the period of the novel). In an essay on the Prefaces to the New York edition, Stuart Culver bewilderingly extends upon James's metaphors of bridge building to assert the relevance of his research into British and American civil engineering societies in the nineteenth century. But to Culver the James of the Prefaces is not solely a civil engineer; he is also a capitalist: "the work of composition is essentially a matter of financial management, amateurish speculation."