On this day in 1915 Henry James wrote to the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, to inform him of a "desire to offer myself for naturalisation in this country." James was seventy-two years old, and had been resident in England for forty years; becoming a citizen in the early days of WWI was his way of signaling "my explicit, my material and my spiritual allegiance, and throwing into the scale of her fortune my all but imponderable moral weight -- 'a poor thing but mine own.''" ... FULL STORY »
