Starting The Princess Casamassima and welcome to the world of - Dickens?

You would think, from the title alone, that "The Princess Casamassima" would be classic Henry James, steeped in old world aristocratic pretensions, a long complex story of the titled and entitled - and yet - in the first 20 pages or so - for a minute you'd think you're reading Dickens. As James establishes the plot, a young boy who's been raised by a dressmaker in some remote and unfashionable London neighborhood, receives a visit from a "lady," who apparently is connected with the prison, and she wants to bring the boy (or have the dressmaker do so?) to meet his mother, who's imprisoned for murder. The boy up till this point in his life (he's 10) has no idea that his mother is behind bars, no idea about his birth parents. James establishes the scene as kind of shabby, with obvious Dickens echos (not only the opening and the general theme of Great Expectations, boy rescued from his social class, and the fantasy of secret nobility?) but also the street-urchin milieu: when dressmaker/stepmom can't find the boy she sends a neighborhood 8-year-old girl to go looking for him, and there's a sense that the children live largely unsupervised on the streets and that the destiny of these two will entwine. All this said: the writing style is astonishingly non-Dickensian, with long meandering sentences with a million clauses and subclauses and changes of direction and establishing a point and then working around it or backing off from it - that is, the style is Jamesian.