In their introduction to A bibliography of Henry James Leon Edel and Dan H. Laurence rightly single out the year 1878 as an example of James's astonishing literary productivity. In that year were published French Poets and Novelists, the revised Watch and Ward, Theodolinde (later to be called Rose-Agathe), Daisy Miller, The Europeans, “Longstaff's Marriage” and an International Episode, together with thirty-one articles, reviews and notes, the majority of which were published in the Nation, although James did not become their regular London correspondent until September, 1878. Throughout the seventies James, consciously or unconsciously, had been increasingly preoccupied in his fiction with the “international subject”, and his letter to America also testified to his growing enchantment with Europe. The decision that he made for Europe in 1881 had in one sense been made several years earlier; in his novels, short stories and articles James may be seen constantly weighing two civilizations in the scales of his own artistic purposes, setting off the achievement of Europe against the promise of America. In writing his biography of Hawthorne in 1879 James must have realised that his own problems were in many ways similar to those which had confronted Hawthorne in America.

American colonists who clung to the British standard when the final break with the mother country came have long been christened Loyalists, and have been extensively studied. Protagonists of the colonies in the mother country, however, have been comparatively neglected, and there were a considerable number of these individuals. Although mainly of secondary importance, there were a number of merchants and others whose sympathies, for various reasons, lay with the American colonies, and who worked on behalf of the colonial interest in this country often as close associates with the Rockingham Whigs.

The difference in critical response to Lolita in England and America is interesting and troubling. It cannot be dismissed without comment or merely accepted as a twentieth century phenomenon of intellectual life. It can, I believe, be explained in only one way. In the literature of the United States there is by now a well-established literary tradition which centres around the alien figure in society, the outcast, the lowly and the rejected.