Henry James without travel is inconceivable. Movement between countries and the destabilized viewpoint produced by the habit of comparing them are at the heart of his distinctive novelistic vision. James’s peripatetic childhood included periods of residence and schooling in Switzerland, France, England and Germany. Italy, discovered in his twenties, became a lifelong passion, which he sustained with regular visits after he settled in England in 1876. He recorded his impressions of North American and European places in over fifty travel essays, many of which were collected in the volumes Transatlantic Sketches (1875), Portraits of Places (1883), English Hours (1905) and Italian Hours (1909). He also wrote two travel books, A Little Tour in France (1884) and The American Scene (1907), and a meditation on the American encounter with Europe, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903). Travel writing helped to launch James’s career as a professional author, and remained an important forum for experimentation with scenes and ideas that he would develop further in his fiction. Through travel James the novelist found two of his great subjects: the ‘international theme’ of cross-cultural (often transatlantic) encounter, and the ‘complex fate’ of the cosmopolitan American (CL 1855–1872–2, 438).