Poor Richard

Poor Richard is an early story by Henry James, first published in the Atlantic Monthly across three numbers in 1867. James was twenty-four when he wrote it. It is one of his Civil War stories, although the war is in the background rather than the foreground, and it has the slightly stiff manner of his very early fiction.

The story is set on a New England farm during the war. Richard Maule is a young man whose poor health and his mother’s nervous insistence keep him at home while other men are fighting in the South. He is in love with Gertrude Whittaker, a young woman of property in the neighborhood. Two other men are also interested in Gertrude. Captain Severn is on leave from the army, an admirable man Richard cannot really compete with. Major Luttrel is also in uniform but is more frankly after Gertrude’s money. The triangle becomes a quadrangle and then the war intervenes in a way the story uses to test each character.

Richard is the most interesting figure because he is both sympathetic and weak. James does not let him off the hook for his small jealousies and his moments of bad behaviour, but he does grant him a slow education in honesty. By the end of the story Richard has lost most of what he wanted and gained some self knowledge in exchange.

The story is one of the better early pieces and shows James already working with the kind of close moral observation that would define the mature novels. It is not as polished as the international stories he would soon be writing, but it is a sincere attempt at a serious American subject. Readers curious about his early work might pair this with A Landscape Painter, his other 1860s Atlantic story, and with The Story of a Year, his first published Civil War tale.