by Michael Sims
CHAPTER 12
The Circular Tour
After ten years of such work I was as unknown as if I had never dipped a pen into an ink bottle.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES
During his first few months at Bush Villas, Arthur turned his imagination to his whaling voyage two years earlier. The dramatic scenes of the Arctic, its ethereal beauty, and the romantic melancholy it inspired had remained with him, and he drew upon vivid memories to write a ghost story, “The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star,’” which he sold to Temple Bar for a satisfying ten guineas. It showed no great originality in his conception of a ship captain haunted by the ghost of his former love, who lures him onto an ice floe, where he dies. But the setting was vivid, the atmosphere forbidding, and Arthur conjured a dramatic sense of tragic fate. Turning toward his own experience for background, resurrecting scenes he had witnessed—he even made the narrator a young ship’s doctor—he soon rose above his first tales situated in exotic but poorly imagined settings such as the Australian gold fields or the North American frontier.
During 1883, continuing to harvest his seafaring memories, he wrote “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” and began sending it to magazines. Arthur was fascinated by the already legendary fate of a British merchant brigantine named the Mary Celeste. He had been reading about it for more than a decade. In early December 1872, when Arthur was thirteen, the 282-ton ship was found derelict four hundred miles east of the Azores, with its cargo of seventeen hundred barrels of industrial alcohol still in the hold but threatened by three feet of sloshing water. The ship had been at sea for a month, its last log entry dated November 25. Unmanned but still under full sail, it was drifting toward Gibraltar. Its captain, his wife, their young daughter, and seven crewmen had vanished—along with the ship’s single lifeboat. One of her pumps had been disassembled, but there was no sign of violence or accident to explain the absence of people. Pirates would have looted; a storm would have wrecked. During the intervening decade, despite government investigations and idle speculation, no trace of the family or crew had been found.
For some reason, Arthur changed the name of the ship from Mary Celeste to Marie Celeste, while keeping the real name of the captain and even of the rescue ship, the Dei Gratia. Most of his account was fictional. To make his own story more eerie, for example, Arthur claimed that both of the ship’s lifeboats were present. He added the supernatural-sounding detail that the ship, despite its abandonment, had remained so becalmed that a thread bobbin had not even rolled off the sewing machine.
In the summer of 1883, Arthur was delighted when “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” was accepted by James Payn, editor of The Cornhill, probably the most distinguished publisher of short fiction in Britain. The esteemed monthly—to whose pages Arthur had long aspired—had been founded in 1859 by the since legendary editor George Murray Smith. He was the son of George Smith, cofounder of the publishing firm Smith, Elder & Co., which was known for the high quality of its offerings, ranging from Charles Darwin’s scientific travelogue, Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle, to Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. To steer The Cornhill, the primary rival of Dickens’s monthly All the Year Round, Smith hired William Makepeace Thackeray, Dickens’s primary rival as a novelist. The Cornhill’s status was such that Queen Victoria chose it to serialize her Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands.
James Payn was a writer himself, author of moderately popular novels such as Lost Sir Massingberd and Richard Arbour, or The Family Scapegrace. He had written many stories before venturing to tackle a novel. After more than a decade editing Edinburgh’s own Chambers’s Journal, he had become editor of The Cornhill as recently as 1883, when Leslie Stephen, the former editor, stepped down.
When Arthur got his hands on a copy of the January 1884 issue, there was his story, the lead, with half the first page taken up by a striking illustration of a half-naked black African. To Arthur’s delight, his story did not disappear into the void. A year later the Boston Herald reprinted it, apparently construing it as a factual account.
Meanwhile, Arthur’s 1882 London Society story “Bones, or, The April Fool of Harvey’s Sluice” had been reprinted in 1885 by the U.S. publisher Dodd, Mead in volume four of its anthology Tales from Many Sources. Therein Arthur and other young British authors such as Thomas Hardy stood amid their better-known colleagues—Wilkie Collins, popular children’s author Juliana H. Ewing, James Payn, and Charles Reade. It was Arthur’s first appearance between book covers.
A second soon followed. In October 1887 the editor George Redway included “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” in his prominent three-volume anthology Dreamland and Ghostland: Strange Stories of Coincidence and Ghostly Adventure, which bore the misleading extended subtitle Embracing Remarkable Dreams, Presentiments, and Coincidences, Records of Singular Personal Experience by Various Writers, Startling Stories from Individual and Family History, Mysterious Incidents from the Lips of Living Narrators, and Some Psychological Studies, Grave and Gay. Redway chose a couple of Arthur’s other stories as well, but only those narrated in the first person in a manner that might be interpreted as factual. Thus Arthur’s imagined details, including the newly French-sounding name Marie Celeste, soon became part of the ship’s myth.
“Have you seen what they say about your Cornhill story?” a friend called to Arthur on a Portsmouth street one winter day in early 1884. He was waving a London evening newspaper.
Eager for praise but cautiously donning a modest expression, Arthur peered over his friend’s shoulder as the man turned to the column and read aloud: “The Cornhill this month has a story in it which would have made Thackeray turn in his grave.”
Arthur said later that the alleged friend escaped assault only because there were witnesses nearby on the street.
This incident reminded Arthur of the rare benefits of anonymity. Mostly, like other writers, he experienced only the frustrations attending anonymous publication. Soon, however, praise helped balance the scales. More than one reviewer speculated that the author of “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” was Robert Louis Stevenson. This mistake was flattering—Arthur admired the work of his fellow Scot—but it did nothing to enhance Arthur’s own reputation, except with editors. Distant critical applause could not be heard at Arthur’s upstairs desk in Southsea.
But Stevenson himself suffered the same questions of identity when he published shorter tales rather than novels. Less than two years earlier, Arthur had picked up a two-year-old issue of The Cornhill, dated September–October 1880, and with excitement read a long story, “The Pavilion on the Links.” Not until later that year did he, along with many other readers, confirm the authorship of this story—and of others he had enjoyed—when they appeared together in New Arabian Nights, under the byline of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Such speculation was rampant in publishing. Most fiction published in periodicals at the time was unsigned. Political journalists earlier in the century had worn anonymity as their armor, and afterward it remained in fashion. Although his editorship drew readers, Charles Dickens had used writers’ anonymity to mask the extent of his own contributions to his periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round. Dickens felt that such intrusive editing lent his periodical a unified voice, an overall house style, but many contributors considered it an erasure of their individuality. By Arthur’s time, anonymous publishing was slowly expiring but not yet dead. Publishers had realized that a famous author’s name on the cover or masthead would lure subscribers, and that anonymity had at times disguised slanderers and other irresponsible writers. And writers were increasingly eager to gain credit for their labors.
Gradually the ambitious Arthur decided that only with publication of a novel could he draw attention to his work. In 1883 he wrote his first novel, a rather awkward and static tale with the bland title The Narrative of John Smith. In it Arthur gazed into a mirror and wrote about a medico who yearned to write fiction. Arthur made an effo
rt to step outside himself by making the narrator twice his own age and handicapped with gout, thus forced to narrow his focus onto a stack of blank paper, but it was an unconvincing personation. He speculated on the origins of religion, on the urge to write, on politics, on women, on life in general. The book was more a series of sketches and miniature essays than a novel.
Finally Arthur sent out the manuscript—only to have it lost in the mail. It was never received by the publisher and never returned to the author. To his inquiries, the post office replied on its standard blue forms that they had no record of it. Arthur tried rewriting it from memory, but he seems to have given up in frustration or simply lost interest, perhaps because this freshman project went stale as he outgrew it. He never finished the rewrite.
Summoning his usual determination, he tried again. During 1884 and 1885, Arthur wrote a novel entitled The Firm of Girdlestone. The melodramatic plot somewhat resembled that of A Lost Name, an 1868 novel by Sheridan Le Fanu, the celebrated Irish master of ghost stories and Gothic thrillers. Stepping considerably outside his own experience this time, Arthur told the story of the escalating chicanery perpetrated by John Girdlestone, founder of the London firm of Girdlestone and Company, and his son Ezra, in their desperate attempts to hide the financial ruin caused by the elder Girdlestone’s speculations. Arthur moved from a static structure for The Narrative of John Smith to a frenetic one for The Firm of Girdlestone. He told his sister that his book abounded in exciting murder scenes, and added, “I would need a private graveyard to plant all my characters in.”
Arthur didn’t try to hide his contempt for the Scrooge-like financiers. When three crew members die on one of the firm’s ships, the younger Girdlestone remarks mercilessly, “We know very well what that means. Three women, each with an armful of brats, besieging the office and clamouring for a pension.”
From the beginning, Arthur realized that the novel was derivative and uninspired. To his mother he described it as “fairly good as light literature goes nowadays.” But he kept sending it out. Publishers just as reliably returned it, in what Arthur later described as “the circular tour” that manuscripts take from writer to editor and back to writer like homing pigeons. Privately sharing their opinion, he felt that he couldn’t blame publishers for not snapping up Girdlestone.
CHAPTER 13
The Unseen World
There is great promise, I think, in the faces of the dead. They say it is but the post-mortem relaxation of the muscles, but it is one of the points on which I would like to see science wrong.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE STARK MUNRO LETTERS
In December 1883, Arthur’s lighthearted short story “Selecting a Ghost” appeared in London Society, which over the preceding couple of years had also published “The American’s Tale,” “The Gully of Bluemansdyke,” and others of his stories. This time, rather than trafficking in spooks of his own, Arthur mocked the claims of spiritualist mediums that they could summon ghosts on demand. The narrator, Silas D’Odd, has grown wealthy in the grocery business and as a consequence has bought a castle, Goresthorpe Grange, but he is shocked to learn that the moldering corridors lack a ghost: “As the presence of a kennel presupposes that of a dog, so I imagined that it was impossible that such desirable quarters should be untenanted by one or more restless shades.”
D’Odd and his wife turn to her cousin, who has already furnished the castle with a crest and fake family portraits. Eventually, under the influence of a drug, D’Odd finds several ghosts applying to him for work at Goresthorpe. “I am the invisible nonentity,” sighs one. “I am electric, magnetic, and spiritualistic. I am the great ethereal sigh-heaver.” Other ghosts appear—an old woman who says, “Sir Walter was partial to me”; a cavalier who boasts, “There is a blood stain over my heart . . . I am patronised by many old Conservative families”; a vague presence who quavers, “I snatch letters and place invisible hands on people’s wrists.” Finally a horrific vision of rotting bones in a shroud murmurs, “I am the embodiment of Edgar Allan Poe . . . I am a low-caste spirit-subduing spectre . . . Work with grave-clothes, a coffin-lid, and a galvanic battery.” In the end Silas D’Odd discovers that he was hallucinating under the influence of chloral.
Arthur may have been mocking himself in part, because during this time he began to explore spiritualism, the belief that after death disembodied spirits can communicate with the living. During his years in Southsea, Arthur read dozens of books about spiritualism, which in its alleged physical manifestations claimed to provide demonstrable evidence—rather than demanding a leap of faith—that the human spirit survives death. His earliest memory was the sight of his dead maternal grandmother in June 1862, before his fourth birthday. In 1881, while still in Edinburgh, he had attended a spiritualist lecture entitled “Does Death End All?” Now, in Southsea, he thought obsessively about this topic. In 1876, the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had recognized the importance of natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin, published a collection of three long essays about spiritualism, On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism. Arthur read this book attentively, along with dozens of other volumes exploring the question of whether some part of a human being’s personality and character—some essence or distillation—might survive and even transcend the death of its vehicle.
In early 1885, a Southsea colleague and friend, Dr. William Roylston Pike, consulted with Arthur about a patient—a young man named John (inevitably nicknamed Jack) Hawkins, who suffered from seizures that seemed to be growing steadily worse. Arthur accompanied Pike and examined the pale and feeble patient, who was twenty-five, only a month older than himself. Sadly, he confirmed the older doctor’s diagnosis of the seizures’ cause—cerebral meningitis, an inflammation of the tissues surrounding the brain. Usually it was fatal.
When examining Jack, Arthur met the rest of the Hawkins family. A Gloucestershire widow, Emily Hawkins had moved to Southsea only a few months earlier with her son Jack and her daughter Mary Louisa. Nicknamed “Touie,” Jack’s sister was almost twenty-eight. The family rented a terraced flat not far away, overlooking the sea and Southsea Common. Soon Jack grew worse, and apparently because of conflicts at their lodging, Arthur offered his own spare bedroom at Bush Villas to Jack. This way he could attend the boy himself at a moment’s notice. Emily Hawkins already had one son in a Gloucester mental asylum, and naturally preferred that Jack not go to a hospital—the last resort for the sick because of the mortality rate in such institutions.
Although it was a generous and romantic gesture, apparently Arthur expected to also get paid for this on-site medical work. In his autobiographical novel The Stark Munro Letters, the patient’s family asks the narrator to recommend lodging and Munro offers his own house. “Both ladies thanked me a very great deal more than I deserved,” he remarks; “for after all it was a business matter, and a resident patient was the very thing I needed.” When he offered to take in Jack Hawkins, Arthur was in financial straits. Again unable to meet his bills in Southsea, he had recently forwarded some to his faithful mother, knowing that she would pay them, as she had in the past.
Jack’s condition had been steadily worsening, and he died on the twenty-fifth of March, only a few days after moving into Arthur’s house. Two days later, Arthur rode with the Hawkins family as Jack’s coffin was conveyed from Bush Villas—a hearse parked outside must have been a poor advertisement for a physician—to the relatively new Highland Road Cemetery. During this time 40 percent of the burials at Highland Road were of children. Many had not dodged illness and accident to reach adulthood, and their small gravestones stood in solemn rows with the larger stones of their kin as Arthur’s patient was laid to rest.
Hardly had Arthur returned to Bush Villas when a policeman arrived to interrogate him about Jack’s death. There was a question about whether anyone might profit from it, especially this little-known young physician, in whose house the patient had quickly expired. Fortunately, Dr. Pike had examined Jack, at Arthur’s reque
st, only the night before his death. Pike’s professional opinion of the case, along with his established reputation, freed Arthur from suspicion.
Arthur found the death of his young patient traumatic, professionally and personally. But there were larger philosophical implications. For some years, Arthur had described himself as an agnostic and skeptic. Gradually, however, he had begun to yearn for greater spiritual satisfaction than he found in a materialist’s view of life. Now and then he even attended a table-rapping session, in which a medium in a darkened parlor claimed to communicate with the spirits of those who had “crossed to the other side,” as spiritualists liked to say. Arthur struggled to accept the mediums’ oracular ambiguity and theatrical table-rapping as evidence. The death of Jack Hawkins prompted further speculation along these lines.
* * *
Arthur’s father was not dead, but his absence from the family was almost as final. In early 1885 Charles Doyle, while still an inmate at Blairerno, somehow got his hands on a bottle and, furiously drunk yet again, began to believe that God was ordering him to escape. In struggling to obey, he broke a window. When he tried to leave, staff restrained him, and he fought back, striking everyone within reach.
As a consequence, in May, Charles left the facility aimed at helping peaceable alcoholics. He was moved to where a professional staff was better prepared to deal with volatile behavior—not far south, to the Royal Lunatic Asylum in the village of Hillside, north of Montrose. Founded in 1781 as the Montrose Lunatic Asylum, Infirmary & Dispensary, largely through local private subscription, it had received its first royal charter in 1810, and was the oldest such institution in Scotland. It had grown in both quality of treatment and accommodations for inmates during its century of existence. In 1858 new buildings were built on nearby Sunnyside Farm, primarily a long three-story hospital in the Tudor revival style. Locally the entire institution came to be called Sunnyside. The old buildings remained part of the hospital, and it was in these that a befuddled Charles found himself.
