I know, I know - Henry James was naturalized as a British citizen only in 1916.. When he wrote "The Turn of the Screw" (1898), he was technically still an American, albeit one who had spent the better part of his adult life as an expatriate in England. During the decades following the Civil War, the United States of America had lost their distinct ethnic makeup. Even though the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elites were able to retain their positions of wealth and power for another two generations, the massive influx of mostly Catholic immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe rendered the America the Founders had known - "a Britain over the Sea" in all but name - irretrievably a thing of the past. Whilst Protestant North German, Dutch and Scandinavian immigrants had effortlessly merged into the Anglo-Saxon mainstream of American life, Catholic immigrants from South Germany, Poland, Ireland and Italy never entirely shed their cultural peculiarities.
When Henry James returned to New York City after years of travelling and living in England in order to sell off the real estate he had inherited, the writer suffered no less than a culture shock: Nobody seemed to be able to speak proper English any more ! At that moment, James may have felt himself overcome by doubts as to whether the independence from the British crown had been such a good idea after all..
Forty years later, another Anglo-American intellectual of patrician lineage followed James` eyample: Having been one of the world`s most radical exponents of avant garde poetry in the interwar period, Thomas Sterne Eliot shed his American citizenship and became an English country squire and High Church Tory.