by Roger Dobson
Initially the rival claims of Oxford and Cambridge must be dealt with. The evidence against both is rather strong. Let us consider our data, as the subject of this monograph would have said. If Holmes had studied at either place why were he and Watson so coy about revealing the fact? Holmes speaks only of ‘college’ and ‘the university’ in the two tales set in his early days, ‘The “Gloria Scott” ’ and ‘The Musgrave Ritual’. This is hardly the traditional manner of Oxbridge men.
Why among all the peers of the realm, knights, illustrious civil servants, scholars and other leading dignitaries who retain his services does he never encounter a contemporary from either university?
Why does he commit gross errors in addressing the nobility? (See ‘The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor’.) In Victoria’s England, Oxford and Cambridge were overflowing with the sons of English aristocrats. Despite his reclusive nature mentioned in ‘The “Gloria Scott” ’ surely Holmes would have known how to address a lord correctly.
If Holmes was at Cambridge how can he talk of the quadrangle in ‘The Adventure of the Three Students’ when court is the correct term there? Further, in ‘The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter’ he refers to Cambridge as ‘this inhospitable town’ and seems ignorant of local geography. Even a vice-chancellor of the university, S.C. Roberts, has gone into print attacking the theory, espoused by Dorothy L. Sayers among others, that Holmes was a Cambridge man. (See The Sherlock Holmes Letters, edited by Richard Lancelyn Green [1986], for a discussion of the matter.)
In Sherlock Holmes: A Biography of the World’s First Consulting Detective by W.S. Baring-Gould (1962) the future sleuth takes up residence at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1872, following in the footsteps of his brothers Sherringford and Mycroft. Yet how could Holmes have scraped through the entrance examination with such an impoverished stock of knowledge as catalogued by Watson in Chapter Two of A Study in Scarlet? Aside from varying degrees of familiarity with geology, botany, anatomy and British law he is almost a dunce. Only in chemistry is his learning profound. He is sublimely ignorant of literature, philosophy, politics and astronomy, and professes never to have heard of Carlyle; though as he does make some recondite allusions in later stories he must have caught up on his reading. Holmes splits infinitives with gay abandon throughout the cycle, and that he knows nothing of the classics was proved by Andrew Lang in his famous essay of 1904 pinpointing the absurdities occurring in ‘The Three Students’.
Sherlock Holmes: A Biography of the World’s First Consulting Detective by W.S. Baring-Gould, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.
Not being a member of the nobility or from a particularly prominent family it is impossible that Holmes could have got into Oxford possessing such appalling ignorance of academic subjects. There is even a possibility that he suffered from dyslexia considering all the occasions Watson is deputed to read telegrams. One must apply his own methods to the problem: ‘when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’.
Let us, therefore, consider the improbable. . . . There is some evidence that Holmes lived in the North of England in his youth. In The Hound of the Baskervilles he says: ‘I confess that once when I was very young I confused the Leeds Mercury [typography] with the Western Morning News.’
Baring-Gould imagined that Holmes grew up on a hillside farm, named Mycroft, in the village of Sigerside in the North Riding of Yorkshire (where he suffered under a tutor named Moriarty). Although uncanonical, this theory certainly accords with the idea that his university was a northern one. It may be recalled perhaps that Watson has Holmes committing some ludicrous solecisms—he calls Derbyshire and Norfolk ‘the North’; but one can never underestimate the talent Watson had for making blunders and contradicting previously established facts in the canon. He could not decide whether the wound gained in Afghanistan was in his shoulder or leg. He had Holmes investigating the problem of Wisteria Lodge in 1892 when all the civilised world knew the detective was presumed dead after the Reichenbach tragedy. Watson gave a bay window to 221B—there were none in Baker Street—and the same Christian name to the Moriarty brothers, and was unsure whether his mother-in-law was alive or dead. Clearly he was an untrustworthy authority. Yet one cannot rule out the theory that linguistic errors about the North were introduced to throw future biographers off the scent. It seems certain that the two associates wished to keep the identity of Holmes’s university secret.
The first early case referred to in ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ concerns the Tarleton murders. Tarleton is a small town near Southport in Lancashire, less than thirty miles from Manchester. It provides an additional clue to Holmes’s links with the North.
Conan Doyle, Watson’s collaborator on many of the narratives, certainly knew the North West well. He was a pupil at Stonyhurst College near Preston for five years. In 1898 he wrote a mystery story, ‘The Lost Special’, involving a railway journey set near Manchester. The tale involves an anonymous criminal investigator, naturally identified as Holmes by some critics: another pointer to the ‘cover-up operation’ dissociating the sleuth from Manchester.
The strongest evidence for Holmes having studied at Owens College stems from his passion for chemistry. In his youth the college possessed probably the finest chemical laboratory in the land. The pioneering work of Edward Frankland, professor of chemistry at Owens in the 1850s, laid the foundations for much important research. His successor, Henry Roscoe, appointed in 1857, gathered a distinguished team around him. Where else other than in old ‘Cottonopolis’, adopted home of John Dalton, father of the atomic theory, could Holmes have pursued his scientific studies with such modern equipment?
Owens was established in 1851 at the former home of the free trader Richard Cobden in Quay Street. The building stands there still, now used as court offices. Ironically, only a few hundred yards away Baker Street and 221B have risen again in all their late-Victorian glory. Granada Television’s Castlefield site has been for several years the scene of lavish and loving re-enactments of Holmes’s greatest cases in a definitive film series.
In 1871 Owens College gained a new home: Alfred Waterhouse’s imposing structure on Oxford Road, a mile from Quay Street. The French Gothic architecture enabled the building to double as the Louvre in Granada’s dramatisation of ‘The Final Problem’ in 1985.
Lest I be accused by Sherlockians of stranding their idol in a cultural desert, it should be pointed out that the area around Oxford Road is rich in romantic associations. In the 1790s Thomas De Quincey engaged in battles with brutish millboys here en route to school. Charlotte Brontë began writing Jane Eyre in lodgings in the locality in 1846, while her biographer Mrs Gaskell lived a short step away in Plymouth Grove from 1850. And it was along Oxford Road that the lonely figure Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, could be seen prowling in the 1890s, seeking solace from prostitutes. If all this is insufficient, the first Rolls-Royce in history purred out from a workshop half-a-mile from the University in 1904.
In Sherlock Holmes Commentary (1972) D. Martin Dakin makes out a convincing case for Holmes attending university from 1872-76 and beginning professional practice in 1877. In ‘His Last Bow’, which is set in 1914, Holmes is said to be about sixty, and although disputed his year of birth has thus been set at 1854: the same as that other, rather different, colossus of the age, Oscar Wilde.
So far as Owens College was concerned the year 1876, when Holmes’s studies were drawing to a close, was a black one. . . .
It seems likely that the college authorities took the unorthodox step of requesting Holmes’s help in a problem which had been distressing them some time. As Holmes says in ‘The Musgrave Ritual’: ‘during my last years at the university there was a good deal of talk there about myself and my methods’.
Money and possessions were disappearing, and it was evident that a thief was abroad. Once Holmes was involved it was relatively simple to trap the culprit. The snare bears some vestiges of his handiwork—Holmes was a master at forcing malefactors
to rise to his bait.
On the last day of May 1876 a sum of marked money was left in plain view in the students’ cloakroom. At dusk a handsome undergraduate, tall, freckled but pale, entered, scanned the room and took the cash. A policeman secreted next door burst in to apprehend him. It proved a mean triumph. The young man was the college’s brightest star; the winner of many prizes for poetry and languages, he had passed the matriculation examination of London University. He had not stolen for his own gain, but to keep the woman he loved, a young alcoholic prostitute, from selling her favours. The girl squandered all the money her lover possessed on drink, and in desperation he had turned to larceny—he cherished dreams of saving her. Now his potentially splendid future as a classics don lay in ruins. Dismissed from college, his honours rescinded, he served a month’s hard labour. On his release from prison he went into exile in America, where he did further penance by almost starving to death. He returned to England in 1877, and slowly, over the course of the next twenty years, established a reputation as a fine artist which endures to this day. Many readers will doubtless have realised the identity by now of this tragic figure who numbered H.G. Wells and Conan Doyle among his friends.
Admittedly no indisputable evidence links Holmes with the episode: but if, as seems likely, he was at Owens at this period could he have resisted the impulse to intervene in the puzzle, despite his abhorrence of prosaic crime? If not, why did he and Watson draw a veil over his university days? Surely it was because he had sought to catch a thief and found to his eternal regret that he had been instrumental in ruining the life of a gentleman and a noble spirit. For what was merely a footnote in the dazzling career of Sherlock Holmes proved a spectre no exorcism could banish haunting the ill-fated author of New Grub Street and other masterpieces of despair, George Gissing.
M.P. SHIEL AND ARTHUR RANSOME
Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, June, 1988
It is impossible to determine which was more bizarre: the eccentric life and personality of the novelist M.P. Shiel or his extraordinary books. Shiel, the author of those mad but enduring fantasies The Purple Cloud and The Lord of the Sea (both 1901) was one of the most idiosyncratic stylists ever to put pen to paper. At its best his work reads like a cross-pollination of Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Rolfe and Herman Melville, and his daring manipulations of language anticipated the linguistic extravagance of James Joyce. Shiel never permitted the trifling rules of grammar and syntax to intrude once his prose was in full lava-like flow. Here is a characteristic passage from his finest creation, The Purple Cloud, perhaps the only novel of the period to rival the scientific romances of H.G. Wells. The narrator, the sole survivor of an Arctic expedition to the North Pole, is nearing his goal:
And now with a wild hilarity I flew, for a lunacy, a giddiness, had got me, until finally up-buoyed on air, dancing mad, I sped, I span, with grinning teeth that chattered and gibbered, and eyeballs of distraction: for a fright, too—most cold, most mighty high—had its hand of ice on my soul, I being alone in that place, face to face with the Ineffable; but, still, with a gibbering levity, and a fatal joy, and a blind hilarity, on I sped, I span.
M.P. Shiel, 1865-1947.
Could the cloud really have been any colour other than purple?
Later in the book the narrator—the last man on earth after the deadly vapour has destroyed the human race—toils for seventeen years building a magnificent palace for himself, ‘the satrap of earth’, only to abandon it when completed. (The palace’s construction is described in a sentence more than 600 words long.) Shiel’s protagonist then sails off in his yacht to put ‘three hundred cities and countrysides’ around the globe to the torch. Such scenes are commonplace in the world of Matthew Phipps Shiel.
What other author would have married off his spouse to a friend in fiction? In The Purple Cloud Shiel depicts his beautiful Lina—the Parisian Spaniard Carolina Garcia Gomez—as the wife of his fellow writer Arthur Machen. The narrator finds their bodies in a lonely house on the Cornish coast.
In ‘The Tale of Henry and Rowena’ two star-crossed lovers are menaced by a panther. Do they simply turn and flee? No: instead Lord Henry Darnley reaches for his ‘pigmy canghiar’—and amputates his left arm!
. . . Darnley grasped his left wrist with the other hand, tugged, wrenched the arm from the shoulder: nor was he a moment too soon, for the creature’s eyes were already glairy with the greens of desire; but even as it evilly crept, its belly down on the ground, wriggling in a prowl to spring, Darnley was swinging the arm like a club, and he flung it wheeling, to drop before the beast’s nostrils.
Satisfied with the sacrifice, the panther retreats.
If all this appears outlandish, consider Shiel the man. Not only was his political philosophy an interesting blend of socialism and fascism, he virtually created his own religion based on science and Christianity. And his ego was enormous. Writing about Montserrat, his Caribbean birthplace, he mused: ‘I have an idea that at the moment of my death it will sink: I do not know if it is true.’ He conferred Christian baptism and the names Victor Napoleon on Victor Gollancz, spurned footwear when mountain climbing, kept prunes soaking in a chamber pot beneath his bed, and, a health fanatic, went running about the Sussex countryside, in peril of his life, in his seventies as a night-time proto-jogger. ‘I like the light of the other suns even better than ours,’ he explained romantically. Shiel spent the last years of his life writing a gargantuan life of Christ in which he proved, to his own satisfaction at least, that St Paul and St Lazarus were one and the same. According to Lawrence Durrell in his essay ‘Some Notes on My Friend John Gawsworth’ (Spirit of Place, 1969), Shiel also took to spending much time in a tree in his latter years.
Such unorthodox behaviour may simply be a matter of royal prerogative, however, for Shiel was not merely a novelist—he was a king, though a king in exile and without a nation. On his fifteenth birthday on 21st July 1880 Shiel was solemnly crowned sovereign of Redonda, or Rodundo, a steep guano-covered rock populated by goats and boobies twelve miles north of Montserrat. His father, Matthew Dowdy Shiell, a trader, ship-owner and lay preacher, took a fancy to the mountain-islet and, as a descendant of the ancient Irish kings, annexed it for his domain. When Britain claimed the rock shortly after Shiel’s coronation, with a view to protecting its phosphate deposits, the elder Shiel was furious.
Although his claim to Redonda was never officially recognised by the Colonial Office, Shiel clung proudly to the title all his life. At his death in February 1947 the crown passed to John Gawsworth, his friend and literary executor. Gawsworth told A. Reynolds Morse, the author of the bibliography The Works of M.P. Shiel (1948): ‘When I was staying with Shiel at L’Abri [Shiel’s home near Horsham] in October, 1936, he decided that I should succeed him as monarch, so a quick blood transfusion with a pen knife was made between our right wrists, and a document prepared on L’Abri notepaper . . .’.
An illustrious realm of peers was established to support the Redondan throne, and literary figures including Dorothy L. Sayers, Henry Miller, Dylan Thomas, Martin Secker, Rebecca West, Victor Gollancz, Alfred A. Knopf and many more were ennobled. Most of the titles and several of the original peers or their heirs survive to this day; although the matter of the royal succession is a thorny one, with a number of rival claimants in regal dispute.
But our concern is with Shiel as a writer. After all, kings and their crowns come and go, but books go on for ever . . .
Shiel has attracted dazzling praise and grave censure: ‘there is no one else like him’, Hugh Walpole declared; to Gollancz he was ‘the gem-encrusted magus’. ‘Sensible people ought to have a complete set of Shiel,’ commented Rebecca West. Reynolds Morse has said that ‘time will prove him to be perhaps the greatest writer of English the world has ever known’. H.P. Lovecraft eulogised his outstanding tales of terror such as ‘Xelucha’—‘a noxiously hideous fragment’—and ‘The House of Sounds’, hailing this latter as ‘a peerless masterpiece—the finest horror stor
y of the generation . . . God! But after that story I shall never write another of my own.’ Shiel had his admirers exhausting their superlatives (though this acclaim brought little financial reward and he died in poverty and obscurity).
Yet some have found the xenophobia exhibited in Shiel’s work repellent. In his world Jews and Orientals are frequently portrayed as fiends. The science fiction critic Sam Moskowitz in Explorers of the Infinite (1963) suggests: ‘Some students might, as an exercise, try to find a single Shiel book in which there is not a direct or implied slur at the Jews, usually accompanied by another at religion.’
The Lord of the Sea, a future war novel in which Shiel predicted the founding of the State of Israel, has achieved an almost infamous reputation. In Moskowitz’s opinion it ‘reaches an intensity of anti-Semitism that provokes comparison with Hitler’s Mein Kampf, for which it could have served as an inspiration’.
Despite this, Shiel’s weird plots and polychromatic prose have gained him a cult following, particularly in America where Reynolds Morse and John D. Squires, his foremost champion, have been reprinting some of his more neglected books and bibliographical material in acclaimed volumes of ‘Shielography’.
A giant book of critical essays, Shiel in Diverse Hands (1983), edited and with notes by Reynolds Morse, stands as one of the most lavish tributes to any imaginative writer ever assembled.
Yet for perhaps the best study of Shiel as writer and eccentric we must turn to a little known vignette penned eighty years ago by an author who attained far greater renown—Arthur Ransome.