Conrad had fully immersed himself in what he called ‘the destructive element’ by the last decade of the nineteenth century and had formed his worldview, something summed up in such pungent Conradisms as: ‘Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose’, ‘We live, as we dream, alone’, ‘All a man can betray is his conscience.’ They speckle all his fiction. A bequest from his ever kind uncle inaugurated a second career as a writer, beginning with ‘a story of an Eastern river’, Almayer’s Folly (1895) – an auspiciously mature work. Conrad was blessed in his literary friends – men such as the critic Edward Garnett, the publisher William Blackwood, fellow novelists like Ford Madox Hueffer, and, particularly, his literary agent James B. Pinker who ingeniously worked his author’s copyrights and patiently put up with his often outrageous demands for money.
Nothing flowed easily from Conrad’s pen. The most costive of writers, getting a novel out of him, one friend said, was like a Caesarean birth. His aristocratic background expressed itself not merely in a majestic appearance, dress and haughty bearing (no novelist photographed better), but in an unquestioning expectation for things he could not, in the first half of his writing career, afford: country houses (he preferred Kent, by the sea), servants, limousines, chauffeurs, first-class travel. As Cedric Watts records, by 1909 Conrad’s debts totalled £2,250, at a time when the average annual earnings of a doctor were about £400. In 1896 Conrad had confirmed that he was a seafarer no more by marrying. His wife, Jessie George, sixteen years younger than him, had been a typist – a useful skill. There would be two sons, Borys and John – one carrying a Polish name, the other an English one. The next ten years following his marriage comprise what Watts calls ‘the major phase’ – and three acknowledged masterpieces: Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), Under Western Eyes (1911).
The First World War (in which Borys was severely shell-shocked, never to recover) and the Russian Revolution paralysed Conrad creatively. His growing popularity made him suspect he must be writing below his best self. None the less it is hard to think he ever wrote anything better than ‘The Secret Sharer’ (1912) or The Shadow Line (1917). This feeling was compounded by a creeping sense of being somehow passé. The novel had moved forward; he, as a novelist, had not. Victory (1915) came out in the same year as Lawrence’s The Rainbow; The Rover (1923) came out within months of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). The comparisons are not entirely in Conrad’s favour.
He was, in his last years, seen by the public as a giant. He graciously turned down a knighthood offered by Ramsay MacDonald’s government. Visits to Poland and, particularly, America, in 1923, confirmed his now worldwide celebrity (the Soviet Union never liked him, nor he them). By this point his health was deteriorating fast. Chain-smoking shortened his life: a ‘mountain of ash’, as he once said, memorialised each of his great works. The memorial he actually chose for his gravestone was:
Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.
As Cedric Watts tersely reminds us, ‘these are the words uttered in Spenser’s Faerie Queene by “a man of hell, that calls himself Despair”’. Not a cheerful passport to eternity.
FN
Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski)
MRT
Lord Jim
Biog
J. Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (2007)
86. Ella Hepworth Dixon 1857–1932
Shall we never have done with the New Woman? The Times, reviewing Dixon’s one novel
I spent ten years of my academic life compiling a guide to Victorian fiction. It involved the highly pleasurable task of reading some 3,000 novels. ‘What masterpieces have you found, overlooked by literary history?’ I was asked. ‘Only one’, I would reply. ‘Ella Dixon.’ ‘Who?’ was the inevitable response; followed by, ‘What did she write?’
Ella was born in London, the daughter and seventh child of William Hepworth Dixon, long-serving (1853–69) editor of the Athenaeum, the most authoritative literary journal of the nineteenth century. Being seventh meant, she jested, that her life would be fortunate: if fairy stories were to be believed. Whatever else, her subsequent life was no fairy story. ‘A Knight of the Inkstand’, as his daughter called him, W. H. Dixon was the offspring of a Lancashire, puritan family, enriched by trade. In her very early childhood, Ella’s father was a thriving man: a JP and a noted traveller (he helped found the Palestine Exploration Fund). The family occupied a large house by the Regent’s Park – one of the finer addresses in London. But the good life did not last. Dixon suffered a series of reverses in the 1870s, a formative period for his daughter. In 1874, their home was wrecked by an industrial explosion and Dixon himself was disabled by a fall from a horse in 1878. There were also financial misfortunes. He died, prematurely, when his daughter was in her early twenties.
Her mother was an ‘advanced’ woman, an Ibsenite and, as Ella recalls ‘almost the first woman in London to call in a woman doctor when my brother Sydney was born’. Ella was educated expensively in London and Heidelberg, studied painting in Paris, and followed in her father’s footsteps by editing The Englishwoman during the course of 1895. She never married and, even for a woman of her class in the 1890s, travelled widely and moved freely in the London literary world. A successful journalist by profession, Dixon wrote short stories, collected under the cumbersome, but indicative, title: One Doubtful Hour and other Side-Lights on the Feminine Temperament (1904).
Dixon’s only published novel is The Story of a Modern Woman (1894). Painfully autobiographical, it has as its heroine Mary Erle, the orphaned daughter of a renowned man of letters. As a little girl, she scorns dolls (and the Ibsenite dolls’ house, we presume). Mary aims at an independent life in a world as yet unready for female independence. It means struggle. Failing as an artist, she scrapes a living as a journalist, living in poor lodgings all the while. She discards her lover, Vincent (a married man), and is left at the end of the narrative independent, at last, wretchedly alone, but still a fighter. The last scene is of the heroine, at twilight, at Highgate cemetery, a glimmering London at her feet.
Dixon also wrote My Flirtations (1892) by ‘Margaret Wynman’, a ‘lively and catty’ series of sketches, supposedly written by a coquette. Towards the end of her life, she was militant for the cause of women’s rights, and lived to see partial victory for the ‘Modern Woman’. She left a memoir of literary London, As I Knew Them: Sketches of People I Have Met on the Way (1930), which is extraordinarily unrevealing, confirming the author’s intention to remain one of her age’s inconnues – impenetrably private.
FN
Ella Nora Hepworth Dixon (‘Margaret Wynman’)
MRT
The Story of a Modern Woman
Biog
Valerie Fehlbaum (intro), Ella Hepworth Dixon: The Story of a Modern Woman (2005)
87. Mary Cholmondeley 1859–1925
With men it is take, take, take until we have nothing left to give. The mother’s outburst in Cholmondeley’s notorious novel, Prisoners
Cholmondeley was born at Hodnet, in Shropshire, the eldest of five daughters of a clergyman and distantly related to the Marquess of Cholmondeley. A lifelong sufferer from asthma, she was educated mainly at home by a family governess and by her father. Her childhood was, she later recorded, heavily ‘repressed’, although there was no shortage of books for her to broaden her mind with – and they were not all conventional books. Mary’s mother, unusually, was interested to the point of obsession with science. From the ages of sixteen to thirty Cholmondeley lived in the country, helping her father with his parochial duties – her mother having been afflicted with creeping paralysis. Mary never married; being convinced from childhood that she did not possess the looks which would attract a man.
In 1896, when the Revd Cholmondeley retired, for health reasons, as Rector of Hodnet (having lost the bulk of his property), the family moved from their country
vicarage to live in a London flat. Mary, who had written her first novel aged seventeen, began to circulate her work among publishers as early as 1883. Her first published novel, The Danvers Jewels (1887), published anonymously, was an ingenious, sprightly, sub-Moonstone, detective story. It was successful enough to warrant a sequel, Sir Charles Danvers (1889).
During the late 1880s, her parents’ health was failing, as was Mary’s – although she was now the family’s principal breadwinner. She necessarily lived a retired life, out of the world, although her fiction was smart and Shavian. Her novels, particularly when they satirised established religion, sometimes scandalised and always contained a substratum of barely sublimated female rage. The imprisoned butterfly is one of her favourite images. Diana Tempest (1893) displays Cholmondeley’s melodramatic tendencies attractively, with a plot centred on murder. The novel was dedicated to the author’s sister, Hester, who had died aged twenty-two. The dedication is accompanied by a complaint about God, the tyrannical father, and foe to women: ‘He put our lives so far apart we cannot hear each other speak.’ The story centres on a hidebound father, Colonel Tempest, who dies in a condition of religious mania. Diana Tempest was the first book to appear under Cholmondeley’s own name. Her father, one gathers, did not approve of a novel-writing daughter.
Red Pottage (1899) is the novel which has lasted best. It features a duel, a guilty man’s self-destruction, and some sharp satire against religious cant. The last aspect of the work provoked denunciation from a London pulpit which delighted the author. Red Pottage also has a revealing scene in which the heroine Hester’s antipathetic clergyman brother, James, discovers the manuscript of her latest work of fiction (she publishes her novels secretly and anonymously), for which she has received the promise of £1,000. The filthy thing reminds him of the novels of the detestable atheist, George Eliot, and he burns the only copy she has.
Cholmondeley went on to produce five novels in the twentieth century, one of which, Prisoners (1906), ran into libel trouble and irritated many of her acquaintance who discovered themselves portrayed in the work. In later life she subsided into silence, living with her sister Victoria in London and Suffolk.
FN
Mary Cholmondeley
MRT
Red Pottage
Biog
P. Lubbock, Mary Cholmondeley: A Sketch from Memory (1928)
88. Arthur Conan Doyle 1859–1930
Holmes takes my mind from better things.
Doyle was born in Edinburgh, one of nine children of an alcoholic father. An Irish artist turned Scottish civil servant, Charles Doyle was consigned, in later life, to a series of lunatic asylums. In the late 1970s a notebook surfaced whose lucid wit suggested that he may have been the victim of ‘wrongous confinement’. It was not an unknown resort of vindictive wives – divorce, Victorian-style. The novelist recorded little of his feelings about his luckless parent. A wealthy ‘lodger’ in the Doyle household – Dr Bryan Waller – slipped into the paternal (and possibly spousal) role, yet in none of his autobiographical writings does Doyle allude to the mysterious Waller, whose existence was uncovered by twentieth-century detective work.
Arthur Doyle (now additionally named ‘Conan’, later hyphenated, for a godfather with whom his relationship is obscure) was educated at the fee-paying Jesuit college, Stonyhurst. For the rest of his life he spoke with a pronounced Scottish accent and was ambivalent about religion. At sixteen he spent a year in Austria before enrolling at Edinburgh University’s medical school. He loved the Alps and would have been gratified by the modern pilgrimages by Holmes fans to the Reichenbach Falls.
His first story, ‘The Mystery of Sasassa Valley’, was published in 1879. In 1880 he spent seven months in the Arctic as ship’s doctor on a whaler. The following year he graduated, a ‘sixty per-cent examinee’ with a respectable degree, and made another trip to Africa. After an unsuccessful experiment in partnership, he set up in medical practice at Southsea, near Portsmouth, in July 1882. His income had reached £300 a year by 1885, enabling him to marry the sister of one of his patients. Little is known of Louise Hawkins, other than that she had some money and may have nudged her husband towards spiritualism. A few years after the marriage she contracted tuberculosis which, although he was a trained doctor, Doyle did not diagnose until the disease was fatally advanced. He may have felt corrosive guilt at his oversight.
All through his early years at Southsea, Doyle had kept up his writing on the side and in 1886 played around with stories centred on an ‘amateur private detective’, called ‘J. Sherrinford Holmes’. The outcome was the Sherlock Holmes novella, A Study in Scarlet (1887). No top-drawer publisher would take it and it was eventually serialised in a magazine edited by Mrs Beeton’s husband. As usual with innovative works, the big-name publishers got it wrong. This mystery of double murder in Utah and London caught the public taste and Doyle followed it up with another Holmes adventure, The Sign of Four (1890). Doyle put something of himself into Sherlock Holmes but the sleuth was mainly inspired by a sharp-eyed teacher at Edinburgh, Dr Joseph Bell, a virtuoso at diagnosing illness by symptomatic ‘clues’, invisible to others. Early in 1891, Doyle submitted two stories to H. Greenhough Smith of the Strand Magazine. The editor reportedly realised ‘that here was the greatest short story writer since Edgar Allan Poe’. These Sherlock Holmes stories were devised to correct ‘the great defect’ in current detective fiction – lack of logic. They were illustrated by Sidney Paget, who supplied the detective with his trademark deerstalker and aquiline profile.
Doyle’s heart was never really in detective fiction. Holmes, he complained, ‘takes my mind from better things’. Nevertheless the stories were phenomenally popular in Britain and America and overshadowed everything else Doyle would ever write. In fact, his writing was extremely diverse. It includes such ambitious historical romances as Micah Clarke (1889), a story of the 1685 Rebellion and its defeat at Sedgemoor, told autobiographically by one of Monmouth’s humble followers. The White Company (1891), another historical romance, was the author’s own favourite work. The action is set in the Hundred Years War with France, and follows the exploits of a company of English bowmen. Doyle also invented the series heroes Professor Challenger (see The Lost World, 1912) and Brigadier Gerard. But, vary his game as he might, he was doomed to be the creator of Sherlock Holmes however much he chafed under it. In 1893, he killed the detective at the Reichenbach Falls, only to have to bring him back to life in 1901 and again in 1903.
Much as he came to hate him, Holmes made Doyle rich. With the aid of the agent A. P. Watt, the novelist was earning as much as £1,600 a year by his pen in 1891, and by the end of the century was one of the richest of British men of letters. Doyle was a hearty man, loving cricket (he played for the MCC, and on one glorious occasion bowled out W. G. Grace), shooting and motoring – an expensive hobby which Holmes subsidised handsomely, as he did world travel and a country-house lifestyle. No pigging it in Baker Street digs for Arthur Conan-Doyle. Rodney Stone (1896) reflects Doyle’s enthusiasm for the manly art of pugilism. Set in the early nineteenth century, it introduces Beau Brummel and other historical notables into the action, and earned the author £5,000, a handsome purse. Above all, Doyle loved skiing. He picked up the enthusiasm in Davos (where his wife went for the sake of her lungs) and popularised the sport – enriching Switzerland even more than Holmes had enriched the Strand’s proprietor, George Newnes.
Louise Doyle was thirteen years dying. For ten of those years her husband was passionately involved with a woman almost young enough to be his daughter. Free at last, he married Jean Leckie in 1907, a year after the death of Louise. Doyle had children (with both Louise and Jean), but his relationship with them seems to have been remote.
Doyle was a convinced imperialist. During the Boer War he offered his rusty medical services to the armed forces and propagandised for the English cause. One of his anti-Boer ‘war pamphlets’ sold half a million copies. He was knighted by a grateful government in 1902. Do
yle was similarly active as a patriotic front-line reporter in the First World War and made himself England’s foremost novelist-propagandist, along with Mrs Humphry Ward (whom he admired) and Hall Caine (whom he despised). He lost a son and a favourite brother to the Great War, which may have predisposed his cranky adherence to spiritualism in his last years.
All his adult life, Doyle was extraordinarily diligent as a writer to the press and attached himself to innumerable causes. Some, such as his defence of wrongly convicted criminals, were noble. His campaign to clear the alleged ‘horse slasher’, George Edalji, inspired a worthy act of literary hommage, Julian Barnes’s novel, Arthur and George (2005). Other causes – notably his crusade on behalf of the ‘Cottingley fairies’ – brought ridicule. Few writers have retained their posthumous popularity more bestsellingly. It is nice to think of his spirit (did such things, as Doyle believed, exist) slipping into a Leicester Square cinema to catch a showing of the 2009, Guy Ritchie-directed, Robert Downey Jr-starring movie Sherlock Holmes.
FN
(Sir) Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
MRT
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Biog
Martin Booth, The Doctor, the Detective, and Arthur Conan Doyle (1997)
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 34
