Observing a Few More Trifles: Or, What Price Conan Doyle?
Observing a Few More Trifles: Or, What Price Conan Doyle? is an article written by Donald A. Redmond published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 5, 1994).
This wide-ranging analytical essay uses trifles in Arthur Conan Doyle's fiction — names, domestic details, costume, publishing history, piracies, and textual variants — to argue for rigorous contextual and bibliographical study rather than speculative over-interpretation. It culminates in a call for systematic physical bibliography and cultural contextualisation to establish Conan Doyle's true historical "price" and literary standing.
Observing a Few More Trifles: Or, What Price Conan Doyle?
MY INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE CONFERENCE organisers were that I should not mention-but I shall not say the name. Unfortunately, like King Charles's head he keeps getting into things. We must recognise that we cannot separate the creation from the creator-even recognising, as ACD himself rhymed, that the doll and its maker are never identical.' Therefore you will pardon me, I trust, if I paraphrase ACD for the title of my ramblings: 'You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles,' ('The Boscombe Valley Mystery').
So show us your trifles, you cry. All right. Why were the lettuces upon the sideboard? In the oyster supper scene, Chapter 10 of Beyond the City, Ida Denver says, 'I wish we could crown ourselves with flowers. There are some lettuces upon the sideboard.' What is more unlikely? Or do we have here a sort of Victorian fast-food salad bar? I must quote again: the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace featureless crimes which are really puzzling ... ' I am not saying that keeping lettuces on the sideboard is a crime. And why 'lettuces' anyway? Isn't 'lettuce' collective, like 'sheep', with no plural? But Mrs Beeton does say 'lettuces' in her Book of Household Management. She says they may be stewed and sent to table in a good brown gravy flavoured with lemon juice. She also says that any cold meat the larder may furnish should be nicely garnished and placed upon the buffet'. That is under section 2270 on breakfast, but it does account for the cold beef upon the sideboard in another story ('The Beryl Coronet'), apparently left there all day. There was a loaf upon that sideboard too ('The Five Orange Pips'). These must have been standard emergency rations at 221b Baker Street. I am saying that nothing-nothing-that we read in Conan Doyle is there by chance. It is for us to study and understand. However trifling, it is there for a purpose.
I am using the lettuces only as an example of a trifle. The point I would make is that one must not leap from a trifle, via unwarranted assumptions, to extravagantly wild and unjustified conclusions-such as that because a certain character in a Conan Doyle story has an untasted breakfast before him at the beginning of the story, he is suffering from a hangover and therefore the day previous had been his birthday-nor that because he twice quotes from Twelfth Night, that birthday was 6 January. This kind of thing is oreamnosis, jumping to unjustified conclusions-or as one writer said more bluntly, 'moonshine'. (1)
One must take trifles and consider them in their milieu. The lettuces must be studied together with the entire scene: Jane the maid (not Mary Jane who was slovenly with Watson's boots) — Jane who could not set the breakfast table (not the one upon which sat the untasted breakfast, or am I confusing you?) because the golden-haired Ida was engaged in chemical experiments upon that table-reminis cent of another Conan Doyle eccentric. Ida herself, it is clear, is a sublimation of Louise Hawkins, as is also Maude Crosse, née Selby, in A Duet. Even though there were not bullets in the butter-dish, nor sunken parsley, in Beyond the City, The Times was sodden with acid. And the long-suffering Jane, who 'has been a cook', finally produced 'toast which was leathery from being kept, dried-up rashers, and grounds in the coffee.' In my own experience all English toast is leathery, late or not, and English coffee will remove lime deposits from any surface. Was there a cook too? There is mention of 'the united experience of the kitchen' — so why was advice sought of Jane who has been a cook' — surely a domestic come-down?
To appreciate, to evaluate, such a scene we will do well to bone up on the domestic affairs of the late Victorian household. I commend to you studies such as Not in Front of the Servants by Frank Dawes (New York: Taplinger, 1974); and even the numerous popular explorations of Victorian culture by Ronald Pearsall-whose own so-called Biographical Solution to Conan Doyle is less a solution than an oreamnotic exercise. (2)
My own interest has been, you know perhaps too well, the naturalness of personal names in ACD's writings, to which I ascribe no small part of the realism which attracts us. In Beyond the City almost the first name over which we trip is Admiral Hay Denver, R.N. Retired. Admiral of the Fleet in fact. Now it happens that Admiral of the Fleet Lord John Hay, fourth son of the Marquess of Tweeddale, born 1827, was still on the active list in 1891 when Beyond the City appeared, and his service included almost everywhere the Royal Navy went, which was pretty well everywhere in the world. He was at Devonport in 1887-8, becoming Admiral of the Fleet in 1888 — a naval officer of whom ACD, in the naval area of Portsmouth, would know. (3) Lord John Hay married Annie Lambert of Denham Court. Would this suggest 'Denver', which is a personal name? The city was named for James W. Denver, whose father Patrick was an Irish rebel in 1798 and fled to the United States. There was also John Denvir of Antrim, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and a Home Rule advocate. (ACD was a Liberal Unionist.) And what is the connection between Admiral Hay Denver and the Duke of Denver, whose family's goings-on are recorded in the works of another popular author? What about the name usage in which the Admiral's wife is addressed in conversation as 'Mrs Hay Denver'? And there is Mrs Hunt Mortimer in A Duet. As in the case of Arthur Cadogan West in 'The Naval Treaty', is this a compound surname? Consider the frequent use in England even today of a middle name apparently as a sort of compound. I have seen Henry Ward Beecher alluded to as 'Ward Beecher' and Harriet Beecher Stowe and 'Mrs Beecher Stowe4. Is Conan Doyle the precedent here, or the norm? ACD himself in Through the Magic Door speaks of 'Wendell Holmes'. Notice also Dr Proudie, the quack doctor in Beyond the City obviously from Dr Proudie, the clergyman who became Bishop of Barchester in Trollope's Framley Parsonage (1861); but Proudie, spelled various ways, is an Aberdeen name. Names of restaurants in ACD's writings, aside from real establishments such as Simpson's in the Strand, have a decided aroma of pasta about them: Marcini's in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Mariani's and Gatti's in A Duet, Goldini's in 'The Bruce Partington Plans'. London was full of restaurants but why do we hear only of Italian?
But on to other trifles. What became of the bull pups? Young Charles Westmacott first appears in Beyond the City as 'a big, powerfully built young man, with a bull pup under one arm and a pink sporting paper in his hand. Like the bull pup to which Dr John H. Watson referred in confessing his domestic bad habits, the bull pup never appears again-though the Sporting Times, otherwise known as 'The Pink 'Un', goes on to this day.
Ely Liebow, discussing what he calls 'Experience Veiled in Pseudonyms' in The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1987), dismisses Beyond the City almost cursorily as 'an early-day glimpse of suburbia' and focuses on the character of Mrs Westmacott (do we ever learn her first name?) and its reflection of ACD's attitude to the independence of women. He also calls Beyond the City and A Duet the 'Curious Case of the Two Neglected Domestic Novels'. Certainly when we see big Charles Westmacott and his aunt careering along the road on a high tandem tricycle' the picture rises irresistibly of ACD and little Touie on a tandem tricycle in South Norwood. There are other bits which remind one of other Conan Doyle stories. Compare these two:
- In a low chair beneath a red shaded standing lamp sat Ida, in a diaphanous evening dress [Oh, my!] of mousseline de soie, the ruddy light tinging her sweet childlike face, and glowing on her golden curls.
That from Beyond the City, Chapter 9, written June 1891. And this from the previous year:
- She was seated by the open window dressed in some sort of diaphanous material [Oh, my! again] with a little touch of scarlet at the neck and waist. The soft light of a shaded lamp fell upon her as she leaned back in the basket chair, playing over her sweet, grave face and tinting with a dull metallic sparkle the rich coils of her luxuriant hair, one white arm and hand drooped over the side of the chair, and her whole pose and figure spoke of an absorbing melancholy.
The Sign of the Four, Chapter 11, written late in 1889. Comment is superfluous. That 'touch of scarlet at the neck and waist' seems to be a favourite phrasing. It recurs in A Duet as 'silver-grey... a little white chiffon at neck and wrists... the hat en suite, pale-grey lisse, white feather.' Mary Morstan's first appearance is in 'a sombre greyish beige' with 'a small turban of the same dull hue', and as she leaves Watson watches 'the grey turban and the white feather' disappear in the crowd. 'Beige' in this case is a fabric, rather than a colour. Or were these only current styles?
While we are at clothing, what about footwear? A sentence in The Hound of the Baskervilles always puzzled me. Sir Henry's tan boots, one of which was stolen (not the one found later in the Grimpen Mire) were new and 'had never been varnished'. The explanation may be in A Duet, in which Violet Wright is speaking to Frank about his wife: 'You are not worthy to varnish those pretty patent leathers of hers'. Patent leather had indeed a varnish finish, but is usually black. Perhaps it is no wonder Sir Henry's had never been varnished. We have also in A Duet the picture of the City man's well-brushed top hat and immaculate business frock-coat'. It reminds one irresistibly of the immaculate pair strolling down Regent Street in The Hound of the Baskervilles, observed by the villain in a hansom cab; or of that early and immaculate Basil Rathbone in his first two films from Conan Doyle tales.
Another trifle in both Beyond the City and A Duet is the discussion of Browning. Ely Liebow comments on the jabs at Browning, and suburban literary pretensions, in A Duet, but does not add the bit in Beyond the City. Charles Westmacott, who is the physical picture of ACD though depicted as a dullard, says in part:
- 'I hate Browning ... I can't make him out... I try, but he is one too many... She [his aunt] likes to read him aloud in the evenings. She is reading a piece now, 'Pippa Passes', and ... I don't even know what the title means.'
Neither did the ladies in A Duet, but the latter is satire rather of the ladies than of Browning. To what extent then do we understand ACD's views of the Victorian poets? We cannot take these passages literally as his views, that would be Oreamnosis. Swinburne he satirises in The Sign of the Four, Jean Paul Richter he admires (the flamingo-feather image at sunrise in the same work) and he would have read Richter in the original German at Feldkirch. It is beside the point that he lived in Tennison Road in South Norwood-the one Tennyson Road in London not spelled with a Y. Frank Crosse's reading, or at least his bedside books in A Duet, include Macaulay, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Gibbon, Carlyle and Borrow-mostly heavy going. The 'literary' chapters in A Duet, one on Carlyle, one on Pepys, and a guided tour monument by monument through 'England's Valhalla', Westminster Abbey, reflect ACD rather than a suburban accountant. Frank Crosse on the other hand says, 'I don't profess to know much about these things' when speaking of the stock quotations in the newspaper-strange things from the lips of an accountant, even an assistant accountant! More probable to come from the pen of a young author only now becoming flush enough to invest a few pounds. At least the stock quotation is in correct form (4 ¾ to 4 ⅞) unlike the stock quotation in 'The Stockbroker's Clerk' which has the bid and asked fractions backward.
The pictures of doctors, medical training and the medical profession in ACD's works (if I may trespass on Al Rodin's ground for a moment) reflect not only his own Edinburgh training but the medical science, or rather medical arts, of the period. Liebow has well summarised much of this in his review of Round the Red Lamp and 'The Croxley Master', also in The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Dr Walker in Beyond the City is another such picture, and one sentence strikes me as significant. The Doctor is speaking to the Admiral about his daughters: 'There's Clara, who has learned up as much medicine as would give her the L.S.A., simply in order that she may sympathise with my work. The L.S.A. is the Licentitate of the Society of Apothecaries. The sentence illustrates that as recently as the turn of this century it was possible in a very literal sense to 'read' medicine the British University student still 'reads' a subject and qualify as a practitioner upon passing the examinations of the relevant professional society. Medicine until well into the present century was based largely on the administration of natural substances. Add the British Pharmacopoeia of 1885 to your list of background books for studying ACD, and learn a little medical Latin to do so.
There are, in addition to depictions of household life in ACD's writings, trifles about the houses themselves, particularly London row or terraced houses — what pretentious builders today call 'town houses'. The chapter on Carlyle in A Duet calls Cheyne Row, Chelsea, which is dated 1708, 'drab-coloured, flat-chested. dim-windowed houses' — which is reminiscent of Pitt Street, Kensington in 'The Six Napoleons': 'one of a row, all flat-chested, respectable, and most unromantic dwellings.' The description of Carlyle's kitchen is most evocative, not only of the house but of household affairs:
- ... the subterranean and gloomy kitchen, in which there had lived that long succession of serving-maids of whom we gain shadowy glimpses in the Letter and in the Journal... Poor souls, dwellers in the gloom.
It is hardly any wonder that ACD moved his family as quickly as possible from Montague Place to suburban South Norwood, when he left medical practice (such as it was, or was not) to live by his pen. Frank Crosse's analysis, in the Carlyle chapter, of the window inscription at No. 5 Cheyne Row sounds like the logical mind of the detective and his creator. Compare it with ACD's logic in the Edalji case, of why young Edalji could not have committed the crimes of which he was accused. Frank Crosse's initial statement draws attention to the diamond-scratched writing on the windowpane, in exactly the style of the description of the culprit in The Sign of the Four or in 'The Boscombe Valley Mystery': 'He was the son of the house and a young aristocrat who had never done a stroke of work in his life.' Only then does Crosse reveal the steps in his analysis, much as the similar reasoning has to be explained to poor Watson.
This all brings us back to Mrs Beeton, as well as to the Conan Doyle household in Southsea. According to Mrs Beeton a household with an annual income of £500 could afford a cook and a housemaid. At £300 a year, a maid-of-all-work would be the extent of the domestic staff. Recall Dr Conan Doyle's first tax return, in which he recorded an annual income of £300, and the tax inspector recorded on it the comment 'Most unsatisfactory' — to which ACD in turn replied, 'I entirely agree'. When we first see the Crosse household in A Duet there has been a housekeeper in charge one Mrs Watson! — and when the new bride arrives, Mrs Watson has gone and the two servants are indeed cook and housemaid. Crosse's salary is only £400 a year plus commissions, and Maude has £50 a year, so much of what little plot A Duet has reflects sailing very close to the wind. One literary trifle is mention that for four pounds or so probably four guineas — one could become a member of the London Library'. This marvellous Victorian establishment, founded by Carlyle because the British Museum would not lend him books, still offers loan of quantities of books to its members for an annual fee trifling considering the value received. In view of the mention of the assistant librarian of the London Library in 'The Illustrious Client', ACD very sensibly held a membership.
There is a whole chapter about Mrs Beeton, in which Maude Crosse finally concludes, 'Then why should I try to be Mrs Beeton?' Very sensible; Mrs Beeton being inexhaustibly and grimly sensible. She would not have approved of some Crosse expenditures, such as Frank's 'red golfing-coat', an 'extravagance' at thirty shillings-about £60 or $120 in present currency. But as we have seen, costume was everything representing Victorian respectability. Or presumptions of something less respectable; in Beyond the City Mrs Westmacott's cycling costume is described as 'a heather tweed pea-jacket, a skirt which just passed her knees and a pair of thick gaiters of the same material.' There are endless other allusions to costume-I have alluded to 'diaphanous evening dress' — but are there any systematic histories of nineteenth century costume which we can profitably use as background for study of ACD? Punch cartoons of the time give an artificial and overdrawn impression-stiff evening dress, endless skirts and tight bodices; those few of the lower classes depicted in the cartoons appear in blurry undistinguishable rags. J.C. Flugel's Psychology of Clothes (1930) says only, 'The return to a greatly increased elaboration of costume in the mid-Victorian period was accompanied by what now seems to us the over-detailed ornamentation of the Victorian drawing-room', and he also uses the phrase 'the billowing abundance of mid-Victorian times'. But we are looking at late Victorian and Edwardian times, when the whirlwind of bicycle and tricycle blew away some of the long skirts of the ladies, even if it does not seem to have loosened the stiff collars of the gentlemen beneath their Norfolk jackets.
Let me change to a different trifling aspect of Beyond the City and other of ACD's works: the book as physical entity. I want to consider this in some detail, for it leads to my subtitle just as the household budget does: What price Conan Doyle? Green and Gibson's bibliography of ACD, page 70, shows the origin of Beyond the City, a novelette ordered, or contracted for, on 1 June 1891 and delivered on 8 July. It appeared in book form only in August 1893 and even then only as a trailer to ACD's Napoleonic novel The Great Shadow. Subsequently ACD's works began to 'take off in sales as a result of the appearance of his detective short stories, particularly when the first twelve appeared in book form late in 1892. In North America the same phenomenon occurred, but with a difference. Commencing sometime in 1893 and continuing at least through the First World War, not less than fifty-four issues of Beyond the City appeared over the imprints of some two dozen firms.
This is similar to the publishing history of The Sign of the Four and A Study in Scarlet, which I looked at in a book with the word Pirates in the title. The same piratical firms published Beyond the City as published the two detective novels. How could they do this? A new Copyright Act had become law in the United States on 1 July 1891. Prior to that, foreign authors (meaning especially British authors) had no rights whatsoever in the United States. After 1 July 1891 British authors could obtain (that word is important) copyright in the United States, provided their work was set in type and printed in the United States at the same time, or before, it appeared in another country. Unfortunately, ACD sold Beyond the City in 1891 to the periodical Good Words, and did not seek its simultaneous publication in the United States. He therefore lost the right to seek copyright of Beyond the City. The book was in public domain under the new law. The Sign of the Four was first published in the United States, but before the passing of the new Copyright Act, so it too was in public domain, as was also A Study in Scarlet of 1887. When the detective stories began to appear in The Strand Magazine and ACD's popularity soared, American publishers scrambled for anything by Conan Doyle. Who was first off the mark with Beyond the City is not clear at the moment. Green and Gibson say simply 'none has a clear priority' among the pirates. These editions were not dated-there was no copyright notice to print-and priority among the fifty issued could only be determined by the kind of bibliographic comparison which I did in that Pirates book, working from a collection of as many issues as possible. Praise then to collectors like Nathan Bengis (over four hundred issues of The Sign of the Four, now in the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library) and Donald Pollock (over a hundred of The Hound of the Baskervilles)!
Clearly however the same process occurred with Beyond the City as with the other Conan Doyle books. I have seven issues in hand, six of which from four firms have all been produced from one set of printing plates-plates used over and over again until in the later issues they are so worn as to be almost unreadable. The United States National Union Catalog lists issues from at least eleven firms using these identical printing plates, which we can call the '180-page' plates from the number of the last text page. Of the eleven firms, at least five used one single set of printing plates of The Sign of the Four. At least five (not the same five) used one single set of printing plates for A Study in Scarlet. It was then common practice for the first firm off the mark to rent or sell its plates to other cut-rate publishers. There was money in Conan Doyle — but not for him. But as I said, what price Conan Doyle? In fact, not an awful lot of money. The reason was cut-throat competition, and then as now the uncertainty of the bookselling market. You could buy an expensive edition of ACD's works. One of the Appleton Company's agents would sell you the Author's Edition in crushed levant leather for ten dollars a volume. Remember that was in the days when the sayings 'A dollar a day is very good pay' and 'Another day, another dollar' meant literally what they said. Appleton, who was one of ACD's authorised or legitimate American publishers, did not issue an edition of Beyond the City, presumably because they could not make money on it. But of those issues by the pirates for which Green and Gibson give prices, the highest is $1.98. Rand McNally would sell you Micah Clarke or The White Company in half calf leather for $1.75. Most piracies were a dollar or less. Hurst, Lupton, Neely, or Street and Smith would sell you Beyond the City for ten cents. Remember however that the original Bristol publisher of The Great Shadow and Beyond the City, priced is at 3s.6d.-equal then to about 87 cents American, but equivalent today to $14. (4) By 1912 British editions of Beyond the City and other Conan Doyle works were out at sixpence, or twelve-and-a-half cents American.
And speaking of piracies, a new (1994) nine-volume set of ACD's detective stories is being touted by the Book-of-the-Month Club copied from, among others, 1907 piracies of A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four.
The figure most often quoted of ACD's earnings is the £25 he received from Ward, Lock for the entire rights to A Study in Scarlet. Chris Redmond has shown that in terms of purchasing power or the value of money, this was equivalent to $2000 in 1990s currency. Admiral Hay Denver's pension, in Beyond the City, was perhaps half the service pay of an Admiral of the Fleet, which was £2,190 or in today's money about $175,000. The villain's reported debts were £13,000 — rather more than a million in today's dollars. This puts the financial problem which is the crux of Beyond the City into perspective. The Admiral endeavoured to sell the rights to his pension for £5,000, perhaps five years' income. ACD did a little better from Beyond the City than from A Study in Scarlet. His fee was £150, or $12,000 in today's money, not bad for a month's work. The recurrence of domestic financial problems in A Duet — not as massive, only £962, or say $76,000, or two years' earnings, but which was happily resolved-lends poignance to Thoreau's remark that 'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation'. ACD was well acquainted with this phrase though his quotation from Thoreau best known to Holmesians deals with a trout in the milk.
In the Piratical study of the two detective novels I looked systematically for textual differences and physical clues in the printing, such as type degradation and the transmission of typographical and other errors, to trace the publishing sequence of the various issues. Without more issues of Beyond the City in hand this was not possible; but one can compare two versions, that by P.F. Collier and the '180-page' plates used by eleven other firms. There are the same kinds of textual differences between versions, as in the detective novels: typographical errors (Collier have 'You' for 'Your' at one point; the '180-page' plates have 'houe' for 'house' on page 29); stylistic changes (Collier have 'number two' where the other plates have 'Number 2'; and 'villanous' where the others have 'villainous', 'check' (American) rather than 'cheque' (British)-but the text is nowhere as corrupt at the fourth- and fifth-generation piratings of the detective novels.
More noticeable than these physical bibliographic points are some unexplainable trifles-improbabilities-in the author's text. In Beyond the City, the 'long sad, wail of a French horn' on page 96 becomes the distant wails of the bugle' on page 100. This sounds like authorial forgetfulness akin to the dating problems in The Red-Headed League'. At the end of Chapter 13, young Westmacott, supposedly obtuse, says, 'They keep the directories and registers [that is, of the professional societies] in this eating-house.' This sounds too much deus ex machina even for an eating-house in the City financial district, and altogether Westmacott's rescue of Admiral Hay Denver from the financial rogues sounds too providential to be in character.
One of the pirated editions of Beyond the City, the only separate issue of my six in which the paper is not brown and crumbling, is from Street & Smith. Someone has noted on its flyleaf that it is not in Green and Gibson, which lists only a Street & Smith paperback. But this clothbound issue is the only one which contains, in addition to Beyond the City, a 'filler' of thirty separately-numbered pages containing 'The Man from Archangel'. This short story can be lumped roughly with The Mystery of Cloomber as regards atmosphere, bleak Scottish coast with shipwreck, though it lacks the Eastern mystics. But there are textual items in it regarding the intruding foreigners, over which I stumble. The mysterious Russian girl from the shipwreck wrote 'Sophie Ramusine'. She could speak no English; but if she could write her name at all, why could she not say it? If she spoke no English, she would write in Cyrillic script-which is not even the same as Cyrillic printed characters, and has for instance the letter n represented by a written character which English uses for h, while P standard for our R and c for our s. 'Sophie' would be 'Sofya', written with a C while the ya sound is a letter not in the roman alphabet; the result would look something like 'Cofa'. Much has been made of the garbled code of candle-flashes supposedly conveying an Italian message in 'The Red Circle', but this is inexplicable. The narrator finds 'Archangel' painted upon a plank from the shipwreck 'in strange, quaint lettering'-that is, in Cyrillic with which he was obviously unfamiliar. But the Russian for 'Archangel' would look something like ARKHAHTEACK (with an upside-down L and an incomplete A before CK). Then too the Man from Archangel says his name is Alexis Ourganeff, and that he is a Finn by birth. But 'Ourganeff' is a Russian name, not Finnish. While Finland was under Russian domination c. 1891, and no doubt many ethnic Russians were then (and later) born in ethnically Finnish territory, that did not make then 'Finns by birth'. The language problems are as large in 'The Man from Archangel' as in The Mystery of Cloomber and The Sign of the Four. And is the Latvian in 'The Disintegration Machine' another such case? Trifles, no doubt; but what do they reveal about a well-educated author who had studied in Austria and had a good working knowledge of French and German?
'The Man from Archangel' appears also in the Collier Conan Doyle's Best Books, those three mud-coloured volumes from 1903 with the Frederic Dorr Steele frontispieces and orange ink on the titlepages. It is in Volume 2, one of thirteen of ACD's short stories occupying more than half the volume following The Sign of the Four. The stories are mostly the early stories collected in 1890-93 under several titles: The Gully of Bluemansdyke, My Friend the Murderer, Mysteries and Adventures. The text plates of The Sign of the Four did not originate with Collier, but with A. L. Burt; but as the short stories do not appear in any of the other dozen or more uses of the Sign plates, Collier may have typeset the stories themselves. The publishing history of almost every piece of ACD's work needs to be knitted into the whole fabric in order to know what impact these works have produced.
We should, while we are at it, look at early influences on the literary ACD. 'I am an omnivorous reader', one of his characters says. Voracious was the word for young Arthur, and one of his favourite boyhood authors was Thomas Mayne Reid, who called himself Captain Mayne Reid, having been an officer in the New York volunteers in the Mexican War. Reid returned to London in 1848 to make a career of boy-Westerns such as The Rifle Rangers, The Young Voyageurs and The Scalp Hunters. The last is of special interest because it depicts (most unfavourably) what is now the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, centre of art, tourism, retirement and John Bennett Shaw. The extent to which the young ACD absorbed and retained impressions from Reid's work has not been fully studied.
My copy of The Scalp Hunters was published by Hurst, one of the New York pirates we often encounter. It bears the notice 'Copyright 1899 by S. C. Andrews' but it was certainly not in American copyright, as it was written in England in the 1850s. Possibly the lithographed cover of Indians in a canoe was copyright. But do not these phrases and incidents sound familiar from ACD's writings?
'I find on referring to my notebook
We 'had our flasks along ...' As Inspector Lestrade said, 'As long as I have my trousers I have a hip-pocket, and as long as I have my hip-pocket I have something in it.' Reid goes on to say that each flask contained a pint of pure Cognac.
There is the incident of the narrator sinking in quicksand; and of his recuperation from a knife-wound in Santa Fe, reminiscent of Dr Watson's recuperation in Peshawur, even to strolling on the verandah. Later the narrator suffers multiple wounds!
The geography of The Scalp Hunters sounds confusing. I have not consulted the Sage of Santa Fe, but Reid seems to have the Rocky Mountains both east and west of Santa Fe. Also the ridges of the Sierra Blanca are away to the eastward, while ACD's account of the Great Alkali Plain says, 'In the whole world there can be no more dreary view than that from the northern slope of the Sierra Blanco'. Note the slight difference: Blanca and Blanco.
The subplot of the loss of a child to the Indians reminds one of Part II of A Study in Scarlet, and the description of 'savage Navajos' is probably as accurate as ACD's depiction of the intractable Mormons. The description of the central desert, and mention of the Great Salt Lake, are reminiscent of both A Study in Scarlet and the bleak Vermissa Valley in The Valley of Fear. Simultaneous shots fired by trapper and Indian are akin to those fired in 'The Dancing Men', though fortunately in Reid's tale they are only at a treed animal. There is mention of a herd of buffaloes' and we remember the footprints in A Study in Scarlet and 'The Boscombe Valley Mystery'. Gordon Speck has recently pointed out that Mayne Reid's Wild Huntress, and Sir Richard Burton's The City of the Saints, parallel Part II of A Study in Scarlet as well. (5)
There is the breaking into narrative with a romantic apostrophe-in The Scalp Hunters, on moonlight in the high desert': in 'The Naval Treaty' the moss rose episode; and speculation about the narrator's beloved, akin to Watson's infatuation with Mary Morstan. The description of the secret Navajo temple reminds me of Thaddeus Sholto's 'oasis in the howling desert' of South London, in its barbaric splendour. Finally, there is combat on a narrow cliff path-first on horseback, then on foot hand-to-hand-surely inspiration for that combat in 'The Final Problem', though Reid himself used the same scene over again, and there are multiple sources woven into the Reichenbach Fall scene, including Victor Hugo and an 1867 story in Macmillan's Magazine.
So having observed many trifles each alone insignificant-we can proceed to logical processes: induction, deduction, abduction, subduction. Take your pick; I do not know one from another. But one conclusion we must come to, from the evidence of many trifles: that we must produce a picture of Arthur Conan Doyle using the same method as the French impressionists, that is pointillism, in which (I quote the dictionary, for I know less of art than Inspector Macdonald in The Valley of Fear) luminosity is produced by laying on the colours in points or small dots of unmixed colour, which are blended by the eye'. All of which reminds one of the statement about Doctor Watson in the first page of The Hound of the Baskervilles: 'It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light'. We must accumulate as many trifles as possible and place them in our picture, comparing that picture with what we can learn of the culture, commonplaces and circumstances of ACD's Victorian and Edwardian age, in order to make these points or small dots blend to our eyes. The mistake which has so overmuch been deliberately perpetrated by certain enthusiasts has been to take a trifle, a drop of water, and infer from it a Niagara of erroneous conclusions-which might have been immediately reduced to drought by looking at the larger circumstances, such as the impossibility of finding water on the moon. Alas, Monsignor Knox, your 1912 satire has fallen on blind ears and deaf eyes, your ridicule of the methods of Biblical analysis has become gospel, for the theological schools are full of analytically debunking experts, our societies have filled with fanatic enthusiasts who knew neither Joseph nor any other prophet, and our original source of fascination, the author, is forgotten in this museum of caricature of his created figure.
What price then Arthur Conan Doyle? Not so much what price today-what worth the academics state in comparison with Shakespeare, Shaw or Swinburne — but what price in his own time, what value seen by his contemporaries, British or even Americans of his day. This month new biographies of Winston Churchill are debunking him. Does it matter? Did Churchill, or did he not, inspire his own people in his own day? Was Victoria a great queen, or not? Looking at ACD in the same way, does it matter what the academic debunkers now say? Views of him in his own time may establish his price better than we can translate that price in today's currency. More than once I have read that ACD was to Americans the best-known
British personage of his time. The prices paid to him in his famous years reflect that opinion.
One aspect of that evaluation is the study of the physical record of that popularity: the physical bibliography of ACD's works. I caution you that there is not a great deal of time left for that, because much of the early published Conan Doyle is mouldering into dust. Much more will be lost as attention turns from the book as prime record, to text stored in other forms. Photographs fade. Colour photographs fade more rapidly. Videotapes fade. How soon will we find that other forms of textual transmission fade? Moreover, these forms are not the text as it originally appeared. The very process of textual transmission, whether print or non-print, can induce errors in that text, through human frailty if no other reason. This is good science, known as the Uncertainty Principle, that the very observation of circumstances alters those circumstances. We have already lost, at least lost track of, many of ACD's own manuscripts; and sadly and conversely, corrupted Conan Doyle texts are still being republished by greedy commercial interests. Cambridge University Press is now producing a History of the Book in Britain. One of the editors has struck a keynote which may well be taken in regard to ACD: 'The editors have ... decided to make readers the central issue. Who reads books? What books were read? What demands can we perceive? How did the books reach readers? Where did they come from?' (6)
The same page of the Times Higher Education Supplement points out the important role of the literary agent in modern publishing-beginning with ACD's own agent, A.P. Watt. The literary agent is one of the answers to that question, how did books reach readers? I commend to you the detailed study not only of the original texts of Arthur Conan Doyle, but of the way they have come to us, and the sources he used to craft his works before paper rots, ink fades, and nothing is left but a negligent line buried in some massive bibliography.
References
1. Bengis: Baker Street Journal: 7, pp.204-214 (1957)
2. Ronald Pearsall: The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (1969); Edwardian Life and Leisure (1973); Collapse of Stout Party: Victorian Wit and Humour (1975); Night's Black Angels: The Forms and Faces of Victorian Cruelty (1975); Public Purity, Private Shame: Victorian Sexual Hypocrisy Exposed (1976); perhaps even The Table Rappers (1972) about Spiritualism
3. Georgina Doyle, in attendance at the ACDS conference, kindly reminded me at this point that Innes's full name was Innes Hay Doyle. (And I add that my maternal grandmother's name was Georgina; thank you, Mrs Doyle.)
4. And a copy was on a bookseller's shelf in Toronto during the ACDS conference for $225.
5. Gordon Speck; Camden House Journal, Vol. 16, No.3 (March 1994)
6. Times Higher Educ. Supplement; 3 Dec. 1993
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
