Review:The Winning Shot/Christopher Roden
This review of the booklet "The Winning Shot", by Arthur Conan Doyle was written by Christopher Roden and published in the The Parish Magazine (No. 15, january 1997).
This review welcomes the new annotated edition of The Winning Shot for making a rare Conan Doyle story more accessible, but is sharply critical of Philip Weller's editorial choices, tone, and some of the volume's annotations and production flaws. It argues that, despite useful material on the text and its context, the edition is weakened by pettiness toward earlier editors, inconsistent annotation, and avoidable errors.
Review
- THE WINNING SHOT
- by Arthur Conan Doyle
- Annotated and with an Introduction by Philip L. Weller
- Sherlock Publications, 1995; 54pp (large format (A4) card covers); £10;
- ISBN 1-8737230-20-3
Reviewed by Christopher Roden
'The Winning Shot', to which R. Dixon Smith refers in 'The Gap on the Second Shelf elsewhere in this issue, made its first appearance in Bow Bells on 11 July 1883. Up to now, apart from being reprinted in the elusive An Actor's Duel and The Winning Shot, its only reprint has been in The Unknown Conan Doyle: Uncollected Stories, edited by John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green (Secker & Warburg, 1982).
This new printing, which, its editor tells us, restores the original Bow Bells text, comes complete with an essay entitled 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Dartmoor Connection'. The essay also attempts to piece together the internal textual chronology of the story and a textual bibliography, and offers other incidental items.
In highlighting the restoration of the original text, Philip Weller draws attention to the earlier printing by Gibson and Green. 'The version of "The Winning Shot" [in Uncollected Stories],' he writes, omits some relatively large sections of the story as it was originally published, and there are numerous minor changes.'
Well, numerous minor changes there are, and whilst these are chiefly stylistic (changes in publishing style from the 1880s to the 1980s), there are occasional instances of words which have been omitted, and even inserted-though, it has to be said, by no means to the detriment of the text.
'Some relatively large sections' amount to a single twenty-one word passage towards the story's end. This was, I strongly suspect, a typographer's omission caused by the eye lighting on an identical phrase ['from which'] occurring within a couple of lines, with the result that the intervening twenty-one words were omitted. Again, the omission changes the sense not one iota and it is, I feel, unfortunate that Weller should sieze upon it to imply a shortcoming in the Gibson & Green volume. There would appear to be a snideness here, which is further manifested in a phrase of the editor's appearing two paragraphs later: ... the invaluable bibliography of most of [italics mine] Conan Doyle's works...
We are all aware that A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle has minor omissions-chiefly in the nature of discoveries made since its publication in 1983. Some of us are sensitive to the fact that those omissions are unlikely to see correction before it is possible to make a full consideration of the Conan Doyle Biographical Archive. To imply criticism by the insertion of a carefully placed word (as 'most' is in this case) is churlish.
A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle may not be perfect, and Uncollected Stories may not offer a perfect reproduction of original texts, but Weller's volume has its own omissions and typographical errors too: a photograph referred to (note 3, page 7) does not appear in the book; and three paragraphs below that note there is a dropped 'h' from the word 'had'. It is petty to mention such things here, but the editor of this volume seems to require a standard to be set.
Of the text of the story itself, I regrettably did not have a Bow Bells text to hand with which to make a comparison. However, if, as is indicated, the text has been fully restored, it would appear that there are errors in the original (e.g., a stray 'and' on line 4 of page 9; 'considerable' rather than the more correct 'considerably' on page 15).
Apart from the story, Weller has managed to compile some 307 annotations to this short story, some useful, a number unnecessary. In view of the criticism he makes of Uncollected Stories, however, it is surprising that no effort has been made to annotate where textual differences do occur between that volume and the original text as presented here that would have been particularly useful. The Weller text adopts a peculiar typesetting style which has each paragraph separated by at least a one line space, making Note 3, which tells us that there are several double paragraph break spaces [in the original]' virtually meaningless, since these breaks cannot be easily distinguished in the text.
Of other annotations, I found myself in disagreement with the handling of one of the leading characters in the story, Charley, the eldest son of Colonel Pillar. The annotation tells us that Charley is 'a familiar form of the name Charles'. Indeed it may be, but it is somewhat presumptuous of the editor to then change the name to Charles in subsequent annotations (though he does this inconsistently). If Conan Doyle wrote 'Charley' (and there is no reason to believe that he did not), that was surely what he intended the character's name to be there is no reason for that to be changed on a personal whim over one hundred years later.
To round off the volume there are three extracts from Ordnance Survey maps, which are provided to supplement the editor's notes on the possible location of Toynby Hall. The extract from a large scale map (page 53) and the reproduction of the 1" map (page 54) are muddy and extremely difficult to distinguish with any ease despite their large format (at least that is the case in the copy from which I am working). The final map also indicates 'Tavistock Road and Roborough Hall Highlighted'. That is misleading: they are not.
I am enthusiastic about all attempts to make reprints of Conan Doyle's work more widely available, and for that reason alone 'The Winning Shot' is a welcome addition to other recent reprints, though my personal preference is to see publications of this nature available in more permanent form. The volume has not, I understand, been produced in great numbers and may become difficult to obtain in quite short time.
Christopher Roden
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
