Conan Doyle's Sense of Justice
Conan Doyle's Sense of Justice is an article written by Harold Orel published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 4, 1993).
This essay examines Arthur Conan Doyle's evolving sense of justice, contrasting Sherlock Holmes's pragmatic moral judgments with Conan Doyle's public advocacy in matters of war, law, taxation, prison reform, and civil liberties. Drawing on fiction, letters, journalism, and historical cases, it argues that Conan Doyle's moral convictions were forceful, often uncompromising, and deeply engaged with the political and social crises of his time.
Conan Doyle's Sense of Justice
One interpretation of Conan Doyle's sense of justice appeared in The Strand Magazine in September 1911. A symposium of eminent men and women considered the question: What Reform is Most Needed? Conan Doyle turned his attention to the divorce laws of the day:
The divorce laws are so arranged at present that divorce is practically impossible for a poor man, that people are tied without hope of release to lunatics, drunkards, and criminals, and great numbers (more than two hundred thousand individuals) are separated by law, and yet are not free to marry again a fact which cannot be conducive to public morality.
In 'The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor' Sherlock Holmes said that he read nothing but the criminal news and the agony column. (The latter,' he added, 'is always instructive.') But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who strenuously objected to being confused with his creation — read widely, and took an avid interest in countless issues that would scarcely have interested the Great Detective. In my following brief remarks, I touch on a subject that warrants more investigation than it has received: Conan Doyle's sense of what constituted fair play, or, in other words, his sense of justice.
Surely Holmes had his own special concept of what needed to be done to bring to account someone who had transgressed the law. From behind a curtain he watched as a woman, whose life had been ruined, fired bullet after bullet into the body of her betrayer, 'the king of all the blackmailers', Charles Augustus Milverton, and he did nothing to prevent her grinding her heel into Milverton's upturned face. Even more remarkable, he refused to help Inspector Lestrade: 'The fact is,' he told his visitor from Scotland Yard, 'that I knew this fellow Milverton, that I considered him one of the most dangerous men in London, and that I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private vengeance.'
And there are other special moments in the Sherlockian Canon: 'The Blue Carbuncle', when Holmes announces that he is not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies; 'The Abbey Grange', when Holmes tells Watson that he had rather play tricks with the law of England than with his own conscience; and several stories in which the issues are ambiguously presented A Study in Scarlet, 'The Devil's Foot', 'The Crooked Man'. It is not easy to predict, on a first reading of several such stories, how Holmes will judge the issue, and whether a private individual's mercy will interfere with the strict judgments of the law.
'What is the meaning of it, Watson?' Holmes asks (at the conclusion of 'The Cardboard Box'). 'What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.'
Holmes feared the east wind that was coming, 'such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast.' So he thought in 'His Last Bow'. He seemed to recognise increasingly often, as the years wore on, the impossibility of settling all problems by use of reason.
Compare that growing grimness, the gathering-in of shadows on Holmes's willingness to act even as he acknowledged that not all his options were clear — a change that we may associate with the aging process to the indomitable spirit of Conan Doyle. Even in his fiercest polemics against those who refused to recognise the value of the Spiritualist movement, Conan Doyle never thought that the east wind of a changing age could frost his determination to speak the truth as he saw it and to defend the right.
In some ways, of course, he gave freer scope to his imagination than Holmes did; he increasingly often thought of Holmes as 'merely a mechanical creature, not a man of flesh and blood, and easy to create because he was soulless.' I am not referring here to Holmes's ignorance of astronomy, the theories of Copernicus and the composition of the solar system, or of literature, philosophy, and politics (the list of limits as recorded by Watson in the second chapter of A Study in Scarlet.) As the Canon grew, Holmes's knowledge of the sciences and the arts correspondingly improved; Holmes was not ever as two-dimensional as Conan Doyle pretended. But there is something freer and larger about Conan Doyle's sympathies with the oppressed, the unjustly persecuted, the underprivileged, than we can claim for Holmes's character.
I am not making a case for viewing Conan Doyle as a friend of all mankind. There are moments in his life when even his friends were startled by an Old Testament ferocity in what he said or did. I recall how surprised I was when I read that during his visit to Sing Sing at Ossining in New York State, he sat in the electric chair to see how it felt, to imagine the current crashing through his body. He was astonishingly grim about what needed to be done to punish those who in time of war fought unfairly, and were responsible for the deaths of women and children. In 1901, citing as his precedent the fact that the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War had continually carried French hostages in the trains, he recommended putting a truck full of Boer irreconcilables behind every engine which passed through a dangerous part of South Africa. The first duty, Conan Doyle argued, was to English soldiers. The Boer attacks on railway trains had killed non-combatants indiscriminately, and these were outrages that invited — nay, demanded — reprisals.
Conan Doyle's anger at the Germans during the Great War may be traced in Letters to the Press, that indispensable volume edited by John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green. He had a clear notion of what the rules of war were; when the German Navy laid mines in open waters and caused the death of neutrals, this was 'murder'. It was immoral to bombard unfortified towns by sea or by air. The Germans treated prisoners with shocking disregard for what was right, for what was necessary in a world that respected civilised values. Zeppelin raids on helpless civilians enraged him. He urged retaliatory raids upon German towns, and he did not flinch at the thought that German civilians might be killed. 'The Hun is only formidable when he thinks that he can be frightful with impunity,' he told his countrymen; "Blood and Iron" is his doctrine so long as it is his iron and someone else's blood.'
Conan Doyle hated luke-warm feelings so far as the Germans were concerned. Hatred a righteous wrath was the means whereby the English could attain an invincible (and, from his point of view, a necessary) resolve. 'When Miss Cavell was shot,' he wrote in 1918, we should at once have shot our three leading prisoners. When Captain Fryatt was murdered we should have executed two submarine captains. These are the arguments which the German mentality can understand... We have law and justice on our side. If they attempt a reprisal, then our own counter-reprisals must be sharp, stern, and relentless. If we are to have war to the knife, then let it at least be equal for both parties.
Yes, one may say, but this was wartime, a period of emotional excess. When peace prevailed in the land, did Conan Doyle speak as stridently about the issues in which he was interested? He certainly delivered his views with great energy, and one may not say that he was ever unclear about what he believed. Because so many readers are already familiar with the broad outlines of the two most important cases which obsessed Conan Doyle — namely, the cases of George Edalji and Oscar Slater — I will not retrace them in detail. But his hatred of Establishment influence used to create injustices in court, his contempt for lawyers who behaved abominably while covering up legal scandals and the inexcusable behaviour of police officials who assisted them in doing to, was not limited to these landmark cases.
Some court sentences struck him as entirely inappropriate, such as the three-months judgment against an American lady who had stolen some small articles of silver from a hotel-room. It is to a consulting-room, and not a cell, that she should be sent,' he argued. He stood up for women workers in a Brighton hotel whose pay was being reduced. As he told the voters in 1900, he felt pledged to oppose all narrow or reactionary legislation. Indeed, his concerns ranged from the relatively minor — as when he denounced the officials who set speed traps in the Guildford district during the summer to catch motorists, or the Sunday laws which prevented rifle shooting while allowing cycling, motoring, boating, and even golf as legitimate activities on the Sabbath to the stupidity of the Lord Chamberlain in his capacity as censor of plays; to the unforgivable intolerance of the divorce laws (which Conan Doyle thought were based largely upon theological considerations); to the colour prejudices which prevented full Empire representation at the Olympic Games; to the outrageous murdering of wild birds for their skins and plumes (he was a prime mover in the Importation of Plumage Prohibition Bill of 1914); to wartime profiteering; to the release (for whatever reason) of criminals who had been convicted three or four times of a penal offence.
'We segregate our lunatics and we segregate our infectious cases,' he wrote to The Times in 1929, and the hardened criminal is a mixture of both. He is a man with a dangerous idée fixe, and he is a man who is likely to infect others by exerting his influence upon those who are younger or weaker than himself. The world has no use for him. He is the enemy of society. It is folly, therefore, to give him successive sentences, which mean intervals when we have to pay the penalty for our own weak and illogical leniency. The true method of guarding ourselves is to eliminate him altogether. From the time that his true character is established the prison doors should never open again.'
Whether one agrees with the sentiment or not and even those who agree with it will concede the harshness of tone — one can understand and appreciate why Conan Doyle is occasionally described as one of the few Great Victorians who speak directly to our own age. There is no mistaking where he stands on the issues, and he had an uncanny knack of interesting himself in issues that remain timely.
I recognise the crankiness of some of Conan Doyle's positions, such as the blast he delivered in 1926 — the year of the General Strike in England, and widespread unrest among a disillusioned populace against the way in which vacationers went to the Riviera for hotel accommodations, rather than to the southern coast of England. He proposed a heavy poll tax to penalise those who made money in England, and preferred to spend it abroad. Only good reasons of health or of business could excuse their absence from England. He was in favour of blacklisting tax-evaders in the Channel Islands and other places abroad; if they remained recalcitrant, he went on, they should be deprived of all rights of citizenship. 'The times are serious,' he declared, and drastic methods are needed.' In brief, he believed that he was delivering a just verdict on those who merited punishment for shirking their duties to home and country, and he did not flinch from the charge that he might be more extreme than the circumstances warranted. At such moments he reminds us of Sir Nigel Loring in The White Company, who preferred to return two blows for every one that he received, and the other great historical figures of that romance: John Chandros, Pedro of Castile, the Black Prince and his father, the noble Edward III, and the semi-mythical Bertrand du Guesclin, warriors all, men determined not to be defeated in the continuing battles of life.
What, then, did Conan Doyle's sense of justice amount to? He demanded a fair hearing for all sides of a question. (When he wrote The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, he was seeking to explain the British view, and to define the causes which led to it; he was incensed that the foreign press had presented only one side of the issue.) He wanted tariff proposals, and other Government bills, to be judged 'in a judicial and impartial spirit', because such judgments would perform 'an important national service'. He urged greater equity in taxes, pointing to the disparity between what the poor paid for their necessities and what the rich did not have to pay for the import of diamonds, motor cars, velvets, and silks. He wanted reforms in the system of income-tax assessment, and elimination of the assessor's right to impose 'peculiarly outrageous' judgments on helpless citizens. His was one of the angriest voices raised against the villainous behaviour of the representatives of King Leopold of Belgium in central Africa, behaviour that remains appalling and unforgivable to this day. In similar fashion he condemned Portugal, in 1910, for its barbarous treatment of prisoners: 'We have before us,' he wrote, 'cruelty, injustice, want of chivalry, everything which is alien to the real Portuguese nature ... .
Unlike Sherlock Holmes, who had little or no interest in opinions and leading articles, Conan Doyle was a man who held strong opinions and wanted a free play of opinions in an open forum; and he was capable of changing his mind, too, as when he became a convert, in 1911, to the cause of Home Rule for Ireland. He did not want to be ignored, or his proposals for remedying social wrongs and injustice to be taken lightly. He was, taken all in all, a courageous warrior enlisted in worthy causes, and deserves to be remembered in our time not only for the passion of his convictions, but for the eloquence with which he expressed them.
Professor Orel's paper was first presented to the annual meeting of the Norwegian Explorers in Minneapolis in June 1993.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
