by Michael Sims
. . . my claim for Sanity is not best made by Enlarging on my common sence [sic]—as in the possession of a Certain Class of ability demonstrated in this Book and proved by 30 years of Official Public Life, tho’ unfortunately not seen by certain Members of my own Family.
But his family had reason to believe that Charles could not survive outside the asylum. At about the same time as these private complaints to his journal, he became restless and excited. He claimed in the presence of attendants that he had already died and that the asylum was hell and the people around him were devils.
CHAPTER 27
Dread of Madhouses
I was now once more at a crossroads of my life.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES
In late 1889 a young Englishman named John Coulson Kernahan had joined Ward, Lock & Co. as a junior editor. The author of a quirky meditation on mortality in the form of a novel, A Dead Man’s Diary: Written After His Decease, Kernahan was helping Frederick Locker-Lampson edit a new edition of his popular anthology Lyra Elegantiarum: A Collection of Some of the Best Social and Occasional Verse by Deceased English Authors, and would go on to write popular novels such as The Child, the Wise Man, and the Devil, as well as a fictional prediction of coming war with Russia, The Red Peril.
As junior editor at Ward, Lock, he quickly had ideas. Kernahan was also assistant editor of the U.K. edition of Lippincott’s, and the February 1890 issue, which was about to go on sale, would feature the complete text of The Sign of Four, commissioned the year before by J. M. Stoddart. Later Kernahan said that he found the issue of Beeton’s in which A Study in Scarlet had appeared barely more than a year earlier, and took the red-yellow-and-black volume to the managing director, James Bowden.
“Is there anything being done with this?” Kernahan asked.
Bowden shook his head. “It served its purpose, and did respectably as the Annual.” He pointed out that the sales of the first book edition the year before were not impressive, however. “And few reviewers had anything to say of it.”
“No,” Kernahan admitted, “so many books appear at Christmas that reviewers are not likely to write at length, or even to notice the contents of one of the many Christmas annuals.”
A Study in Scarlet, however, had been the work of an unknown writer. Times had changed, Kernahan insisted. This man Doyle had since published a historical novel, Micah Clarke, and here Lippincott’s was about to publish a second Sherlock Holmes novel. “I am as sure as one can humanly be,” Kernahan claimed that he insisted, “that there is a great future for stories in which Sherlock Holmes figures. As you have A Study in Scarlet, the very first story about Sherlock Holmes, I suggest that you reissue it as a book, by itself, attractively produced, and attractively illustrated.” He made a prediction: “I believe it will have a huge sale, and go on selling for years.”
Finally the director agreed.
The Sign of Four appeared in England and the United States simultaneously, in both editions of the February 1890 issue of Lippincott’s. In England Arthur’s contract with Lippincott’s gave the magazine three months of exclusivity. After that period expired, the novel was reprinted in various English periodicals, beginning with the Bristol Observer from May to July, followed by the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, the Birmingham Weekly Mercury, and others. On the seventh of June, and again on the fourteenth, the Bristol Observer printed unsigned illustrations of the novel that portrayed Sherlock Holmes wearing a deerstalker hat. In his text Arthur had not mentioned such a hat, but the illustrator was not afraid to take liberties; he also adorned Holmes with a small dark mustache.
The deerstalker, made of tweed with a bill in both front and back, had been nicknamed the “fore-and-aft cap.” Deer stalking was not quite the same as deer hunting, which in England referred to unarmed gentry riding after trained deer hounds. Stalking was the term for more solitary armed hunting, especially for selective culling of herds of fallow, roe, and other deer for game management. A new Handbook of Deer-Stalking had been published as recently as 1880. The deerstalker’s design not only shielded both the face and the back of the neck; most variations also had flaps that could be pulled down to cover the ears. It was strictly rural headgear. The Bristol Observer artist, however, portrayed Holmes wearing the hat in Westminster and along the Thames.
* * *
“A most interesting man to talk to,” one of Charles Doyle’s asylum attendants noted on January 20, 1890. Charles seems to have never lost his charm. But the same medical record noted that Charles was not sketching as often as he had formerly, and that the quality of his drawings had greatly deteriorated.
Three days later, Charles was transferred to the Royal Edinburgh Asylum. He had been in Montrose for almost five years. Institutions often transferred patients after a few years, partly in the hope that they might find a change of staff and setting invigorating. The General Board of Lunacy described Charles’s condition as “relieved,” and stated that he was suffering not only from alcoholism but also from epilepsy and deteriorating memory.
The Royal Edinburgh was on an estate in Morningside, in southwestern Edinburgh. In a way, Charles was going back home, but his family was scattered far afield, so Charles was no less alone than he had been at Montrose. His new setting was much larger, with twice as many patients. Under director Thomas Clouston, the Edinburgh Royal Asylum was expanding and modernizing. Originally opened in 1813 as the Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum, it had been launched with parliamentary funds derived from punitive fines from the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. There was a large building for charity patients as well, but Charles’s family could afford his £42 annual fee. After he was examined at the new facility and the staff realized how poor his memory was for recent events in his life, Charles was admitted with a new diagnosis: “epileptic insanity.”
Geographically, Charles was a long way from Arthur’s busy life in Southsea, but he was often on Arthur’s mind. The son suffered a tumult of emotions about his father—love, pity, shame, anger—and they showed up in his fiction. In December 1890, each weekly issue of Chambers’s Journal carried an installment of Arthur’s long story “The Surgeon of Gaster Fell.” In it the narrator suspects his neighbor, a surgeon, of trapping an elderly man in a cage, apparently for the sake of some dark experiment. But the story turns out to be the sad narrative of a family looking after their troubled father; the cage was an alternative to a fate the old man would have considered worse. “He has an intense dread of madhouses,” revealed the surgeon in the story’s closing note, “and in his sane intervals would beg and pray so piteously not to be condemned to one, that I could never find the heart to resist him.” When this story was reprinted years later, Arthur deleted this too-revealing remark, but he left the fictional date of the story as 1885—the year that Charles Doyle had turned violent and been transferred from Blairerno’s easygoing home for inebriates to Montrose’s secure asylum for the insane.
Eleven months later, in November 1891, Arthur’s more explicit story “A Sordid Affair” appeared in the weekly People, which had serialized his sensationalist novel The Firm of Girdlestone the year before. The new brief story featured another fictional incarnation of Charles Doyle. A dressmaker’s husband, “a small man, black bearded and swarthy,” is an amateur artist. Formerly a clerk, his “long course of public drunkenness had ended in a raging attack of delirium tremens, which could not be concealed from his employers, and which brought his instant dismissal from his situation.”
Although exhausted by years of worry and trouble from her husband’s drunkenness, the dressmaker, Mrs. Raby, believes that she can help him conquer his demons. “It was always with others that she laid the blame, never with him, for her eyes were blind to the shattered irritable wreck, and could only see the dark-haired bashful lad who had told her twenty years ago how he loved her.”
Mrs. Raby makes a beautiful gray satin foulard dress on order for a customer—only to find it missing the next morning. Arthur was again dr
awing upon his own family’s sad experience when he wrote the scene in which Mrs. Raby rushes to a nearby pawnshop to find her newly made work hanging on a hook.
“That’s my dress,” she gasps.
The pawnbroker says, “It was pawned this morning, ma’am, by a small, dark man.”
Later, on the street, Mrs. Raby sees a crowd of boys jeering at “a horrid crawling figure, a hatless head, and a dull, vacant, leering face.”
She hails a cab, and someone helps her pile her husband into it.
His coat was covered with dust, and he mumbled and chuckled like an ape. As the cab drove on, she drew his head down upon her bosom, pushing back his straggling hair, and crooned over him like a mother over a baby.
“Did they make fun of him, then?” she cried. “Did they call him names? He’ll come home with his little wifey, and he’ll never be a naughty boy again.”
Arthur closed the story with an apostrophe to his mother (and possibly to his sisters and Touie): “Oh, blind, angelic, foolish love of woman! Why should men demand a miracle while you remain upon earth?”
* * *
Soon Arthur passed another literary milestone. Longmans, Green & Company published The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales in England in March 1890 and the following month in the United States. Here Arthur’s early attempts at sensational fiction could cavort together for the first time—the title story alongside “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” his fictionalized take on the Mary Celeste ship; his horror story “The Ring of Thoth” partnering with his horrific story “John Barrington Cowles” to produce chills. “The Parson of Jackman’s Gulch,” which D. H. Friston had illustrated two years before his drawings adorned A Study in Scarlet, was thus rescued from the ephemeral moment of magazine publication, as were five other stories.
“Dr. Conan Doyle appears to be equally at home,” wrote The Glasgow Herald in its review, “with the eerie, the sensational, and the humorous. The motifs of all these stories are well selected and capitally worked out.” The reviewer seemed unaware of revealing Arthur’s carefully wrought surprises: “In ‘John Barrington Cowles’ the reader meets with a vampire or some similar gruesome monster disguised as a fascinating young lady. And this happens in Edinburgh!”
Arthur kept new short stories circulating, and many were accepted—most, of course, reflecting little about his father or other personal matters. As he looked around for new approaches, he thought of continuing his Sherlock Holmes cases in short form. He knew that readers were familiar with series of tales about a recurring character, from Dumas’s several novels about d’Artagnan to numerous accounts in the 1860s by Scotland’s first police detective, James McLevy. Arthur also understood that stand-alone tales with a recurring character would dodge the notorious pitfall in serializing longer works: the potential loss of interest from a reader who had missed one or more issues and had thus lost track of the narrative. A single recurring character of proven popularity would not only establish an author’s loyal readership but also bind readers to the periodical in which his adventures appeared. This might be a selling point for a young author, to help him stand out from his many competitors who were equally eager to fill space in periodicals.
CHAPTER 28
Adventures in the Strand
I should at last be my own master. No longer would I have to conform to professional dress or try to please any one else. I would be free to live how I liked and where I liked. It was one of the great moments of exultation of my life.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES
The Strand, a historic thoroughfare in Westminster, ran for less than a mile along the busy north shore of the Thames, from Trafalgar Square to Temple Bar, the boundary between Westminster and London. There the Strand became Fleet Street. Angling northward from the Strand, crossing Exeter Street and emptying into Tavistock Street, was a minor avenue called Burleigh Street. From there, in a tiny, cluttered room on the top floor of an office building, in time for Christmas 1890 although dated January 1891, the publisher George Newnes launched the first issue of a new periodical dubbed The Strand Magazine.
Newnes and his colleagues had considered naming it The Burleigh Street Magazine. The cover, beautifully drawn by a flourishing young painter and designer named George Charles Haité—who was famed for his uncanny recall of scenes and colors—showed a glamorized view looking eastward down the Strand toward the eighteenth-century church St. Mary le Strand, with a corner plaque on a building in the foreground reading BURLEIGH STREET. When Newnes was planning the periodical, however, its actual address seemed a mouthful, and the Strand was so close by that he settled on the shorter title. Despite its parade in the 1890s of innocent shops that could not have looked less cosmopolitan, the street was significant in English history. It evoked aristocratic palaces and ecclesiastical gatherings that could help create and sustain an identity in the minds of readers. Here John Evelyn had witnessed the Restoration of Charles II and had afterward written, “I stood in the Strand and beheld it and blessed God!” Burleigh Street held no such magic.
The youngest son of a Derbyshire Congregational minister, Newnes possessed more than his share of imagination and confidence. A decade earlier, in Manchester, he had launched Tit-Bits, an aptly named magazine filled with short and often sensational anecdotes distilled from many other popular sources. Newnes had famously hired Manchester’s “Newsboys Brigade” to hawk his new publication on the streets, and within two hours they had sold five thousand copies of the first issue. Gradually it came to publish short articles, short fiction, and humor, and it had been hugely successful for him. He proved a genius at promotional gimmicks. The Tit-Bits Prize competitions had once awarded to a lucky reader an entire house in Dulwich, and Newnes had even masterminded an outrageous scheme whereby every issue of Tit-Bits contained an active railway accident insurance policy for the commuting reader. Soon his magazine left most other penny weeklies in the dust.
Newnes had been racing forward ever since, and had for several years been a popular Member of Parliament for Newmarket. Aware of the diverse and not always overlapping markets for periodicals, he had also founded The Westminster Gazette, a liberal political newspaper with modest circulation but wide influence, and The Wide World Magazine, which specialized in true-life adventure.
He was a few months away from forty when he launched the glossy, high-quality Strand. The technology of both printing and distribution had advanced greatly since the dense pages of Richard Steele’s Tatler, issued thrice weekly in a single folio half-sheet in the early eighteenth century. From lithography to reliable mails to railway commuting, many factors were merging to support a flowering of new periodicals. Yet Newnes saw that British magazines were slow to take advantage of these advances. American magazines were developing an ever greater following in England—“because,” wrote Newnes later, “they were smarter and livelier, more interesting, bright and cheerful.” He resolved to launch a native magazine on the American model—a glossy, handsome journal that could compete with the established sixpenny monthlies, such as Scribner’s and Harper’s from the United States, as well as England’s own English Illustrated and the long-established Cassell’s Family Magazine.
Early on, he hired as editor Herbert Greenhough Smith, a Cambridge man and a former Temple Bar editor. Dark-haired, mustached, peering through round spectacles, Smith labored at a cluttered dusk in his tiny office on the top floor in Burleigh Street—a sanctum guarded by a phalanx of clattering typewriters, a recent invention that had caught on quickly, especially in publishing. Like Arthur, Greenhough Smith turned his middle name into a part of his surname. Born in Gloucestershire in 1855, he was only four years older than Arthur. To Newnes’s dream of an eye-catching innovation—his uneconomical hope to publish an illustration on every page, to draw the browser’s eye and keep the reader’s active—Smith added his vision of a literate meeting of fiction and articles from at home and abroad. They planned to launch with only self-contained examples of both,
rather than serializing longer work. Early issues included many translated stories by foreigners, such as the Frenchmen Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet and the Russians Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov.
The Strand, with its attractive pale blue issues available at W. H. Smith’s flourishing railway bookstalls for sixpence, was targeted at suburban and working-class readers. They soon learned that they could be assured of finding literate, intelligent entertainment without risk of moral or intellectual provocation. While supporting The Westminster Gazette, which was never financially independent, Newnes did not want politics and what he considered the indecencies of modern art to infect his popular magazine. The periodical quickly established a readership among the working class. The first issues sold two hundred thousand copies per month, roughly the same as the well-established Cassell’s had managed during its heyday in the 1870s.
Just as The Strand’s encouraging launch embodied changes in the world of publishing, so did the manner in which Arthur’s stories reached the magazine’s office. When, in early 1891, an envelope containing Arthur’s first two stories about Sherlock Holmes crossed Greenhough Smith’s busy desk, it came via A. P. Watt, a prominent literary agent whose clients included the writer of the hour, the young Rudyard Kipling. Watt had recently taken on Arthur.
Like Arthur, Watt was a transplanted Scot, although a generation older—born in Glasgow in 1834. In earlier years, he had sold books in Edinburgh and read manuscripts for the London publisher Alexander Strahan, publisher of the periodicals Good Words for the Young and the Sunday Magazine. He became a partner in a new incarnation of Strahan & Company, established himself as an advertising agent, and in the late 1870s added the representation of authors to his résumé.
