http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1683959

The transatlantic Smiths

"This is a case history of a family of American Quakers who migrated to Europe ... it is impossible to exclude from this portrait in prose the friends and associates of this unpredictable family--such cele- brities as Walt Whitman, Henry and William James; the Fabians when they were young: Bernard Shaw, Graham Wallas, Beatrice and Sidney Webb; the detached observer George Santayana, a sort of Greek chorus of the whole expatriate tragicomedy; Geoffrey Scott and John Maynard Keynes. This history of the Smiths begins roughly with the marriage of Hannah Whitall to Robert Pearsall Smith on June 25, 1851, and ends almost precisely a century later with the death of their youngest daughter, Alys, the last survivor of the transatlantic pilgrimage." (P. xi). The tragicomedy began when Robert Pearsall Smith and his wife were converted in 1867 to Methodism by an evangelical minister, and subsequently moved to London where Robert became "... a new spokesman of the antinomian heresy ..." The parents and their three children "... vividly ... demonstrate the part played by unconscious motivation." (P. 220-221).

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