Angels of Darkness and the Genesis of A Study in Scarlet
'Angels of Darkness' and the Genesis of A Study in Scarlet is an article written by Owen Dudley Edwards published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 5, 1994).
This detailed scholarly essay argues that the unpublished play Angels of Darkness predates A Study in Scarlet and served as its structural and narrative source, rather than being a later adaptation. Through close textual comparison, manuscript analysis, and historical contextualisation, it reconstructs Arthur Conan Doyle's creative process and revision methods.
'Angels of Darkness' and the Genesis of A Study in Scarlet
THE EXCELLENT ARTICLES by Messrs Cameron Hollyer and Michael W. Homer in ACD vol. 4 (1993) complement one another admirably, and constitute an invaluable guide to the unpublished play 'Angels of Darkness' and its relationship to the first Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet. Our debt to Mr Cameron Hollyer goes much farther: were it not for him and his splendid curatorship of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection of the Metropolitan Toronto Library, scholars would hardly be enjoying access to this unpublishable work today. Anna Conan Doyle, widow of the late Adrian Conan Doyle, showed her admiration for Mr Hollyer's achievement in her bequest of this and the other unsold Conan Doyle MSS in her possession; and the Library whence he has now retired commemorates him by its maintenance and furtherance of his work.
I have examined the MSS of 'Angels of Darkness', thanks to the courtesy and aid of Mr Hollyer's successor, Ms Victoria Gill, and to those of Ms Lorraine Williams, a Trustee of the Library. My conclusion is that what has been generally taken to be a play drawn from A Study in Scarlet in fact began life as one of its sources or early versions. I grant that the 'alternative' ending (which for its brief span as we have it seems simply a revised text) must be dated subsequent to the story, and I concede that some of the final pages of the first draft as we have it may date from after the story's composition. But the first two Acts, and much if not all of the third, seem to me to predate A Study in Scarlet, and to have given rise to it.
The historian's first question, 'Where did this document come from?', may seem to obtain in this instance an obvious and save for the vital question of authenticity-an unhelpful answer: the Arthur Conan Doyle papers in family keeping. But the corollary question, 'when is this document first heard of?', sharpens our interest since the answer is, in Adrian Conan Doyle's The True Conan Doyle (1945) where he claimed to have discovered it when
- In rummaging through one of my father's old chests, I unearthed a bundle of his early medical treatises and, tucked among them, a collection of five manuscripts in his writing. They prove that Dr Watson not only came to life before Holmes, but that the original A Study in Scarlet had no Sherlock Holmes in it! Watson alone held the stage in company with Jefferson Hope, etc. The title of A Study in Scarlet has been roughly scratched out in this original M.S., which takes the form of a lengthy dramatic script, and altered to the Angels of Darkness. While it in no way detracts from Holmes, this discovery does confer a new and pleasing distinction upon Watson.
This Michael Homer very properly quotes, while noting many contrary views (ACD 4: pp.67-68). It may seem to call into question Cameron Hollyer's 'No one has suggested that it was written prior to the publication of the book on which it was based', though Mr Hollyer can justly reply that Adrian Conan Doyle clearly later rejected his initial assumption. Adrian made no known objection to the highly fanciful account of the composition (1889: first two acts, and 1890: third act) and abandonment (1892) of 'Angels' in John Dickson Carr's biography (and any objection from Adrian Conan Doyle to anything was made very audibly indeed); and he subsequently presided over such ascription including that in the exhibit catalogue label pasted on the inside front cover of the first notebook of the MS in his possession (ACD 4: p.49).
Nevertheless, however light may be the weight we assign to it, the fact remains that the first discoverer of 'Angels of Darkness' concluded on his initial examination that it preceded A Study in Scarlet, and published his conclusion to that effect.
We may now turn to the relationship in which 'Angels of Darkness' stands not only to A Study in Scarlet but also to what is authoritatively acknowledged as its immediate precursor, 'Story of the Destroying Angel' by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson in their More New Arabian Nights-The Dynamiter, published by Longmans in May 1885. As Michael Homer's researches show, the Stevensons in their turn were all too faithfully following earlier questionable but sensational revelations of Mormonism: his mention of Bill Hickman's Brigham's Destroying Angel (1872) shows where they found their chapter-title (ACD 4: pp. 63, 73). But whatever the derivations of A Study in Scarlet from 'Story of the Destroying Angel', those of 'Angels of Darkness' are much stronger: hence it seems likely they were made nearer in time, the Stevensonian imprint being clearest on the text prepared when their work had been most recently read.
Edmund Wilson in his famous essay 'Mr Holmes, they were the Footprints of a Gigantic Hound' (New Yorker, 27 February 1945, reprinted in his Classics and Commercials (1950). pp.268-269) makes the connection and the contrast of the published works:
- ... there was unquestionably R. L. Stevenson's New Arabian Nights (and, with his wife, its sequel, More New Arabian Nights]. 'The Adventure of the Hansom Cab[s]' and 'The Adventure of the Superfluous Mansion' must have suggested both the Sherlock Holmes titles and the formula of taking people to unexpected places and having them witness mysterious happenings. But Doyle, though much less literary than Stevenson, somehow got solider results, which depended on quite different qualities from Stevenson's suave Oriental tone and the limpid iridescence of his fantasy. For one thing, Stevenson was weak on character [in the New Arabian Nights stories], whereas Doyle had produced two real personalities. And, for another, Doyle had created his own vein of fantasy, which was vivider, if rather less fine, than Stevenson's.
But in 'Angels of Darkness' the vein of fantasy has difficulties in distancing itself from the Stevenson's 'Story of the Destroying Angel'. In its Utah sequences the ambiguous Mormon Hiram Cooper who warns John Ferrier against Mormon designs on his property, and his daughter Lucy as to her probable wardship under the Holy Four, recalls too readily the ambiguous Dr Grierson as he appears early in the Utah passages of 'The Destroying Angel': at first reliable protectors in a hostile Mormon environment, they prove hollow at the crisis destined to take the life of the heroine's father. Cooper in 'Angels of Darkness' foretells Ferrier's probable fate by describing the role Grierson ultimately proves to have played in the Stevenson's story: 'The very hand that a chosen victim of Mormon retribution shakes in friendship may be that which is appointed to do the deed.' The mysterious figures who escort the Stevensons' heroine from Utah prefigure the several escorts over different stages of Lucy Ferrier's escape from Utah in 'Angels of Darkness' (Elias Fortescue Smee the Yankee trader, Splayfoot Dick the runaway slave); the apparent penetration of London by Mormon agents ready to repossess the heroine Asenath Fonblanque (daughter of Lucy) in 'The Destroying Angel' is directly followed in the similar Mormon threat to Lucy Ferrier in San Francisco in 'Angels of Darkness'; Grierson's disguise, and the whole apparatus of disguise throughout The Dynamiter in its entirety, forecasts Drebber in disguise as the Comte de Chargny at San Francisco; and even the complexities of the San Francisco boarding-house cast of characters have something of the inconsequentiality and profusion of The Dynamiter's kaleidoscopic dramatis personae. It is essential to the Stevensons' story that their characters should prove ambiguous and ultimately destructive of their own credibility, where Conan Doyle in play as well as story has a purpose, but at times his stage characters seem almost to question their own existence with a Stevensonian whimsy.
Then the warnings of analogous cases to those of John Ferrier, present in 'Angels of Darkness', absent (save in curt omniscient narration) in A Study in Scarlet, have their counterpart in The Dynamiter's 'Story of the Destroying Angel'. Cooper tells Ferrier of the death of Samuel Wheatstone, following those of Spurling, Conky Jones and Matthew Stuart, just as the Stevensons make Asenath's father recall the disappearance of Priestly and subsequently be disappeared himself. These precedents seem to have turned on disputes about land and wealth, although the Ferrier danger arises through Lucy's marital peril.
Dr Grierson, after the disappearance of Asenath's father, reveals himself to the bereaved mother and daughter as an emissary of the Mormons (though also, as it proves, in very private practice): '... you have, by my forethought, been allowed three weeks to draw your own conclusions and to accept the inevitable.' The inevitable turns out to include his own son marrying Asenath, although in London the 'son' proves to be himself. In 'Angels of Darkness' Elder Johnstone tells Ferrier that a month is given before Lucy makes her choice between the sons of his colleagues on the Holy Four, Drebber and Stangerson, but the arrival of the young men themselves is deferred until the month has almost elapsed (in A Study in Scarlet they appear on the morrow of Ferrier's interview with the Mormon emissary (in that version Brigham Young)). The wooing, then, is not to intrude until the close of the time under notice in either 'Destroying Angel' or 'Angels of Darkness'. But in fact in 'Angels of Darkness' the time under notice is made to become a terrorising business (as it does not need to be in the Story of the Destroying Angel', with Father's removal as terror enough). Hence it is almost anti-climactic for young Drebber and young Stangerson to appear at the end of the warning period, genial and confident of their welcome, despite the fact that their emissary has been chalking numbers in diminishing sequence on the walls of their host over the previous month, predictably leaving his nerves in rags and his hospitality limited. A Study in Scarlet, with far more logic, makes the young wolves descend on the Ferrier fold as soon as the leader has set his mark on their prey, and it is not until the morrow of their rude expulsion at Ferrier's hands that he finds the first of the warning numbers. This also is logical: it is much more a punishment for his temerity in threatening the sons of two of the Holy Four than a follow-up to the initial warning (sufficiently menacing in its delivery by Young himself).
Finally, the Stevensons' use of a Scots name for the doctor, Grierson-ambiguous, intellectual, murderous, treacherous, destructive, protective, an early draft of Jekyll and Hyde?-is followed by ACD when producing in his third act a doctor as altruistic as his antecedent is selfish, as unambiguous in his protectiveness as the other is dubious: Watson. (In passing, the Scots name 'Grierson' so natural to RLS and alien to his wife warns us of the danger of too readily accepting the thesis of her sole authorship of the 'Story of the Destroying Angel'.)
We now turn to a different feature: some items in A Study in Scarlet still mysteries to us, which would make sense as vestigial remnants of 'Angels of Darkness'.
Elder Johnstone. He plays no part in A Study in Scarlet beyond being spelt 'Johnston and named (pp.80, 189) as one of the four principal Elders' the others being 'Stangerson, Kemball, ... and Drebber', the context being that they and Brigham Young have the only tracts of land larger and more fertile than that accorded to John Ferrier. He is quite unnecessary, since he exists neither fictionally (like Drebber and Stangerson senior and junior) nor factually (like Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball, whom ACD rendered 'Kemball' (presumably with Scots memories of Campbell')). 'Kemball' appears in annotation to justify the use of words such as 'heifers' for wives and hence must have a place in the highest elite where it is numbered: he can hardly be convincingly cited as a representative of Mormon elite rhetoric if the text does not so include him (pp.89, 194-95). But in 'Angels of Darkness' Elder Johnstone has the interview with John Ferrier which in A Study in Scarlet is given to Brigham Young. A possible origin of the name has been noted by me for Luke S. Johnson (1807-61), the name being Scotticised by ACD, but if the career of Luke Johnson influenced any portrait in either 'Angels' or A Study in Scarlet it was that of John Ferrier himself, since he seems to have been a useful and courageous member of the pioneer party in the initial migration to Utah, and as such an appropriate designee for reward if not for responsibility.
The Holy Four. The term seems original to Conan Doyle and may well have supplied the origin of Edgar Wallace's 'The Four Just Men' (the variation in whose fourth member also caused some cross-purposes). It first receives mention (p. 89) in A Study in Scarlet as 'the Sacred Council of Four' when Brigham Young reports to Ferrier on its decision in his case and that of his adopted daughter. It is clear in the context that Young has participated in the decision and that, indeed, it is his as well as Stangerson's and Drebber's (seniors, acting in the interest of their juniors): nothing less like a powerless messenger could be imagined. He closes the interview with the reminder to Ferrier that he and the girl would be better
- now lying blanched skeletons upon the Sierra Blanco, than that you should put your weak wills against the orders of the Holy Four!
Nothing in this portrait of Brigham Young suggests he sees the Holy Four (or anyone else) in any position superior to himself: if anything, there is a mild hint of going (American-style) one bigger and better than the Holy Trinity and yet retaining the unity of the deity in four persons. If this was tongue-in-cheek blasphemy on ACD's part it had to be very covert indeed, but it would be consistent with a literary rejection of Jesuit education analogous to James Joyce's comparable iconoclasm, as with his own religious position at this point hostile to fashionable Christian beliefs. But it is clear Young is present at the Sacred Council and voting, not to say dominating. Does this mean the Holy Four is (we must live in this syntax) Drebber senior, Stangerson senior, Heber C. Kimball, Johnstone and Young, or the four minus Johnstone? We never find out. And with the pace of the story going well, we accept the Four as Young and Co.
But in 'Angels of Darkness' the whole thing is explicit:
- Ferrier. But who does these things? Who are the Holy Four? Is the prophet concerned in it?
- Cooper. Rumour says that he is not and that he dare not set his face against it. The great terror hangs over him as over us.
- Ferrier. Speak out, man. I can see that there is a thought in your mind. Who are these men?
- Cooper (looking about him cautiously). It is not good to speak of such things above one's breath. It is said in the town that Elder Johnstone is the most feared of the four, and that Elder Drebber and Elder Stangerson are also among them. Their sons are said also to be among the most active of the Avenging Angels who carry out secret decrees. God preserve us all from their visitation!
- Ferrier. Well, Hiram, we must not let fear run away with us. I guess we are free American Citizens and are not to be bullied by no such gang as you talk of.
This offers us a contrast between 'Angels' and Study with the advantage, as far as history is concerned, decidedly on the side of Study. Firstly, the notion that Ferrier could be bland and breezy about any dangers, after twelve years among the Mormons as here depicted, suggests an old hunter on the verge of senility: or, to put it another way, suggests an author conceiving of a character without seriously setting up the time-dimension to his background. In 'Angels of Darkness' Ferrier behaves like a character just born; in A Study in Scarlet the omniscient narrator takes it for granted that the old hunter knew what anyone with eyes to see and still more ears to hear might know, all the more naturally so since he has made his first appearance dying in the desert, not just in his later (if illusory) prosperity in Utah. Much of the effect made by Ferrier in Study lies in our realisation of the unspoken wisdom behind the old-timer's apparently straightforward speech. The use of the name 'Cooper' in 'Angels' is suggestive: it is Ferrier in Study who embodies the silent vigilance of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking.
Brigham Young. Given the almost pedantic and self-conscious pains ACD later went to in bringing real historical characters on his fictional stage, it seems curious his accuracy should have failed so signally in his depiction of Brigham Young. It is a splendidly forceful portrait and so far is correct, but the language and rhetoric have little in common with the picturesque but self-schooled Vermonter's mode of address. Examples of Young's mode of speech were tolerably available. But if Young in Study was first conceived as a fictional 'Elder Johnstone', a stage Puritan, in fact-Micah Clarke aching to get itself written-the anachronist Young makes more sense. With memories from his Macaulay of William III's dislike of clergymen in the firing-line, ACD in 'Angels of Darkness' posits a Young very much apart from, and rather overawed by, the supreme civil power. The author of A Study in Scarlet, on the other hand, had no doubt that he was dealing with a theocrat: 'Young speedily proved himself to be a skilful administrator as well as a resolute chief.' (p.79.) No historian seems likely to gainsay that, whatever their other doubts about the portrait.
Brigham Young makes two appearances in A Study in Scarlet. The first is during the initial, desert, sequence, and hence has no counterpart in 'Angels of Darkness', which begins in Utah. The second is in the same words assigned to Elder Johnstone in 'Angels', save for a few exceptions. Johnstone addresses Ferrier as 'Farmer Ferrier' (possibly with memories of Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown'), Young as 'Brother Ferrier'. Johnstone enters on the line 'It is not to shake thy hand, farmer Ferrier, that I have come here this day. There is a voice within me which tells me that it would have been better for those of the true faith if we had never set eyes upon thy face' which in A Study in Scarlet becomes
- His heart leapt to his mouth, for this was none other than the great Brigham Young himself. Full of trepidation-for he knew that such a visit boded him little good-Ferrier ran to the door to greet the Mormon chief. The latter, however, received his salutations coldly, and followed him with a stern face into the sitting-room.
Then the dialogues tally, apart from description (very careful description, too, given its allusions to Young's 'light-coloured eyelashes'), and such moments as Johnstone's 'Is this not so?' becoming Young's 'Is not this so?', the result being that where Ferrier in 'Angels' answers 'It is true, every word of it' (a little Irishly), Ferrier in Study, more the hard-bitten frontiersman, can answer antiphonally 'It is so'. The great line from the inquisitorial Mormon 'Where are your wives? Call them in, that I may greet them' (surely the finest expression of polygamy as Puritan reprimand known to literature) loses some force in 'Angels of Darkness' by the vocative 'John Ferrier' appearing after 'wives'. The Johnstone version is a direct confrontation of erring sinner; the Young is lofty and detached contempt from a distant master holding all the cards.
The conspicuous diverting of the texts comes with the Johnstone/Young speech (p. 89) hailing Lucy as 'the flower of Utah', after which in Study Young has two more paragraphs:
- 'There are stories of her which I would fain disbelieve-stories that she is sealed to some Gentile. This must be the gossip of idle tongues.
- 'What is the thirteenth rule in the code of the sainted Joseph Smith? 'Let every maiden of the true faith marry one of the Elect; for if she wed a Gentile, she commits a grievous sin.' This being so, it is impossible that you, who profess the holy creed, should suffer your daughter to violate it.'
Then the spoken dialogue (though not, of course, the ancillary Study narration) becomes once more in accord, until
| ! 'Angels of Darkness' | ! A Study in Scarlet |
|---|---|
| Johnstone: She shall have a month to decide. At the end of that time the young men shall come to you for your answer. [Walks towards the door faces round with flashing eyes] It were better for thee, John Ferrier, that thou and she were now lying blanched skeletons upon the Sierra Blanco, than that you should put your weak wills against the Holy Four. [Exit with a threatening wave of his hands] | 'She shall have a month to choose,' said Young, rising from his seat. 'At the end of that time she shall give her answer.
He was passing through the door, when he turned, with flushed face and flashing eyes. 'It were better for you, John Ferrier,' he thundered, 'that you and she were now lying blanched skeletons upon the Sierra Blanco, than that you should put your weak wills against the orders of the Holy Four!' With a threatening gesture of his hand, he turned from the door, and Ferrier heard his heavy steps scrunching along the shingly path. |
'Angels of Darkness' is in difficulty with its 'thou' and 'you' variations. Johnstone in the final passage may be grammatically neatly balanced between 'thou' (speaking of John Ferrier) and 'you' (speaking of John and Lucy) but the remnant shows no such consistency. 'Where are your wives? alludes to John's wives, but if Johnstone were to judge his speech as nicely as he does elsewhere, it implies he is assuming the wives would be Lucy's as well (which would certainly though not impossibly-add a new dimension to the sexual history of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints). It seems absurd to think that anyone would revise so much against his own intentions: once the author decided in favour of 'thou' and 'you' to denote a singular and plural, he would have made the corrections throughout. On the other hand, to have used 'thou's in a first draft, failed to maintain them, and decided on revision to scrap the lot makes sense. Similarly, 'threatening wave of his hands' seems first draft rather than revision of 'threatening gesture of his hand'-the former sounds like an irate conductor of an inadequate classical orchestra.
It seems even more important to consider revision as dramatical no less than grammatical. If novel was being revised into play, why on earth drop Brigham Young? He would be excellent box-office. His name, one might say, begat multitudes. The speeches from him additional to those of Johnstone are bad Mormonism but good theatre (and if ACD was going to worry about the doctrinal accuracy of his Mormons he had much more revision ahead of him than he showed any other anxiety to make). Young's fear of Lucy's betrothal to Jefferson Hope sharpens the dramatic tension decisively, and lends particular point to the terrorisation process (and the absence of such suspicions make the Mormon omnipresent thought-control look a little foolish). We must remember that Conan Doyle had never yet brought a historical figure into his work (apart from the fleeting glimpse of James Stephens, still living, in 'Touch and Go'), and it was a bold stroke for him to do so. He was not a man to abandon a bold stroke, once he had begun it.
But if 'Angels of Darkness' excludes Brigham Young, it includes practically every other imaginable ethnographic device of the dismal drama of the day, one is irritably tempted to feel. Whatever its date it was, of course, his first play, and allowance must be made for that. The most overwhelming argument for its date of composition anterior to A Study in Scarlet must be that it is vastly inferior to it in quality, reaching depths no writer who had reached the maturity of Study would seem likely to rediscover this side of senility: although banalities on the stage or in verse would not be impossibilities from a writer whose prose style was by now impressively chastened. Cameron Hollyer points to the racism in the treatment of the stupid but devoted black ex-slave Splayfoot Dick and the treacherous Chinese laundryman Ling-Tchu, but any performance today would seem to invite censure from the entire United Nations General Assembly. Whatever their ethical merits, the stage Irish girl, the stage Englishman, and the stage Yankee trader are grotesque caricatures almost unbelievable in a writer who had reached the pre-Holmes heights where Conan Doyle stood in 1885. (And, given May 1885 as publication month of the Stevensons' 'Story of the Destroying Angel', 'Angels of Darkness' cannot be earlier than that; the notebook signatures A. Conan Doyle M.D.' invite us to accept it as August 1885 or later, since any previous month would require later alteration from 'M.B.') Equally, the weeks after reception of the M.D. are those when its recipient flourished it most often. Clearly, ACD intended to conquer the theatre by way of the Music-Hall. Like his fellow-Irishmen Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Synge, O'Casey and Beckett, he silently reflected the influence of Dion Boucicault: Splayfoot Dick has decided qualities in common with Boucicault's Myles na Copaleen and his fellow lovable rogues-indeed he is a surer version of the stage-Irish than the ostensible representative of ACD's ethnic group Biddy McGee.
Nevertheless, if 'Angels of Darkness' seems to show loss of integrity, the very ethnic caricatures themselves show the promise of things to come. In one way, we are back to the earliest attempts at imaginary American locations, as in 'The American's Tale' (London Society, Christmas 1880), and indeed Autumn 1885 is presumably the date of composition of the more sophisticated but nonetheless caricaturish 'Elias B. Hopkins-The Parson of Jackman's Gulch' (London Society, Christmas 1885). Yet Elias B. would furnish a not unworthy first version for Captain Sharkey's spectacular performance as the Governor of St Kitt's, to say nothing of some of Holmes's little impersonations. The dialect of Ling-Tchu and Splayfoot Dick may be excruciating, but they are occasionally a foretaste of Holmes and Watson. ACD had recently been experimenting with an Oriental anticipation of Holmes in the shape of Ram Singh (The Mystery of Cloomber), and while no dizzier contrast could be imagined than Ram Singh's dignity and the Bret Harte 'Heathen Chinee' dredged up for Ling-Tchu (unless it be the even more homicidal dignity of Septimius Goring in 'J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement' as against the Carlyle-inspired Splayfoot Dick) consider:
- Dick. Where is Missey Lucy.
- Ling-Tchu. She passee through garden.
- Dick. How you know dat?
- Ling-Tchu. She leave um markee footee footee all same topside um flowerbed.
- Dick. What fool's talk this? How you know Missy Lucy's footmark from my footmark or any other one.
- Ling-Tchu. 'Spose Missee Lucee tread topside um flowerbed it no easy findee placee.
- Dick. Well?
- Ling-Tchu. Spose blackee Dickee tread it no easy findee um flowerbed.
Similarly in the third act Sir Willoughby Montague Brown does some neat pre-Holmesian work to prove Drebber is no Comte, while anticipating the early Holmes in his complaints of boredom:
- Sir Montague. Ah, my complaint is one you can't cure, don't you know, doctaw. There's no dwug can do me any good, you know.
- Dr Watson. What's the matter then, Sir Montague?
- Sir Montague. I'm bawed, deah boy. I'm bawed. I'm the most bawed thing in cweation, don't you know, unless it's an Artesian well.
- Dr Watson. You must rouse yourself.
- Sir Montague. I can't.
- Dr Watson. See life.
- Sir Montague. I've seen it. It's not worth seeing, don't you know. I mean to say it's such a baw! Believe me, deah boy, it's a baw!
- Dr Watson. Travel then.
- Sir Montague. So I do. Then I twavel back again. If you twavel far enough you find yourself where you started from. That's the worst of the world being round, don't you know. I mean to say that if it was flat, or square, or lopsided, it wouldn't be half such a baw.
It seems absurd to think of these dialogues being adaptations of Holmes's publications on footprints or remarks on the roundness of the earth, but they readily offer themselves as the first versions of such moments. In particular Ling-Tchu anticipates several significant passages, including cycle-tracks in 'The Priory School'.
It is a moving consideration that the Music-Hall must be numbered among the sources of Holmes and Watson, no less than among those of Jeeves and Wooster, and (via the films of Laurel and Hardy) Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon.
As editor of the Oxford A Study in Scarlet, I had come to the conclusion the work should be looked on as pantomime. It would now seem that in its inception there was much that was formally pantomimic, on this showing. But if there was, consider the economy with which ACD's surgical knife cut his cancers out.
The entire Music-Hall cast of characters-the grasping, cheating but good- hearted Yankee trader Smee (did ACD remember the name and suggest it some years later to his co-dramatist J.M. Barrie for Peter Pan?), the ennuyé Sir Montague (a foretaste of Sir Gervas Jerome, whose foppery stays with him to his Quixotic death at Sedgemoor in Micah Clarke), Splayfoot Dick and Ling-Tchu, Biddy McGee and neighbour Cooper-leave not a sign of themselves in A Study in Scarlet save for Holmes-Watson touches and the single line, half-repeated later, 'his servants slept in an outhouse' (pp. 94, 97). This literary massacre seems a case of insult added to injury, given the meaning ACD did not intend for the word 'outhouse'. But its result is that over-explained details in the play appear as haunting, unforgettable touches in the story: the succession of numbers as to the lapse of each day before Ferrier is called to account and his daughter to a Mormon harem, is ascribed in 'Angels of Darkness' to the cunning and malice of Ling-Tchu: it is far more effective for the reader not to know, as s/he never does know in A Study in Scarlet (in which the outhoused servants are specifically eliminated from suspicion in number-scrawling). Elimination of servants, of neighbour Cooper, etc., profoundly deepens the isolation of the Ferriers: the play fixes them among so many characters that Elder Johnstone might well find conditions less cramped in his own harem. The tension of departure is infinitely greater in the story: in 'Angels' Hope also makes his writhing entry to avoid Mormon vigilance but when he leaves with the Ferriers, Dick and Biddy cheer them on and comment on their departure to find it being candle-signalled by Ling-Tchu, whom Dick then attempts to shoot and Biddy knocks over with her broomstick. Although in play as in book the departure will be followed by the murder of John Ferrier, the comic atmosphere does nothing to presage it, where the book at this point sounds a rendezvous with death.
But in any case the play has made too little of Ferrier to wring emotions on his death. Even in his courageous defiance of young Drebber and young Stangerson, 'Angels of Darkness' endows him with occasional touches of the fishwife. Although in the play the suitors appear after the numbers game has been played for almost a month, Ferrier is at first folksy in welcome: 'I thank you, gentlemen. I thank you. Will you seat yourselves. Lucy, these gentlemen are warm from their ride. They have looked in as they passed doubtless that they might drain a horn of our milk.' Then the rivals state their claims, as in Study (p.92), and the texts then diverge as follows:
| ! 'Angels of Darkness' | ! A Study in Scarlet |
|---|---|
| Ferrier (rising to his feet). Then her decision is ready. She will have none of you, you canting brazen faced scoundrels. None of you, d'you hear. Away with you to your other mistresses and tell them how you fared when you asked a pure woman to join them.
Drebber. What! Are you mad? Ferrier. Yes mad when I hesitated even for a moment as to the course I should follow. Out o' my sight while I am still able to keep my hands off you. Stangerson. John Ferrier, do you know what you are doing? Ferrier. My duty. Stangerson. You are signing your own death warrant. Who has ever set his will against the Council and lived? Consider what you do, John Ferrier. Ferrier. I have considered. Ferrier. Out you go. Let me know when you've settled which it is to be. Stangerson. You shall smart for this. Drebber. Our next visit will be of a different sort. Stangerson. The hand of the Lord shall be heavy upon you. He will arise and smite you. Ferrier. If you don't leave my house I shall be the first to start the smiting Here, where is my gun? |
'Look here,' he said at last, striding up to them, 'when my daughter summons you, you can come, but until then I don't want to see your faces again.'
The two young Mormons stared at him in amazement. In their eyes this competition between them for the maiden's hand was the highest of honours both to her and her father. 'There are two ways out of the room,' cried Ferrier, 'there is the door, and there is the window. Which do you care to use?' His brown face looked so savage, and his gaunt hands so threatening, that his visitors sprang to their feet and beat a hurried retreat. The old farmer followed them to the door. 'Let me know when you have settled which it is to be,' he said, sardonically. 'You shall smart for this!' Stangerson cried, white with rage. 'You have defied the Prophet and the Council of Four. You shall rue it to the end of your days.' 'The hand of the Lord shall be heavy upon you,' cried young Drebber. 'He will arise and smite you.' 'Then I'll start the smiting,' exclaimed Ferrier, furiously, and would have rushed upstairs for his gun had not Lucy seized him by the arm and restrained him. |
After the suitors flee, Ferrier in Study calls them 'The young canting rascals' appropriate enough since it follows their text-mouthing departure: the play has him call them canting before they cant. It is logical in a writer to think of canting in the context of hypocrisy, but on revision it makes sense to offer some specimens of cant before the epithet is applied. The play also has trouble in settling on a rhetorical style. Drebber on arrival announces 'God save all here' in good rural Irish fashion (much as Ferrier earlier used the Irish-Scots 'Sit ye down'). The Mormons' style in Study may savour too much of the stocking of seed-corn for Micah Clarke, but it is at least consistent. 'Angels of Darkness' sacrifices sympathy for Ferrier in other respects. Apart from his sneer about the 'other mistresses' (and surely the Drebber and
Stangerson victims in harem invited some sympathy themselves), he tells the boys (in the lines excised above) that his Lucy would rather marry a digger Indian'. This is peevish scolding, in strong contrast to the four curt speeches with which he expels them in the book.
The book makes a Leatherstocking figure of Ferrier, the play reserves such an identity strictly for Jefferson Hope. It is an identity which can be reworked among many age-levels, as it was in the original Fenimore Cooper novels, but one essential mark of Leatherstocking is that he can love but not marry. Significantly, Ferrier in Study is mysterious in all his origins including the matrimonial ('Others again spoke of some early love affair, and of a fair-haired girl who had pined away on the shores of the Atlantic. Whatever the reason, Ferrier remained strictly celibate.') (p.81). But the play gushes:
- Ferrier: ... They've been at me to marry agin, but I guess one wife is enough for one life, an' I can look my Hester square in the face in the next world, if I stick true to her in this.
Hope, on the other hand, is so isolated that even before he appears in 'Angels of Darkness' doubts are raised as to whether marriage can be for him:
- Lucy: I wonder if Jefferson will come back with father. He's going away to Nevada prospecting, so he is sure to come today. I wonder if he will speak out. Oh whatever shall I say or do! I have no mother, no sister to advise me. Who can I ask? There's only Sally [presumably the original form of 'Biddy', ACD then lapsing into the generic stage-Irish servant-girl name] and Dick and Ling-Tchu. I know well that he loves me. I can read it in his eyes. But I can read something else in his eyes sometimes which frightens me. Not always. Only sometimes. When he is thwarted or angered. Oh even if I did not love him I don't think I would dare to refuse him. They tell me that even the rough hunters and the miners are afraid of him. Yet he is generous-so noble!
This sets everything up very nicely for the classical Cooper finale in which the girl will find a more congenial mate, fortified by gallant renunciation from what in this case proves her dying frontier hero. Lucy is true to Hope while believing him dead, but when he finds her in San Francisco and is then killed, he can place her hand in Dr Watson's with his dying gesture. Her belief in Hope's death between Acts II and III allows her to develop tender instincts for Watson without impropriety (no polygamy wanted there) while remaining true to Hope's memory. This structure was evidently fixed from the start of the play, which means that any later revision of Act III was tactical rather than strategic. Moreover, the fidelity to the Fenimore Cooper principles militates for 'Angels of Darkness' being nearer in time of composition to Cooper, as to the Stevensons, than is the remoter A Study in Scarlet. Ferrier in Study is the Leatherstocking type, but Hope in 'Angels' is also the Leatherstocking situation. These seem fairly clear stages of literary evolution.
This in its turn invites us to consider the circumstances of composition of 'Angels of Darkness'. If it was indeed written before A Study in Scarlet it certainly slips casily into the chronology.
- 24-25 March 1885. Death of Jack Hawkins, a resident patient in home of ACD.
- 2 April 1885. ACD attends lecture at the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society 'Incidents of a Journey from Chicago to Vancouver and British Columbia', which dealt with the Mormons in Utah.
- 6 August 1885. ACD marries Louise Hawkins, sister of Jack.
The idea of Jack Hawkins blessing his marriage to his sister was obviously one dear to ACD. Jefferson Hope, with the same initials, is in fact the patient of Dr Watson when he blesses the marriage to Lucy, again with the same initials as Louise. Conan Doyle was perfectly capable of waiting decades to put an idea in literary form, but something as close to the centre of his whole existence as this was not likely to wait before it forced itself on paper in some form. And again, naturally for something so close to the bone, the urgency ran afoul of the art rather than inducing it. There may have been a false start-the many pages cut out from the first volume before the current beginning of Act I may have borne an aborted first version of the play (it could, of course, have been an unrelated short story written and despatched to an editor). The third notebook has some pages at its latter end cut out also, the next being then near the end of Act III. This last seems quite definitely an indication of redraft.
I suggest that the writing of 'Angels of Darkness' took place in late 1885 and possibly early 1886. I suggest that either after its completion (in that first draft form) or abandonment in the middle or latter end of the third and last Act, ACD began work on a different project, which he termed 'A Tangled Skein'. It was about a London crime in which a cabman figured, not necessarily as the murderer, and a policeman assisted him, not necessarily as a fool. There was also a woman, later dropped from the story:
- The terrified woman rushing up to the cabman. The two going in search of a policeman. John Reeves had been 7 years in the force, John Reeves went back with them. [Southsea notebook No.1, reproduced by John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (London: John Murray, 1949), p.63.]
At some later point, when the title had been definitely altered to A Study in Scarlet, ACD jotted down some notes about J. Sherrinford Holmes and Ormond Sacker who lived in 221B Baker Street where they talked about Dupin and Lecoq. (MS of notes reproduced in Pierre Nordon, Conan Doyle trans. Frances Partridge (London: John Murray, 1966), facing. p.211.) And at some point subsequent to these two different ideas-themselves possibly conceived independently of one another-ACD decided to turn his 'Angels of Darkness' into the motivation for the murder Sherrinford or Sherlock Holmes was to solve. It is probable that the (presumable) murder discovered by woman, cabman and PC Reeves had its first existence unrelated to any Drebber, whether John or Enoch. (The change from 'John' to 'Enoch' is one of a large number of changes in vocabulary nearer the Biblical or Puritan as ACD in his writing career drew nearer to Micah Clarke). The decision to turn the Mormon story into utter tragedy brought with it ruthless pruning of 'Angels of Darkness' although with the retention of many good lines of dialogue. If we accept this thesis, 'Angels of Darkness' becomes a valuable text whence to examine ACD's methods of revision, of which far too little data have hitherto been available. We must also notice its material later used not for A Study in Scarlet but for subsequent works (for instance Dr Watson was probably transferred simply as a name to Ormond Sacker, but his role as a scrupulous lover was given him in a different contest in The Sign of the Four: in 'Angels' he saves the life of Jefferson Hope despite belief it will lose him Lucy, while in Sign he refuses to press his suit with Mary Morstan while she appears to be a great heiress).
'A Study in Scarlet' appears on the cover of the first MS notebook before being scoured out in favour of 'Angels of Darkness', and this may indeed have been the first name of the play; but if so it was probably dropped very early. It was then transferred as substitute for 'A Tangled Skein' and may have been the very first part of 'Angels of Darkness' to be so recruited.
The article in the Portsmouth Crescent of 28 September 1888 mentioning that A Study in Scarlet was about to be dramatised is nothing against this. ACD was understandably furious at the meanness of Ward, Lock and (especially) Bowden for refusing to pay him a further penny on the initial £25 despite the story's republication early in July, this time on its own as a single volume (or monograph). So angry was he that he absolutely refused to allow the Sign, many months later, to be republished by Ward, Lock from its Lippincott's magazine text although the magazine had used the Ward, Lock editors and the Ward, Lock book outlet was its standard procedure now. Hence he was glad to tell the grasping publishers as well as the expectant (Portsmouth) public that Ward, Lock might have won the battle but would not win the war. At the same time he would naturally wish to convey the freshness of the adaptation, not its existence before the writing of A Study in Scarlet. Accordingly he resumed work, and cancelled some portion of the third Act, redrafted it, and then yet again redrafted it. And weary work he must have found it, the extrication of good material from the juvenile taking laborious consideration in contrast to the mature writing now flowing from his pen. Once he had made a lover out of Watson in The Sign of the Four that probably ended his idea of resurrecting 'Angels of Darkness'. The diary entry of 13 October 1890 'Play 'Angels of Darkness' finished' meant that he had done as much on it as he would ever do: the state of the work with its unfinished alternative end does not suggest any finish in any other sense. We know of no overtures to any theatre. And his first copies of the first English edition of The Sign of the Four arrived on 21 October 1890.
Much still remains inferential. Jefferson Hope's aortic aneurism makes perfect sense in 'Angels of Darkness', but its diagnosis in A Study in Scarlet leaves the reader in wonder that he did not drop dead in his furious (but possibly intentionally suicidal) struggle: on the other hand, ACD had his fine description of its sound and he did not intend to lose it. The early life of Dr J.H. Watson in Study must have been an import once Ormond Sacker had been discarded in favour of a doctor, but it certainly suggests work at white heat when his military career was copied so drastically from ACD's old Edinburgh acquaintance Dr Patrick Heron Watson (with Crimean War transposed to Afghan and authorship of reminiscences more probable at Crimean distance in time). The MSS for Act III of 'Angels of Darkness' begins with the San Francisco landlady being called 'Charpentier', as is her London counterpart in A Study in Scarlet, but this is then changed to 'Carpenter': was ACD tempted to add stage Frenchwoman to his stage Irish, stage English, stage Yankee, stage Chinese and stage Negro? If so, it was a momentary impulse, and when he reverted to the original spelling in Study it was to lend dignity rather than comedy to an essentially tragic figure-the landlady forced to accept unwanted lodgers for the money, much as his own mother had been forced to do (save that in her case it was her husband rather than the lodger who was drunk).
We have all been too ready to accept the structure of A Study in Scarlet as natural, partly because ACD, following Gaboriau, used long flashbacks. We remember The Valley of Fear. But the cases are far from identical. As I have sought to show in the Oxford Valley of Fear, that work is structurally extremely carefully balanced, with its climaxes in the first and second parts counterpointing one another with significant implications for their symbolic as well as spoken content. The handing of the MS of the Second Part to Watson at the close of the first is as formal an act as the Documentary Novel ever exhibited. In A Study in Scarlet, on the other hand, we never discover how or whence the second part is put together, with its five third-person narrative chapters. But if ACD was reworking his play the dislocation of Study makes sense. In a sense the five chapters no longer require explanation: they had their own previous existence. Jefferson Hope, Lucy Ferrier, John Ferrier, Enoch Drebber and Joseph Stangerson were five characters in pursuit of an author.
Thank God they caught up with him.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
