Sir Dominick Ferrand

Sir Dominick Ferrand is a short story by Henry James, first published in The Cosmopolitan magazine in 1892 and collected in The Real Thing and Other Tales the same year. It is one of James’s smaller mid career stories and it sits in an interesting place between his ghost stories and his stories about literary life.

Peter Baron is a struggling young writer in London. He buys a second hand desk from a dealer and discovers a hidden compartment containing private letters of the late Sir Dominick Ferrand, a deceased statesman whose public reputation is unbroken. The letters show a hidden life. Baron, who needs money badly, faces the question of whether to sell the letters to a magazine that would happily print them. The story turns on his struggle with that decision, and on his developing friendship with a young widow in his boarding house who has her own connection to the matter.

James is interested in the question of literary privacy and what private papers are owed by the living to the dead. He came back to this question several times. The Aspern Papers, written a few years earlier, is the most famous version of the same problem. Sir Dominick Ferrand handles the material with a lighter touch and a happier resolution. Baron is given a way to behave well that does not cost him everything, although it does cost him something.

The story is about thirty pages long and works as a single sitting read. The atmosphere of the London boarding house is precise and the friendship between Baron and the widow has the small warmth that James was usually too careful to let into his fiction. Readers who liked The Aspern Papers should follow it with this one, where the moral question is the same but the resolution is more humane.