Arthur and Sherlock

by Michael Sims

  “Beeton’s Christmas Annual (Ward, Lock & Company),” read the notice in Lloyd’s “Literature” column, “has for leading subject ‘A Study in Scarlet’ by A. Conan Doyle, a tale replete with stirring incidents, and described as a reprint of reminiscences of Army-surgeon Watson. The number also contains two original drawing room plays.”

  The 1887 Annual sold out of its tens of thousands of copies within a few weeks. When The Graphic published its review of the issue on the tenth of December, the reviewer omitted Arthur’s name entirely, describing the author as anonymous and dismissing the book’s originality. “It is not at all a bad imitation,” puffed the reviewer on a more positive note, and then added perceptively, “but it would never have been written but for Poe, Gaboriau, and Mr. R. L. Stevenson. The hero of the tale is simply the hero of ‘The Murder [sic] in the Rue Morgue.’ Those who like detective stories, and have not read the great originals, will find the tale full of interest. It hangs together well, and finishes ingeniously.”

  Next, on the seventeenth of December, a review appeared in The Glasgow Herald, ranking Holmes much higher in relation to his ancestors—though this first laudatory review also misspelled Arthur’s name. “The piece de resistance” of the current issue of Beeton’s, the reviewer proclaimed, was

  a story by A. Conair Doyle entitled “A Study in Scarlet.” It is the story of a murder, and of the preternatural sagacity of a scientific detective, to whom Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin was a trifler, and Gaboriau’s Lecoq a child. He is a wonderful man is Mr Sherlock Holmes, but one gets so wonderfully interested in his cleverness and in the mysterious murder which he unravels that one cannot lay down the narrative until the end is reached. What that end is wild horses shall not make us divulge.

  Two days later, a reviewer in The Scotsman gave Arthur’s book unstinting praise:

  The chief piece in “Beeton’s Christmas Annual” is a detective story by Mr A. Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet. This is as entrancing a tale of ingenuity in tracing out crime as has been written since the time of Edgar Allan Poe. The author shows genius. He has not trodden in the well-worn paths of literature, but has shown how the true detective should work by observation and deduction.

  This review ended with a prediction for Arthur: “His book is bound to have many readers.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Truth as Death

  His brush was concerned not only with fairies and delicate themes of the kind, but with wild and fearsome subjects, so that his work had a very peculiar style of its own, mitigated by great natural humour. He was more terrible than Blake and less morbid than Wiertz.

  —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, ON HIS FATHER’S ARTWORK

  In the last half of the 1880s, during his years at Sunnyside asylum, Charles Doyle often sat outside on the grounds, with the breeze tugging at his sketchbook, and drew and painted. When he focused on the world around him, he produced impressively realistic work, including sketches of his fellows on a picnic. He painted a lyrical watercolor of a man and woman peacefully strolling on a lawn near Sunnyside’s handsome stone buildings with their crow-stepped gables and chimney pots. Through a window, Charles sketched a couple of the bare-faced rooks that socialized on the lawn. When one caught a worm and offered it to another, he asked underneath his drawing of this act, “Could unselfishness go further?”

  Captivated by the elegant purple-and-green coleus adorning a Sunnyside dining table, Charles immortalized it in watercolor. He admired a curly-haired young housemaid on her hands and knees, polishing a floor, with her reflection visible below her—and sketched her in ink, tinting the result with watercolors. The young woman blushed and asked for a copy of the drawing, and Charles gave her one. Apparently his agreeable charm survived. He seems to have employed his artwork as a method of interacting with the staff and with other inmates; he posed for one group photograph with a large sketchbook firmly in hand.

  Often Charles also drew images that none of his fellow inmates could see in the world around them. He conjured, for example, a giant squirrel carrying a bonneted human baby. Sometimes, like his famous brother Dickie, Charles drew fairies—tiny figures avoiding rain under a mushroom umbrella, peering from behind Christmas holly leaves and berries, riding on the back of an exotic fowl. Fairies were something of a family preoccupation. Once Charles turned the sketchbook sideways and painted a tall, beautifully moonlit scene of the Sunnyside buildings at night, with a pageant of pale spirits, including ethereal horses, cascading down from the clouds to the lawn.

  Charles portrayed himself interacting with a sphinx in various ways—kissing it, riding it, fleeing its attack. In one drawing, labeled “Busting Out,” he seems to be tearing his way through a piece of paper, squeezing through the rip he created, and dancing with joy after his escape. A fully dressed and long-bearded Charles shakes hands with a shrouded skeleton that claps him familiarly on the shoulder—while behind Charles a barely sketched-in angel reaches as if to grasp his left hand. But although he readily shakes the skeleton’s bony hand with his right, Charles’s left hand is firmly in his pocket and not available to angels. In the lower right corner, Charles titled this drawing “Truth as Death.”

  No doubt Charles missed Mary, from whom he had been apart for years—since he first went to Dr. Forbes’s establishment for inebriates at Blairerno in 1881 (if not earlier). One scene in his Sunnyside sketchbook Charles conjured from memory or from yearning. In 1886 a home rule campaign was launched to set up a Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, following a similar movement in Ireland. Irish himself and having lived in Scotland for decades, Charles was concerned about the extent to which England would permit greater autonomy within the rest of the United Kingdom. Prime Minister William E. Gladstone’s support for Irish home rule was dividing the Liberal Party and helping erode its influence. During this time, Charles turned to plain India ink to portray himself, long-bearded and bespectacled, seated at the feet of his beloved Mary, intertwining his fingers around his knees and gazing adoringly at his smiling wife as she sews. Underneath he wrote affectionately, “Mary, my ideal home ruler. No repeal of the union proposed in this case.”

  On October 6, 1887, Charles told a physician that he had encountered his wife on the Sunnyside grounds. He had, he claimed, talked with her for a long time. It was fiction.

  * * *

  Arthur had long admired his father’s talent and ambition, and he was painfully aware that it was wasting away in secret. He tried to help Charles by bringing him aboard his new novel. In early 1888, Ward, Lock proposed to republish A Study in Scarlet as a stand-alone volume. Owning the copyright, the publisher did not require Arthur’s permission, but sought his cooperation. Whether Ward, Lock proposed the idea as a marketing ploy or Arthur hatched the plan out of filial affection, he approached his father about drawing illustrations for it.

  At this time Charles was worrying often about death. In March 1888 an attendant at Montrose noted that Charles spent at least half of one day in prayer, kneeling in the billiard room with devotional in hand. “Has no memory for anything recent,” the record noted, “but remembers well things he learnt and people he knew years ago.”

  Whatever his emotional state, Charles produced six drawings for Ward, Lock. Not one, however, demonstrated the grace or imagination visible in his previous work, or even the level of skill that he could still summon on occasion for his sketchbook. When he received the first two from his father, in a package without any accompanying note, Arthur wrote to his mother that neither drawing was bad, although they were “somewhat unfinished.” Arthur thanked his father. Somehow Charles found the energy and focus to send a gracious note in reply, including kind wishes for Touie. When recounting this experience to his mother, Arthur added a hopeful if unrealistic postscript: “Papa in his letter seemed fairly contented with his lot.”

  Clearly Charles did not pose his fellow inmates or asylum staff as models for the drawings, any more than he paid attention to his son’s descriptions of the setting and characters. Arthur
may have been surprised that Ward, Lock even accepted them for publication. The first drawing portrayed the moment when Inspector Lestrade opens the door at 3, Lauriston Gardens, ushering Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson into the presence of the corpse of Enoch Drebber. The awkward figures, barely delineated in a cartoon outline unworthy even of Punch, show a bearded Dr. Watson towering over a scrawny, shoulderless figure that bears no resemblance to Arthur’s description of Holmes. The single professional policeman present—a goateed Lestrade—raises his hand in what Charles presumably meant to be a gesture of horror. With a shapeless hat pulled low over a broad forehead, above a simian face with sharpened chin, Holmes seems the least impressive person in the room. Ironically, the liveliest figure is the staring corpse of Drebber, whose unnatural sprawl fills the foreground.

  The other drawings were no less amateurish. Holmes appeared in three of the six. In one, a figure—which not only ignored Arthur’s description of Holmes but even failed to resemble Charles’s other two representations of him—sits behind a desk, pointing a finger and lecturing the ragtag band of urchins whom Watson describes as “half a dozen of the dirtiest and most ragged street Arabs that ever I clapped eyes on.” Holmes explains them to Watson: “It’s the Baker Street division of the detective police force . . . There’s more work to be got out of one of those little beggars than out of a dozen of the force. The mere sight of an official-looking person seals men’s lips. These youngsters, however, go everywhere and hear everything.” Later he dubbed the urchins the Baker Street Irregulars. Charles’s representation of these boys is barely sketched in; they could be ten years old or forty—as could the figure of Holmes. Seated nearby, the bearded Watson looks, as he does in the crime scene illustration, rather like Charles Doyle himself.

  Loyally, however, Arthur promoted the drawings to Ward, Lock. Soon he was informing Lottie that he had come to terms with the publisher “for Papa’s drawings for the Study.” Apparently a friend of Arthur’s in Southsea, the architect Henry Ball, had agreed to create wood engravings from Charles’s drawings.

  But actually Ward, Lock tried to talk Arthur down on the already modest price that he had proposed for Charles’s work. They offered only three guineas for the six blocks and Ball’s tracings of them. Still a little-known writer with no sway in the publishing world, Arthur wrote Ward, Lock a humiliating letter explaining that normally Charles Doyle received £5 per page for his work, but that, because Arthur was interested in the success of this edition of his novel, he had determined to make the drawings available to them for £3 per page. He said flatly that their alternative offer seemed so incredible he could only assume that it was an error of some kind. “Ward & Lock are perfect Jews,” he fumed to his mother. He insisted that he would rather burn the blocks than accede to such robbery.

  In July 1888, Ward, Lock published the first stand-alone edition of Arthur’s novel in their innovative shilling paperback series. The cover was cheap heavy paper, white, with A Study in Scarlet filling the top half with letters apparently intended to look exotically Eastern, and By Conan Doyle at an angle below. Charles Doyle’s drawing of the murder scene at Lauriston Gardens, with Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade in the doorway, appeared as frontispiece. The caption read, “The single, grim, motionless figure which lay stretched upon the boards. (Page 31).” The other five drawings also occupied full pages.

  Commenting upon this “story of thrilling interest,” a publisher’s preface mistakenly assured the reader that the Mormon subplot was as accurate as it was enthralling. It also proclaimed that “the unraveling of the apparently unfathomable mystery by the cool shrewdness of Mr. Sherlock Holmes” was fully equal to the “sustained interest and gratified expectation” of such recent best sellers as Archibald Clavering Gunter’s romantic adventure Mr. Barnes of New York and Lawrence L. Lynch’s Chicago detective novel Shadowed by Three. Rather than praise Charles’s feeble drawings, the preface cited his pedigree:

  The work has a valuable advantage in the shape of illustrations by the author’s father, MR. CHARLES DOYLE, a younger brother of the late MR. RICHARD DOYLE, the eminent colleague of JOHN LEECH, in the pages of Punch, and son of the eminent caricaturist whose political sketches, signed “H.B.,” were a feature in London half-a-century ago.

  Apparently the tightfisted company never paid Arthur what he asked. In November Ward, Lock sent him a letter stating flatly that they owed him nothing beyond the amount they had already sent. Nor did the book ever make it into the railway stalls of bookseller W. H. Smith, a prized venue that may have been held out to Arthur as a lure to encourage his participation, perhaps because Ward, Lock had bought the rights to publish Smith’s Select Library of Fiction in 1885.

  He earned no more money for A Study in Scarlet, but here at last was a book with his name on the spine.

  Not yet part of the larger publishing community, Arthur probably did not know about a recent precedent that cast Ward, Lock’s no-royalties contract with him in an even harsher light. The Bristol firm of J. Arrowsmith—to which house Arthur had submitted A Study in Scarlet, to no avail—published its own Christmas annual, available for sixpence. In 1883 the third such featured a novella by Hugh Conway, the pseudonym for a lyricist, poet, and author of supernatural and mystery stories named Frederick John Fargus. Conway sold outright to Arrowsmith, for £80, the copyright to his romantic thriller Called Back, a melodramatic, coincidence-driven saga of amnesia, cured blindness, and second sight. He must have thought this a savvy transaction when Arrowsmith’s Christmas Annual sold only half of its six-thousand-copy issue.

  Early in 1884, however, the publisher issued the slim novel for a shilling in its paper-covered series, Arrowsmith’s Bristol Library. Within a couple of months, thirty thousand copies had leapt from the train station bookstalls to distract commuters from rattle and soot. Arrowsmith behaved honorably, canceling its original contract with Conway and signing a new one to pay him a royalty for six years. Meanwhile, Conway collaborated on a dramatic adaption of his novel with J. Comyns Carr, an influential art critic, gallery director, theater manager, and playwright, known for his promotion of avant-garde painters such as the Pre-Raphaelites.

  Thus by 1887, when Ward, Lock published Arthur’s novel, Arrowsmith had sold more than 350,000 copies of the British edition of Called Back. Everyone seemed to be talking about it. It was also widely translated—as well as published, without payment, in the United States. During a flurry of popularity in Amherst, Massachusetts, for example, Called Back caught the attention of a little-known poet named Emily Dickinson. She admired Conway’s book and wrote a poem with the title “Called Back.” When she died a few days later, her gravestone read “Called Back, May 15, 1886.” Conway himself had died suddenly of typhoid the year before.

  While the behind-the-scenes history of Conway’s novel did not inspire Ward, Lock to pay Arthur royalties for A Study in Scarlet, its success did demonstrate the commercial potential of adventurous thrillers.

  Despite these setbacks and reminders of his shaky literary status, during 1887 Arthur had completed his ambitious novel Micah Clarke, set in late seventeenth-century England, amid the Protestant rebellion to overthrow the Catholic James II following the death of his brother, Charles II. Arthur seems to have chosen as his models in this historical outing three favorites—Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Charles Reade. During 1886, Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped had been serialized in the weekly children’s magazine Young Folks’ Paper, which had also seen first publication of Treasure Island and The Black Arrow. Blackwood’s responded favorably to the first half of Arthur’s manuscript of Micah Clarke, but after reading the second and third Arthur’s cherished magazine did not buy the book. He all but begged them to reconsider, but they resisted his entreaties. Soon he sent it elsewhere.

  In 1888 Arthur adapted the second half of A Study in Scarlet into a three-act play. And on the thirtieth of August of that year, he went to the Langham Hotel in Marylebone to dine with Joseph Marshall (usually known as
J. M.) Stoddart, who was in London from Philadelphia, where he edited Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine of Popular Literature and Science.

  They dined in a room with gold-and-scarlet mosaic marble floors and towering plaster relief ceilings. Since the Langham’s completion in 1865, the neo-Gothic grand hotel, with its several stories featuring long rows of elegant windows—arched, mullioned, traceried—had become one of the most renowned lodgings in Europe, offering not only an electrically illuminated entrance but also the first hydraulic lifts in the country, called “rising rooms.” The Prince of Wales had attended the grand opening, and the deposed Louis Napoleon III had spent much of his exile there.

  Stoddart was known for seeking out authors he admired. He had invited two other guests—Thomas Patrick Gill, an Irish Member of Parliament, and the Irish writer Oscar Wilde, who was already a famous apostle of Aestheticism. Five years Arthur’s senior, Wilde had recently published The Happy Prince and Other Fables—five fairy tales—but he was better known for his poetry, which had won Oxford’s Newdigate Prize, and for plays such as The Duchess of Padua.

  Arthur found Wilde charming and impressive. He liked his refined wit and his way of emphasizing rhetorical points with subtle gestures. When the quartet discussed how wars might be fought in the future, Wilde turned his face and raised a hand in a way that lent gravity to his single remark: “A chemist on each side will approach the frontier with a bottle.”