Watch and Ward

Watch and Ward is a short novel by Henry James, first serialised in the Atlantic Monthly across the second half of 1871 and revised and republished in book form in 1878. James himself was uncomfortable with the book in later life and tried to suppress it. He left it out of his collected New York Edition and rarely allowed it to be discussed. The book has therefore had a strange afterlife as the novel its own author wanted to forget.

The story follows Roger Lawrence, a young Boston bachelor, who adopts an eleven year old orphan girl named Nora. Roger raises Nora as his ward with the half formed intention of eventually marrying her himself when she is old enough. The novel follows Nora’s growth into adolescence and young womanhood, with various other suitors appearing for her, and works through the complications of a romantic plot built on this foundation.

The central premise is what made James uncomfortable in later life. The relationship between guardian and ward sliding toward marriage was a recognisable Victorian situation and had been handled by various writers including Trollope. But James’s handling of it in his very early manner does not quite work, partly because the implications of the situation are not fully faced and partly because Roger Lawrence as a character is not strong enough to carry the moral weight of his own plan. The book reads now as an awkward early effort by a writer who would later be capable of much more difficult moral material handled with much greater control.

The novel runs about two hundred pages and is interesting now mostly to readers tracing James’s development. The young James working out his subject in this strange premise is recognisably the same writer who would later write The Portrait of a Lady, but he had not yet developed the techniques to handle his own material. For readers wanting to see the very beginning of his novelistic career, this is the place to look. It pairs naturally with Roderick Hudson, the next novel and the one James himself preferred to call his first.