The Narrative of John Smith Read online

  127. In fact Conan Doyle and some friends of his in Southsea were conducting experiments in mind-reading around this time, as part of their interest in psychic phenomena. He would give Sherlock Holmes seeming mind-reading powers in a number of stories, beginning with ‘The Cardboard Box’ in 1893. ‘“You remember,” said he, “that some little time ago when I read you the passage in one of Poe’s sketches in which a close reasoner follows the unspoken thoughts of his companion, you were inclined to treat the matter as a mere tour-de-force of the author. On my remarking that I was constantly in the habit of doing the same thing you expressed incredulity.”’ Dr Watson was pleased and impressed on that occasion, but reacted more peevishly on others.

  128. Elizabeth Thompson (1846–1933), well-known as a painter of historical and military battle subjects. Conan Doyle had heard her lecture on art in London in 1878. Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899) was perhaps the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century, best known for her pastoral scenes.

  129. The view expressed here, however grating to modern ears, was perhaps more John Smith’s attitude than Conan Doyle’s, for it does not seem to be the view he took from or about his own mother and sisters. In his fiction, too, Conan Doyle took delight in strong, independent women. In ‘The Doctors of Hoyland,’ an 1894 story in Jerome K. Jerome’s magazine The Idler, Dr James Ripley meets fierce competition from a lady doctor whose very existence seems a ‘blasphemy’ to him. She proves the superior practitioner, however, and Dr Ripley finds himself falling in love in spite of himself. In time, after she has saved his leg following a riding accident, he proposes marriage. ‘What,’ the prospective bride mocks, ‘and unite the practices?’ And the crest-fallen Dr Ripley sees his hopes dashed. ‘If I had known what was passing in your mind I should have told you earlier that I intended to devote my life entirely to science,’ she tells him. ‘There are many women with a capacity for marriage, but few with a taste for biology.’ Even before this was written, Conan Doyle had seen his fourteen-years-younger sister Ida prove to be the scholar of the family, their brother Innes marvelling to him that Ida at fifteen was ‘doing all sorts of wonders,’ including winning ‘a certificate which allows her to teach science in a national school and to buy 32s worth of books and send the bill to the government.’

  130. Perhaps suggested by a fable that Aristophanes tells in Plato’s Symposium.

  131. Quoted in ‘A New View of Mormonism’ by James Barclay in the January 1884 issue of the London periodical The Nineteenth Century (pp. 167–84). Thus this was very fresh reading on Conan Doyle’s part, which informed also the Mormon background for A Study in Scarlet the following year. In the same issue is a lengthy article about ‘Life in a Medieval Monastery’ (Augustus Jessopp), perhaps a seed of his historical novel The White Company, researched and written while Conan Doyle was still in Southsea and completed there in July 1890.

  132. Charles Marlow in Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 classic She Stoops to Conquer.

  133. A reference from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1879 essay Society and Solitude, the person unnamed but identified as a humourist of considerable intelligence who had lost confidence in his ability to succeed in the social world.

  134. Conan Doyle speaks for himself here about Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, a book that had impressed him and that he recommended to others, saying for example in a letter home ‘Did the Dr. [Bryan Charles Waller of Edinburgh, a one-time mentor] get “Fathers & Sons.” I think Tourguenieff is grand – he is so unconventional and so strong.’ Yevgeny Vasil’evich Bazarov, mentioned below (as Bazarof ) is the novel’s nihilist figure, a young man who (like Conan Doyle) was planning a medical career for himself.

  135. Conan Doyle would use Russian nihilism and revolutionism against Tsarist autocracy as the theme for his 1904 Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez.’

  136. Wenzel Anton, Prince of Kaunitz-Rietberg (1711–1794).

  137. The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Maundeville, published originally in the fourteenth century, was a work of uncertain authorship that had influenced many readers, including Christopher Columbus.

  138. Conan Doyle had long read deeply into American history through historians like Francis Parkman, and had romantic views of it informed by writers like James Fenimore Cooper. More than the average Briton of his day, he believed in the importance of ties between the two countries based on language, blood and shared history, and for the dedication of his 1890 novel The White Company about the late English Middle Ages, a novel he believed then and later to be his masterpiece, he wrote: ‘To the hope of the future, the reunion of the English-speaking races, this little chronicle of our common ancestry is inscribed.’

  139. Francis Jeffrey, Scottish critic (1773–1850), who did miss the mark in this instance.

  140. ‘In the middle of things you will go most safely.’ From Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  141. Top of the line in Dr Conan Doyle’s day, from E. Hartnack & Co. of Potsdam and Paris.

  142. John Knox (1510–1572), leader of Scotland’s Protestant Reformation. One of Conan Doyle’s hard-headed Scots in The Mystery of Cloomber would declare that she ‘didna’ think muckle o’ John Knox,’ and obviously neither did Conan Doyle himself.

  143. ‘No fools so wearisome as those who have some wit’ (Rochefoucauld, and yet another aphorism that would be voiced by Sherlock Holmes, this time in The Sign of the Four).

  144. William Paley (1743–1805), sometimes called ‘Darwin’s theological father.’ In May 1884, about the time this was written, Conan Doyle remarked in an article in the British Journal of Photography, ‘Easter Sunday with the Camera,’ that he and his companions were ‘coated with dust and dry as if we had swallowed Paley’s Evidences of Christianity.’

  145. It is not known whether this episode is based on a real visit Conan Doyle had from a parish cleric. This episode was transferred to his 1895 novel The Stark Munro Letters with only minor changes. Based on that appearance, the late Geoffrey Stavert, in A Study in Southsea: From Bush Villas to Baker Street (Portsmouth, 1987), speculated that there may have been such a one by the Rev. Charles Russell Tompkins of St Jude’s Church, Southsea.

  146. The Nineteenth Century was a monthly magazine of public affairs founded in 1877 by the architect and editor Sir James Knowles, who had a particular interest in the conflict between science and religion. Conan Doyle was not only a reader of it (see note 131 above), but at least once a contributor in his Southsea days, an article in its August 1888 issue entitled ‘On the Geographical Distribution of British Intellect.’

  147. This quotation is not part of the curate’s visit in The Stark Munro Letters, but does appear elsewhere in that novel, directly attributed to Carlyle (as it is indirectly here).

  148. Conan Doyle, who served in South Africa in 1900 as a volunteer British Army field surgeon during the Boer War, had the same disappointment when he tried to join the Army in 1914, at the beginning of the World War. He enlisted in the Home Guard instead, also serving as a war correspondent and historian of the British campaign in France later during the war.

  149. Gilbert & Sullivan were and are household names in music; the House of Rimmel was a cosmetics company founded in London by Eugene Rimmel in 1834. ‘There are seventy-five perfumes, which it is very necessary that a criminal expert should be able to distinguish from each other,’ Sherlock Holmes was to remark in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

  150. Slang for British soldiers, immortalized by Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Tommy’ in Barrack-Room Ballads.

  151. American poet James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), though the lines are not rendered correctly here; they read ‘But somehow, when we’d fit and whipped, I ollers found the thanks / Got kind o’ lodged afore they came as low down as the ranks.’

  152. Published in a longer and more polished version, and with the sub-title ‘A Ballad of ’82,’ in Conan Doyle’s poetry collection Songs of Action in 1898.

  153. In Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World, as
Professor Challenger and his companions ready themselves for a winner-take-all battle, the sportsman and soldier of fortune Lord John Roxton tells the others: ‘They’ll have something to excite them if they put us up. The “Last Stand of the Greys” won’t be in it.’ And then without attribution Roxton finishes by quoting from this very poem of Conan Doyle’s: ‘“With their rifles grasped in their stiffened hands / ’mid a ring of the dead and dying,” as some fathead sings.’

  Copyright

  First published in 2011

  by The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB

  This ebook edition first published in 2011

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  © in Introduction, 2011 Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, Rachel Foss

  © in The Narrative of John Smith, 2011 Conan Doyle Estate Ltd

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  ISBN 978 0 7123 6301 3