I’ll be honest and admit I’ve only gotten through about the first 30 pages of The Education of Henry Adams. However, they provide more than enough interesting topics. I find it extremely odd that Adams keeps mentioning how he was an “eighteenth century child.” It reminds me of those families that have fallen for glory but people still say “Well my great- great- grandfather was the cousin of a son-in-law of a duke.” From what I can gather, Adams’s family was influential in the national politics of the Revolutionary period and shortly thereafter. Maybe this is the reason he is stuck in the eighteenth century.
It is also odd to me that Henry Adams wrote in the third person. He might want the reader to forget that autobiographies are instinctively biased. He may just want to sound more authoritative on life in Boston and Washington, like an outsider’s view rather than the inborn liking of the city of one’s childhood or the instant dislike of somewhere a child is removed to.
I was wondering why we were reading this novel until I got to his antislavery tirade in the section about Washington. I found it interesting that he said slave states were ragged, dirty, and in every way inferior to free states. I would think with a millions strong free labor source that slave states would have been more pristine. This made me wonder if he was speaking literally or metaphorically about the cleanliness of Washington DC.