A neighborhood walking tour took us, on a hot late August morning, to the three Cambridge homes of William Dean Howells. Now relegated to some obscurity, Howells was a literary lion in the America of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Besides being Atlantic Monthly editor, he wrote several novels, formerly read.

His first local home, two blocks from mine, though only a fifteen minute walk from Harvard Square, stood isolated from other houses. He and his wife apparently relished their isolation. In fact, when others started moving in, the Howells couple moved away to a posher location removed from the new arrivals. These newcomers to whom Howells objected were largely Irish immigrants for whom the writer felt contempt.

Had my maternal grandfather settled in Cambridge rather than Peabody, he would have qualified for the Howelles’ disdain. No matter his fine personal qualities and his respect for learning, Richard Barry was an immigrant from Ireland, enough to make him objectionable.

Last month the Massachusetts legislature cut health care funds for some thirty thousand legal immigrants living in the Commonwealth. Presumably the legislators did so without contempt. They did not follow the federal government’s shameful treatment of many more immigrants imprisoned under inhuman conditions. However, not to have access to treatment for illness will do harm to the Massachusetts imigrants and their families.

Incidentally, William Dean Howells, for his part, did not get off scot free from prejudice himself. The local Yankees looked down on him for being from Ohio.