In 1904 Henry James returned to America after an absence of twenty years, and was almost overcome by the magnitude and complexity of the changes which he perceived. The American Scene records his attempts at describing and coming to imaginative grips with a homeland made strangely new and alien. What this volume of travel sketches displays with peculiar vividness, according to Sharon Cameron, is the power of an assertive consciousness to dominate objects, or even to ‘dispense’ with them, so that the focus of the commentary becomes something like Jamesian consciousness itself. While this reading seems to me neatly over-ingenious, it does cast light upon James's intense struggle – both with himself and with various cultural or demographic phenomena - to make sense of the rush of bewildering experiences which assailed him. His treatment of the Jewish ghetto in New York, for instance, presents a curious compound of surprise, aversion and penetrating social analysis. Some of his remarks savour of unrelieved prejudice: