"Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he," the narrator says of the birth of Henry Brooks Adams in Boston, Massachusetts, on February 16, 1838. Through a series of impressions, he introduces the reader to Henry's boyhood world. Winters in Boston are filled with restraint, rules, confinement, school, and a sense of order that is thrillingly interrupted by wild snowball fights. Summers at his paternal grandparents' home in nearby Quincy bring freedom, delight, hope, and a close relationship with Grandfather John Quincy Adams, formerly the sixth President of the United States. Henry is a child of privilege; that, as much as anything, shapes the outer direction of his life. But his world is rapidly changing, a theme that will affect Henry's education throughout the book. Social change comes first. A trip to Maryland, Virginia and Washington D. C., with his father in 1850, introduces Henry to life in the near South, its appealing informality contrasting with the horrors of slavery, which the Adams family is devoted to eradicating even though it will mean Civil War.
The style of the book affects the reader's understanding. The narrator is Henry in his late sixties; he speaks in the third person, treating the younger Henry objectively except for occasional insights into the boy's attitudes. The reader rarely sees Henry's emotions. Adams speaks of the key figure as a manikin and his education as the various costumes draped across it. The reader soon learns that Adams is using the term "education" in an unusual, broad sense. He has little use for formal schooling, including Harvard College where Henry, as told in the book, is an average student but a good writer and speaker, graduating in 1858 as the Class Orator.
During a two-year "Grand Tour" of Europe, Henry makes a lame effort at studying law but finds that his German is inadequate and ends up devoting a term to learning the language in a Berlin prep school. He returns to work as a private secretary to his father, a Congressman, in Washington during the winter of 1860–1861. Having published some travel letters in the Boston Daily Courier while in Europe, Henry becomes the part-time Washington correspondent for the Boston Daily Advertiser during the winter of political turmoil leading up to the secession of many of the slave states.
