Borrowed Sins
Borrowed Sins is an article written by Catherine Cooke published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 7, 1996/7).
This article explores the literary relationship between Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde, focusing on their 1889 Langham Hotel dinner with editor Joseph M. Stoddart that led to The Sign of the Four and The Picture of Dorian Gray. It also examines possible mutual literary influences between the two writers and Conan Doyle's later fascination with alleged posthumous messages from Wilde through Spiritualist mediums.
Borrowed Sins
- 'All influence is immoral-immoral from the scientific point of view. ...
- His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed.'
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 2
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle trained as a doctor, but always wanted to be a writer. During his student days and in the early years of his practice, he had written a number of short stories, often published anonymously. While working as a medical assistant to a doctor in Birmingham in late 1879 he wrote, and sold to Chambers's Journal for three guineas, his first acknowledged story, 'The Mystery of Sasassa Valley'. He had also written two novels. The manuscript of one of these, The Narrative of John Smith, was lost in the post and never recovered. The other, The Firm of Girdlestone, he was not happy with, and when several publishers had rejected it, he let it lie. It was eventually published in 1890. He remained convinced, however, that the only way to make headway in the literary field was 'that your name should be on the back of a volume' [[[Memories and Adventures]]].
In January 1884, The Cornhill Magazine published 'J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement'. Conan Doyle was invited to a fish dinner at the Ship in Greenwich, where he met the editor, James Payn, and the artist Du Maurier. Conan Doyle was delighted at this chance to touch 'the edge of literary society', as he put it. This meeting with Payn was to prove important for Sherlock Holmes, for Payn helped to introduce Conan Doyle to the American editor of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, Joseph Marshall Stoddart, who, having read A Study in Scarlet, wanted a second Holmes story.
In August 1889 Conan Doyle learned that Stoddart was in London and that he wanted to discuss the possibility of a book. 'Needless to say,' he later wrote in Memories and Adventures, 'that I gave my patients a rest for a day and eagerly kept the appointment'. They met at a dinner given by Stoddart at the Langham Hotel in London. Two other guests were present: an Irishman named Thomas
Patrick Gill, Irish Nationalist and MP for South London from 1885 to 1892 who seemed to be making a start on a promising literary career, being editor of the North American Review from 1883 to 1885, but who has now faded from memory; and Oscar Wilde. The latter is no surprise-Stoddart had organised his lecture tour of America. The exact date of the dinner is not given by Conan Doyle, but he wrote in his diary for 30th August 1889, 'Agreed to write story of 45000 words for £100 for Lippincott'. He added on 30th September that he had finished the work, and on 2nd November that he had been paid! Wilde was reportedly paid £200 for the rights to his story.
The thirty year old Conan Doyle, still a doctor in Southsea and just starting to make his mark in the literary field, was delighted to meet the man, 'already famous as the champion of aestheticism', though that man was in fact only five years older than himself. His description of Wilde from his autobiography is worth quoting in full as a picture written by a writer who excelled in creating atmospheric scenes:
- It was indeed a golden evening for me. Wilde to my surprise had read Micah Clarke [published in February 1889] and was enthusiastic about it, so that I did not feel a complete outsider. His conversation left an indelible impression upon my mind. He towered above us all, and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say. He had delicacy of feeling and tact, for the monologue man, however clever, can never be a gentleman at heart. He took as well as gave, but what he gave was unique. He had a curious precision of statement, a delicate flavour of humour, and a trick of small gestures to illustrate his meaning, which were peculiar to himself. The effect cannot be reproduced, but I remember how in discussing the wars of the future he said: 'A chemist on each side will approach the frontier with a bottle'-his up- raised hand and precise face conjuring up a vivid and grotesque picture. His anecdotes, too, were happy and curious. We were discussing the cynical maxim that the good fortune of our friends made us discontented. 'The devil,' said Wilde, 'was once crossing the Libyan Desert, and he came upon a spot where a number of small fiends were tormenting a holy hermit. The sainted man easily shook off their evil suggestions. The devil watched their failure and then he stepped forward to give them a lesson. "What you do is too crude," said he. "Permit me for one moment." With that he whispered to the holy man, "Your brother has just been made Bishop of Alexandria." A scowl of malignant jealously at once clouded the serene face of the hermit. "That," said the devil to his imps, "is the sort of thing which I should recommend."'
The result of this dinner is well-known: Conan Doyle was commissioned to write The Sign of the Four, which appeared in Lippincott's February 1890 issue, and Oscar Wilde was to write The Picture of Dorian Gray, a book Conan Doyle considered to be 'upon a high moral plane', which appeared in the July 1890 issue. Stoddart wrote in confirmation to Conan Doyle (and presumably in similar terms to Wilde, though Ellmann notes Stoddart requested 100,000 words from Wilde) on 30th August:
- Confirming the verbal and mutually agreed upon understanding of today, we propose to pay upon receipt and acceptance of a story to be written by you consisting of not less than 40,000 words, the sum of one hundred pounds.
- Our rights to be entire in America in all forms of publication, and to be exclusive to Lippincott's Magazine for the period of three months in England.
- It is understood that you deliver the manuscript by or before January of next year.
- Your written acceptance of this will be satisfactory. Trusting to hear from you by return, I am
- (signed) J. M. Stoddart.
Conan Doyle wrote to Wilde to express his reaction to Wilde's book. In his autobiography Conan Doyle is reticent about Wilde's 'too generous' comments on The Sign of the Four. He does, however, quote a large part of Wilde's letter to him, as he considers it shows the true Wilde.
- Between me and life there is a mist of words always. I throw probability out of the window for the sake of a phrase, and the chance of an epigram makes me desert truth. Still I do aim at making a work of art, and I am really delighted that you think my treatment subtle and artistically good. The newspapers seem to me to be written by the prurient for the Philistine. I cannot understand how they can treat 'Dorian Gray' as immoral. My difficulty was to keep the inherent moral subordinate to the artistic and dramatic effect, and it still seems to me that the moral is too obvious.
It is a pity that the letter is no longer available to researchers; it is either buried with Conan Doyle's other papers in the long-running legal dispute and Carr does list some 500 letters to Conan Doyle from famous men and women, but without mentioning Wilde among those he picks out-or lost. Conan Doyle does not give the date of this letter and it is perhaps a little surprising to find that it was in April 1891, so that the edition of Dorian Gray being referred to is the book edition with the textual changes and additional six chapters, not the original magazine publication or the August 1890 issue by Ward, Lock which included both Dorian Gray and The Sign of the Four.
Both issues of the magazine are now highly sought. In July 1995 a copy of that containing Dorian Gray was auctioned at Sotheby's in London; it went to a dealer for £690.
The idea that Conan Doyle based the character of Thaddeus Sholto in The Sign of the Four on Oscar Wilde is well-known in Sherlockian circles. Consider our first view of the character:
- ... Nature had given him a pendulous lip, and a too visible line of yellow and irregular teeth, which he strove feebly to conceal by constantly passing his hand over the lower part of his face. ... 'Your servant, gentlemen. Pray step into my little sanctum. A small place, miss, but furnished to my own liking. An oasis of art in the howling desert of South London.'
Recall Wilde's remark during his 1882 lecture tour of America: "The American woman? She is a charming oasis in the bewildering desert of commonsense.' Wilde himself was described as having thick, sensuous lips and uneven discoloured teeth, which he frequently sought to hide by holding a finger in front of his mouth when talking. Or again, Sholto's remark: . . . there is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman', which requires no further comment. His objection to his brother's desire to deprive Mary Morstan of her rightful share is not that to do so would be wrong, or illegal, but that it would be 'such bad taste'.
Sholto's room is described in detail:
- ... In that sorry house it looked as out of place as a diamond of the first water in a setting of brass. The richest and glossiest of curtains and tapestries draped the walls, looped back here and there to expose some richly mounted painting or Oriental vase. The carpet was of amber and black, so soft and so thick that the foot sank pleasantly into it, as into a bed of moss. Two great tiger-skins thrown athwart it increased the suggestion of Eastern luxury, as did a huge hookah which stood upon a mat in the corner. A lamp in the fashion of a silver dove was hung from an almost invisible golden wire in the centre of the room. As it burned it filled the air with a subtle and aromatic odour.
The Tite Street Catalogue lists a variety of oriental china, a Persian carpet, animal skin rugs (admittedly those of sheep), and a variety of Eastern artefacts, including Chinese and Persian lanterns.
It is worth noting in passing that Captain Morstan, whose disappearance precipitates the events of The Sign of the Four, is last seen at the Langham Hotel, the hotel's first, if not last, appearance in Conan Doyle's work. Then there is the unusual name Sholto itself, a fairly common one among the family of Lord Alfred Douglas. Proof positive, one would say, until one recalled that Wilde did not meet Bosie until the summer of 1891, a year and a half after the publication of The Sign of the Four and some two years after the Langham dinner. No explanation seems forthcoming for this and it joins Conan Doyle's prediction of a
Post Office on Wigmore Street and a house numbered 221B in Baker Street as another eerie and inexplicable bit of prescience on Conan Doyle's part.
It has to be said, however, that the portrait, if portrait it be, is not a flattering one: ... the strange, jerky little fellow, with his high, shining head, puffed uneasily in the centre'. It is, in fact, less of a portrait than a few elements drawn from Wilde and his aesthetic circle, used to give Sholto an air of the exotic. It is an ironic and completely unintentional twist that Thaddeus is arrested by the police on suspicion of murdering his brother.
What is less known in Sherlockian circles is that Wilde put elements of Conan Doyle into Dorian Gray. Both works are murder mysteries and both feature an empty, locked attic room: as the scene for Bartholomew Sholto's murder in The Sign of the Four and for that of Basil Hallward in Dorian Gray. First, Sholto:
- By the table in a wooden armchair the master of the house was seated all in a heap, with his head sunk upon his left shoulder and that ghastly, inscrutable smile upon his face. He was stiff and cold and had clearly been dead many hours.
Then, Hallward:
- Alan, in a locked room at the top of this house, a room to which nobody but myself has access, a dead man is seated at a table. He has been dead ten hours now.
In the former novel, the man who finds the body and investigates is Sherlock Holmes. In the latter, the man drawn into the crime is Alan Campbell:
- He was an extremely clever young man, ... His dominant intellectual passion was for science. At Cambridge he had spent a great deal of his time working in the Laboratory.... Indeed he was still devoted to the study of chemistry, and had a laboratory of his own in which he used to shut himself up all day long.... He was an excellent musician, however, as well, and played both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs. In fact, it was music that had first brought him and Dorian Gray together and after that used to be always seen together at the Opera, and whatever good music was going on... and his name appeared once or twice in some of the scientific reviews in connection with certain curious experiments.
Campbell's task is to use his scientific knowledge and seeming lack of sensibility to horrors to dissolve the corpse:
- ... You go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the horrors there don't affect you. If in some hideous dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to flow through, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject. You would not turn a hair. You would not believe that you were doing anything wrong. On the contrary, you would probably feel that you were benefiting the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind."
Compare this with Holmes, another extremely clever young man aged thirty-four at the time of The Sign of the Four. Holmes studied at Oxford or Cambridge (Sherlockians are unable to reach agreement on which!) and had a chemical corner set up in his rooms, which he often filled with the results of his malodorous experiments. He frequented concert halls and operas and played the violin well. He was also a published writer of articles and monographs on a variety of subjects. Holmes made his friends feel there was something inhuman. about him:
- 'Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes-it approaches to cold- bloodedness. I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects.... He appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge.... When it comes to beating the subjects in the dissecting-rooms with a stick, it is certainly taking rather a bizarre shape.... Yes, to verify how far bruises may be produced after death.'
Then there is the name Campbell, which might recall Conan Doyle's being Scottish; his accent would have given this away had Wilde not otherwise known of it. It might not be stretching the point too far to note Alan Campbell, Arthur Conan; same initials, all two syllables.
Is this merely coincidence? This episode is Campbell's only appearance in the book, but it is part of the original Lippincott's text. Gray, and indeed Wilde, could have disposed of the body in some other fashion. They did not. Wilde chose instead to introduce a character who echoed Holmes as Thaddeus Sholto echoed him. Did the two authors, perhaps egged on by Stoddart, agree on this mutual nod and the similarity of crime scene? Or did Conan Doyle, displaying a pawky sense of humour akin to Dr. Watson's, sketch Wilde, who, reading the story, recognized himself and determined to get his own back? After all, Conan Doyle had guyed a matter about which Wilde was evidently sensitive-his poor teeth. Inserting a minor character such as Campbell could have been done very quickly, even towards the completion of the manuscript. Campbell is hardly a more flattering reflection of Holmes than Sholto is of Wilde.
We have seen Conan Doyle's diary showing the composition of The Sign of the Four. Is there similar evidence for Dorian Gray? On 30th September 1889 Wilde wrote to Stoddart:
- 'You ask me to try to send you my story "early in October"; surely you mean "early in November"? If you could be content with 30,000 words I might be able to post the manuscript to you the first week in November, but October is of course out of the question".
On 17th December, however, he again wrote to Stoddart saying, 'I am quite ready to set to work at once on it.' Two days later he wrote to an unidentified correspondent, 'I have been ill for some weeks and have been obliged to give up my literary work, amongst which is a story for Lippincott's Magazine.... Will you telegraph at once to Mr. Stoddart and say that the story cannot be ready for some months.' While in none of these letters is Dorian Gray actually mentioned by name, the references are clearly to that book.
In the case of The Sign of the Four, there was a four month gap between the submission of the manuscript and its appearance in the magazine. The inclusion of Christmas in this period might have made the gap a trifle longer than it would normally have been. Dorian Gray appeared in the July 1890 issue, which was published on 20th June, from which we might postulate a submission date of the end of February, or even March if we allow for Christmas in the case of Conan Doyle's manuscript. These dates would accord well with Wilde's phrase... cannot be ready for some months' used in the middle of December. It seems therefore highly likely that Wilde had the opportunity to read The Sign of the Four, presumably published on 20th January, before submitting his manuscript. This is, I stress, not proven. The plot of Dorian Gray was, of course, inspired by Wilde's own comment on the portrait painted of him by Frances Richards, 'What a tragic thing it is! The portrait will never grow older, and I shall. If it was only the other way!' (Ellmann notes this and other sources). It is not impossible that Wilde might add almost at the last minute the locked attic room for some other room, place the corpse at the table and either add Campbell or sharpen up the image a little into a reflection of Sherlock Holmes.
Conan Doyle took his reminiscences in his autobiography further:
- I should add that never in Wilde's conversation did I observe one trace of coarseness of thought, nor could one at that time associate him with such an idea. Only once again did I see him, many years afterwards, and then he gave me the impression of being mad. He asked me, I remember, if I had seen some play of his which was running. I answered that I had not. He said: 'Ah, you must go. It is wonderful. It is genius! All this with the gravest face. Nothing could have been more different from his early gentlemanly instincts. I thought at the time, and still think, that the monstrous development which ruined him was pathological, and that a hospital rather than a police court was the place for its consideration.
While this view of Wilde, and of homosexuality as an illness, may sound offensive to late twentieth century ears, in its period it showed Conan Doyle's sympathy towards Wilde, a far cry from the vilification meted out to him by most of established society at the time.
Conan Doyle does not date this second meeting, and the phrase 'many years afterwards' seems odd with Wilde's plays being performed between 1892 and 1895, when the Langham dinner had been in late 1889; it implies we are dealing with the performance of either An Ideal Husband or The Importance of Being Earnest. Ellmann, however, quotes the incident and specifically relates it to A Woman of No Importance, which puts it even earlier in 1893. Maybe it just seemed a long time later: a lot had happened for Conan Doyle in the meantime. On or about the 24th March 1891, Conan Doyle and his wife Louise moved into a rented flat at 23 Montague Place, Bloomsbury. At the same time, Conan Doyle took a front room with part use of a waiting room at 2 Upper Wimpole Street. After only three months he suffered a serious bout of influenza, an illness which had carried off his beloved sister. Conan Doyle decided to give up medicine for literature. He and his wife left Central London once again, moving to the suburb of South Norwood.
Oscar Wilde was to become important to Conan Doyle for another reason years later. As time progressed, Conan Doyle became increasingly involved with Spiritualism, spending a great deal of his own money on lecture trips abroad to spread the word. His first wife had died in July 1906 and he had remarried in September 1907. His second wife, née Jean Leckie, shared his interest and was herself a medium. Many of Conan Doyle's later books were on Spiritualism, including one published in June 1930, the very month before his own death, aptly titled The Edge of the Unknown. Chapter VI, originally published as an article in 1927, discusses 'The Alleged Posthumous Writings of Known Authors', starting with Oscar Wilde.
It is a tricky subject to write about, as Conan Doyle was aware:
- Let us predicate on the first instance that if the Spiritualist hypothesis is true, and if things are carried out exactly as they say, then one would expect the posthumous work to be inferior to that of the living man. In the first place, he is filtering it through another brain which may often misinterpret or misunderstand. Even a typewriter under my own control, causes me, I find, to lose something of my sureness of touch, and how much more would it be if it were an unstable human machine which I was endeavouring to operate. In the second place, the writer has entered upon a new life with a new set of experiences, and with the tremendous episode of physical dissolution between him and the thoughts of earth.
Conan Doyle admits that parody might produce such work, but feels that the question must then be, how far the medium is capable of parody:
- If that medium has never shown signs of the rare power of parody, if he has had no previous literary experience, and if there are other internal evidences of the author's identity, then the case becomes a stronger one.
It has to be said, this is a trifle naive. What is there to stop a fake medium forming an alliance with someone skilled at parody and memorising the result?
Conan Doyle then lists the various messages and works which have purported to come from Wilde, concentrating on Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde, published by Werner Laurie in 1924. The medium was Mrs Dowden (Mrs Hester Travers Smith) who received the messages partly through automatic writing (a method favoured by Lady Doyle), and partly through a ouija board. Mrs Smith seems not to have performed the automatic writing herself, but through one Mr Soal, keeping her fingers on his wrist while he wrote.
I leave it to other hands better qualified than I to pronounce on both Wilde and Spiritualism, but quote the following comments made by Conan Doyle in The Edge of the Unknown in respect of passages from Mrs Dowden's book:
- This is not merely adequate Wilde. It is exquisite Wilde. It is so beautiful that it might be chosen for special inclusion in any anthology of his writings. The adjective 'apple-green' for dawn, and the picture of the may 'creeping like a white mist' are two high lights in a brilliant passage.
Somewhat in contradiction to his earlier thesis, he adds the posthumous Wilde in such passages as this is Wilde with an added sparkle'.
Not only the style of the text but even the handwriting flowing rapidly from the pen of the medium is often that of Wilde, Conan Doyle contends,
- and even reproduces certain curious little tricks of spacing which were usual with him in life. He alludes freely to all sorts of episodes, many of them little known, which have been shown to be actual facts.
These again, sadly, are the sort of tricks used by fake mediums to add verisimilitude.
The messages were first published in Occult Review in 1923, the year in which most were received. About this time, Conan Doyle wrote several letters to the press supporting the messages. In the most extensive, in Occult Review, April 1924, he took issue with C. W. Soal, presumably the Soal who assisted Mrs Smith:
- I should wish with all courtesy, but also with all decision, to express my dissent from Mr. C. W. Soal in what he says concerning the style of Oscar Wilde. He had, as has frequently been pointed out, two separate styles, each very marked and individual, and each quite different from the other. The one is poetic, ornamental and artificial, with lively word effects and a profuse use of colour. ... The second style is epigrammatic, witty, cynical and full of paradox. ... It is easy to produce a short comic parody, by exaggerating the features of a style, but to write or talk in exactly the same style and with equally good matter, argues an equal brain, which would certainly exhibit itself in something more ambitious than parody. ...
- Mr. Soal claims that he has traced all the allusions to their 'probable sources'. In the case of a man whose life was so public and who has been the centre of a whole literature, it is difficult to imagine that there is anything of any importance in his life-anything which would now emerge from his own memory-which was not directly or indirectly alluded to in some quarter or another. But such an explanation would mean that the automatists had ransacked all the Wilde literature. We have their assurance that this is not so, and that their acquaintance with it was very limited. As to the suggestion, put into the mouth of a suppositious critic, that the writers memorise great sections of script, that would of course be a direct accusation of deliberate fraud which is not justified by the character and position of the writers.
It has often been said that Conan Doyle was scrupulously honest himself, and could not believe that others might not have such high standards. He also believed passionately in Spiritualism and longed to persuade others of its truth, making him perhaps rather too susceptible to evidence offered him, some of which, like the Cottingley Fairy photographs, was less than authentic.
Conan Doyle wrote to Mrs Smith on 19th August 1923, 'I think the Wilde messages are the most final evidence of continued personality that we have. One could at a pinch imitate style, but one could not imitate the great mind behind the style. It is to me quite final.' He continues, rather amusingly in his matter of fact tone, 'If you are in contact you might mention me to him — I knew him and tell him that if he would honour me by coming through my wife who is an excellent automatic writer, there are some things which I should wish to say.' Though Conan Doyle published a book of Spirit messages to the family, Pheneas Speaks, there is no record that Oscar Wilde ever visited them. Perhaps he knew what Conan Doyle wrote to Mrs Smith in April 1924, 'Wilde is in purgatory — to reduce his condition to popular terms & will stay there until he gets over the frame of mind he shows in his script. By the way he shocked me once by saying to me that his play was "a perfect thing" which he repeats, I see, in his script.' While Sherlock Holmes did not rank modesty among the virtues', his creator evidently did.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's literary career started in earnest with the publication of A Study in Scarlet in late 1887. He remained active and very much in the public eye until his death in July 1930. His public life was, therefore, bounded by Oscar Wilde. The young Southsea doctor, up in London on literary business for only the second time in his life, found himself having dinner with one of the most celebrated literary figures of the age. Conan Doyle was influenced by Wilde as, it seems, Wilde may have been influenced by Conan Doyle. At the end of his life he was writing about Wilde's style, and he believed about Wilde himself and was actively seeking to meet him again, albeit in the séance room. One hopes they met up after Conan Doyle himself passed through the veil — it might have made death rather less boring for Wilde, who, as reported in the second Dowden script, had commented, 'Being dead is the most boring experience in life. That is, if one excepts being married or dining with a school-master'.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BECKSON, Karl. 'Psychic messages from Oscar Wilde: some new A. Conan Doyle letters'. English Language Notes, 1979, pp. 39-42
CARR, John Dickson. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. London: John Murray, 1949
CONAN DOYLE, Arthur. The Edge of the Unknown. London: John Murray, 1930
CONAN DOYLE, Arthur. Memories and Adventures. London: Greenhill Books, 1988
CONAN DOYLE, Arthur. The Sign of Four. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981
CONAN DOYLE, Arthur. A Study in Scarlet. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981
ELLMANN, Richard. Oscar Wilde. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987
GIBSON, John Michael and Richard Lancelyn GREEN (eds). Letters to the Press. London: Secker and Warburg, 1986
GREEN, Richard Lancelyn and John Michael GIBSON. A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983
GREEN, Richard Lancelyn. 'Conan Doyle's Pocket Diary for 1889. ACD, Vol. 1, No. 1, Sept. 1989, PP. 20-29.
HART-DAVIS, Rupert (ed). The Letters of Oscar Wilde. London: Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd., 1962
HYDE, H. Montgomery. Oscar Wilde. London: Eyre Methuen, 1976
WILDE, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
