![]() ![]() In fact, the narrator will simply skip twenty years (1872-1892) during which Adams was married and his wife committed suicide. The reader will find wit but little passion and less private information in the book. The various garments draped across the manikin represent his education. In his "Preface," he introduces the metaphor of a manikin, which represents Henry Adams. The narrator, in his late sixties, refers to his younger self in the third person. The Education of Henry Adams is not an autobiography as much as it is the biography of an education. Three events strike the narrator as especially significant: a bout of scarlet fever beginning Deceman incident of discipline from the "President" (his name for his paternal grandfather, John Quincy) when the boy was six or seven and John Quincy's paralyzing stroke on February 21, 1848, which brought the grandfather's death later that year. ![]() Presenting his early childhood in a series of impressions, he contrasts Boston, where he spent winters, and Quincy, the nearby (seven miles south) summer home and residence of his paternal grandparents. Adams briefly refers to his heritage as the great-grandchild of one United States President, John Adams (1735-1826) and the grandson of another, John Quincy Adams (1767-1848). The book opens with the birth of Henry Adams, "nder the shadow of the Boston State House," in the third residence below Mount Vernon Place on February 16, 1838. ![]()
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