The Inner Room: Editorial (vol. 1 No. 2)
The Inner Room: Editorial [Vol. 1 No. 2] is an article written by David Stuart Davies published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 1, No. 2) in march 1990.
The editorial reflects on Arthur Conan Doyle's extraordinary speed and fluency as a writer, focusing on how The Sign of Four was conceived, written, and completed in barely a month amid multiple simultaneous projects. It uses this example to marvel at Conan Doyle's creative energy, noting that even a known factual error survived as a testament to his rapid, confident method of composition.
Editorial
Apart from the variety and quantity of output, one aspect of Conan Doyle's work that leaves me open-mouthed is the speed at which he wrote. Looking at some of the original manuscript pages of the Holmes stories, one can see that after the words hit the paper, hardly any major revisions were made. The odd phrase and sundry felicities were tinkered with but in the main the final work, unlike this editorial for example, very much resembled the first draft.
It was interesting to note in Richard Lancelyn Green's article "Conan Doyle's Pocket Diary for 1889" (A C D, Vol. 1, No. 1), that The Sign of Four, whose publication we are celebrating this year, was written within a month of being commissioned. It is unlikely that Conan Doyle had thoughts about such a story before he attended the now famous dinner on 30 August 1889 at The Langham Hotel with the editor of Lippincott's Joseph Marshall Stoddart, Oscar Wilde, and the Irish M. P. Thomas Patrick Gill. In fact, he wrote to Stoddart on 3 September saying:
- As far as I can see my way at present my story will either be called "The Sign of the Six" or "The Problem of the Sholtos". You said you wanted a spicy title. I shall give Sherlock Holmes of "A Study in Scarlet" something else to unravel.
He may have been prompted to think of Holmes again as A Study in Scarlet had been reprinted earlier that year but, nevertheless, Conan Doyle talks of the story in only vague terms. And yet, his diary entry for 30 September states: "The Sign of the Four finished and dispatched." — What alacrity!
The Sign of the Four was written in the midst of other literary endeavours: on 19 August he started work on The White Company, and in September he had begun revising his old novel Girdlestone & Co. which became The Firm of Girdlestone, while at the same time attempting to assemble a series of short stories with a view to having them published in one collection. One can only wonder at the incredible mind and energy responsible for producing in so short, and apparently hectic, a time The Sign of the Four, perhaps the most cohesive and, therefore, the best of the Holmes novels.
The plot has greater dash than A Study in Scarlet, and Holmes plays a more integral part in the main proceedings than he does either in The Valley of Fear or The Hound of the Baskervilles.
The speed with which Holmes' second investigation was completed no doubt explains why it was not until it was published in Lippincotts, both in Britain and America, in February 1890, that Conan Doyle spotted "one obvious mistake". As he wrote in a letter to Stoddart:
- ... in the second chapter the letter is headed July 7th and on almost the same page I talk of it being a September evening.
Despite his instruction that this "must be corrected in book form, that mistake survives in printed editions today almost as a memorial to the way in which the book was created; to that Doylean flourish and celerity.
However, if we consider The Sign of the Four in a wider context than the Holmes Canon, we can see not only that this splendid work was produced with great speed, but also at a time when so much else occupied the creative mind of the man who is the fount of this Society.
And having seen..... we can only marvel.
DAVID STUART DAVIES
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
