Professor Fargo

Professor Fargo is a short story by Henry James, first published in the Galaxy magazine in August 1874 and never reprinted in the New York Edition. It is one of his odder early pieces, a story about a traveling lecturer who claims supernatural powers and the family he attaches himself to in a small New England town.

The narrator is a young man passing through a country village who falls in with Colonel Gifford, a faded mathematician with a deaf and dumb daughter. The Colonel tours small towns delivering lectures on rational science to nearly empty halls. He shares the bill with a man calling himself Professor Fargo who claims to be a spiritualist medium and who draws much bigger crowds with seances and clairvoyance demonstrations. The contrast between the failing scientist and the prospering humbug is the joke that runs through the story, until it stops being a joke.

Fargo turns his attention to the Colonel’s silent daughter, who is intensely religious and who is the only person in the story who genuinely believes everything Fargo claims to be able to do. The way she falls under his influence is one of the most disturbing things James wrote in the 1870s, and it gives the story a darker register than the comic opening suggests.

The story is uneven and James clearly knew it. He left it out of the collected work and it has rarely been anthologized since. It is interesting now mostly as an example of how he was thinking about mesmerism, fraud, and the line between rational and irrational belief during a period when American spiritualism was at its peak. It pairs naturally with The Bostonians, where similar material is handled more fully, and with the later The Turn of the Screw, where the question of what an adult does or does not see is the whole subject.