The Pupil

The Pupil is a short story by Henry James, first published in Longman’s Magazine in March and April 1891 and collected in The Lesson of the Master the following year. It is one of his most quietly devastating stories about family life and about the slow recognition that a child can have of the parents who are using him.

The story follows Pemberton, a young American tutor who has been hired by the Moreen family to teach their bright sensitive son Morgan. The Moreens are an American family wandering around the cheap hotels and pensions of Europe, claiming to be in financial difficulties that are actually permanent and refusing to live within their means. Morgan is precociously aware of what his family is. He sees more clearly than his parents do that they are essentially confidence tricksters living off the goodwill of people who eventually catch on. He develops a deep friendship with Pemberton, who slowly comes to share Morgan’s view of the family and who finds himself trapped in the role of an unpaid and exploited tutor.

The story works through several years of the relationship between tutor and pupil. The Moreens move from city to city as their welcomes wear out. Pemberton stays on long after he has stopped being paid, partly out of attachment to Morgan and partly because the boy has nowhere else to turn. The crisis comes when Pemberton is offered another position and tells the Moreens he must leave. The ending is one of the most quietly painful in James’s middle period work and turns the whole story into a different kind of tragedy than the earlier chapters suggested.

The story is short, about sixty pages, and is one of the best pieces in The Lesson of the Master collection. James himself thought highly of it. For readers who liked What Maisie Knew, the longer novel in which a child observes adult disorder, The Pupil is the closest short story analog. It pairs naturally with The Lesson of the Master and with Brooksmith, two other stories from the same period about quiet observations of difficult lives.