Taking the rough with the smooth

In The Ambassadors, Henry James sends Lewis Lambert Strether from Boston to Paris to retrieve Chad Newsome, the wayward heir to a factory at Woollett, Massachusetts. Strether never names the ‘small, trivial rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use’ that has enriched the Newsomes, though he does say that it is not clothes pins, baking soda or shoe polish. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster identifies this ambiguity with James’s ‘uninvolved’ style, then suggests a button hook. Possible resolutions of the ‘Woollett Question’ also include safety matches, alarm clocks, toothpicks and, in a David Lodge campus satire, a chamber pot. I suggest another item from the booming industrial towns of Massachusetts, and a possible inspiration for the ‘obstinate’ runaway, Chad Newsome.

Henry David Thoreau was heir to the Thoreau Pencil Company of Concord, Massachusetts. There was money in wood — the forests of New England supplied material for construction, fuel, and railway sleepers — and that was the problem.