by Michael Sims
Arthur saw zealous—and often quite successful—Mormon missionaries around him in English society. During the single decade of the 1850s, they baptized forty-three thousand English converts into their church. Although polygamy had been forbidden in England since the Bigamy Act of 1603, many poor people seem to have weighed the risks of a new faith against the narrow avenues and high walls of the English class system—and opted for change.
The Book of Mormon forbade polygamy, but among elders Smith encouraged it. In 1876 the Doctrine’s prohibition against it was removed. Soon novelists began exploiting this controversial practice, in part through accounts of virtuous women described as having resisted indoctrination and thus escaped the life of sin planned for them. At times the heroine’s virtue was threatened in titillating detail. Readers could absolve their lapse into prurience, however, through the piety with which victims condemned their tormentors. Church leaders were portrayed as licentious and vain, their followers as bovine and fainthearted. Drink, forbidden by Mormon doctrine, was presented as commonplace.
Stories about evil Mormons had been popular throughout Arthur’s life. His childhood favorite author, Captain Mayne Reid, wrote one, The Wild Huntress, published in 1861, when Arthur was two years old. In Maria Ward’s didactic 1855 novel Female Life Among the Mormons, the heroine, Ellen, recounts how Joseph Smith personally sabotaged her betrothal and how she fell under his spell. “His presence was that of the basilisk,” she recalls. “He exerted a mystical magical influence over me—a sort of sorcery that deprived me of the unrestricted exercise of free will.”
In 1885, the year before Arthur wrote A Study in Scarlet, one of his favorite writers, Robert Louis Stevenson—collaborating with his wife, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson—published a sequel to his popular 1882 story collection New Arabian Nights.
Arthur greatly admired Stevenson’s writing and found himself trying to emulate his friendly, vivid style. Also an Edinburgh native, Stevenson was nine years Arthur’s elder and a fellow alumnus of Edinburgh University—where he had also taken classes with Joseph Bell. Stevenson was born into a family of engineers who specialized in lighthouse design. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, his grandfather, the renowned Robert Stevenson, built the Bell Rock lighthouse on the reef of Inchcape, the notorious graveyard of ships off the southwest coast of Angus. But the young Stevenson had abandoned engineering for literature. His first great success, Treasure Island, had appeared in 1883, to wide acclaim. Two years later, just before Arthur began writing A Study in Scarlet, saw publication of Stevenson’s novel Prince Otto, a fanciful but politically charged adventure story.
More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter comprised a series of stories within stories, narrated by various characters, with titles such as “Story of the Fair Cuban” and “Narrative of the Spirited Old Lady.” The Stevensons set their first framed story, “The Destroying Angel,” in Utah among violent Mormons. The Stevensons portrayed the Danites, their titular “angels,” as a network of spies and assassins spanning the globe, imposing the will of Brigham Young on both apostates and “Gentiles” (non-Mormons). These were not uncommon ideas. A novel published only eight years before Arthur wrote A Study in Scarlet bore the subtitle “A Terrible Tale of the Danites of Mormon Land.”
The Danites were founded as a secret vigilante group in 1838 while the Mormons were headquartered in Missouri. Four years earlier, Joseph Smith had started a private militia he called the Armies of Israel, and this may have been the origin of the Danites. Persistent rumors of a band of Mormon assassins emerged from Utah, but the church denied that such a group existed after the tumultuous early days in Missouri.
In the Stevensons’ story, a family is threatened by the all-spying church that wants their money and their daughter. Terrified, they try to flee under cover of darkness, only to find the symbol of the Mormon Eye, which they had been taught to associate with church omniscience, drawn on a rock face. They turn back. The father is killed and the mother submits to an assisted suicide, leaving the narrating daughter in the hands of a manipulative old man who has long been secretly arranging a marriage with her. At the end of her story, the person to whom she recounts this saga doubts its truth—permitting the authors to exploit anti-Mormon sentiments without committing to them.
Seldom hesitating to borrow from other writers, Arthur incorporated generous helpings of The Dynamiter into A Study in Scarlet. He could not resist the dramatic potential of the evil Danites, whom he dubbed “Avenging Angels” instead of “Destroying Angels,” the term used by Stevenson and others. He titled Chapter 5 of Part 2 “The Avenging Angels.” Arthur gave the girl (and later young woman) in his story the name of the mother in the Stevenson tale, Lucy. Early in Part 2, a band of Mormons rescues a man named John Ferrier and the orphaned Lucy, whom Ferrier then adopts.
Like the Stevensons and many other writers, Arthur created an innocent young woman whose virtue is threatened by the conniving elders. But he trumped the Stevensons by making his villain Brigham Young himself, who had died less than a decade before Arthur began writing his novel. At one point, Young comes to Ferrier to ask why he has no wives, and to proclaim of Lucy, “She has grown to be the flower of Utah, and has found favour in the eyes of many who are high in the land.”
But Lucy has fallen in love with Jefferson Hope, a man outside the faith—a forbidden love. Two young men, the ungentlemanly and threatening Enoch Drebber and Joseph Stangerson, visit Ferrier to insist upon Lucy’s hand in marriage. He throws them out, which results in their threats of both human and divine reprisal. Ferrier urgently begs help from Hope. Ferrier winds up killed by Stangerson, and afterward Lucy is forced to marry Drebber. She dies a month later, and Jefferson Hope swears vengeance upon the killers. Unlike other writers about Mormons, Arthur did not indulge in sexual titillation; the marriage and death of Lucy occur offstage.
After years away, Hope returns in search of his enemies, only to find that they have fled the Mormons. He tracks them across the United States and eventually to England. In recounting his story to Holmes and Watson, Hope describes how he got a job driving a hansom cab in London in order to search for Drebber and Stangerson. The hansom was a two-wheeled vehicle that seated a pair of passengers behind a low double door that guarded their shoes and clothes from mud and excrement flung up by the horse’s rear hooves; the top-hatted driver stood outside at the back, holding the reins through a loop on the roof.
Hope watched and waited. In the revelatory last chapter of A Study in Scarlet, Hope admits that he returned to the scene of his crime, searching for his lost ring, only to find the house surrounded by police. He evaded them by acting drunk, thus deliberately attracting attention instead of trying to avoid it. In this ploy too, Arthur was imitating Gaboriau. The murderer in Monsieur Lecoq attracts attention the same way, in order to get himself jailed alongside an already arrested accomplice.
A fan since boyhood of stories about the American frontier, Arthur admired Mark Twain’s writing and is unlikely to have missed Twain’s amusing and vivid 1872 book Roughing It, which recounted Twain’s embroidered adventures in the western United States, including run-ins with Mormons. Twain sketched one brute reputed to be one of the Destroying Angels, whom Twain defined as “Latter-day Saints who are set apart by the Church to conduct permanent disappearances of obnoxious citizens.”
Arthur’s magpie mind seems to have plucked a term from Twain’s account that appeared in no other contemporary book or article about the Latter-day Saints. “They may be darned sharp,” says Jefferson Hope about his Mormon pursuers, “but they’re not quite sharp enough to catch a Washoe hunter.” The Washoe were a tribe of Native Americans long established in the region of Lake Tahoe; one of the Nevada Territory’s nine original counties was named Washoe. Twain remarks that “Washoe is a pet nickname for Nevada,” and employs it many times within his passages set in Utah and Nevada. But apparently the term was otherwise unknown until Arthur used it.
The overwrought historical
background story was not equal in quality to the rest of A Study in Scarlet, lacking the texture and style of the Sherlock Holmes scenes, as well as the personal warmth of Dr. Watson as narrator. But it provided Holmes with an interesting opponent and allowed Arthur to stretch his wings as a writer.
And naturally the story ended with the triumph of this brilliant new detective. When Sherlock Holmes lures him into a trap, Jefferson Hope surrenders and remarks admiringly, “If there’s a vacant place for a chief of the police, I reckon you are the man for it. The way you kept on my trail was a caution.” It was the end of his trail. Hope turns out to be suffering from “an aortic aneurism,” as Watson diagnoses it, and dies in his cell without appearing before a magistrate.
After Père Tabaret, the amateur private detective in Gaboriau’s The Widow Lerouge, solves the case, he thinks about his primary rival on the police force: “This investigation will bring him honor, when all the credit is due me.” In A Study in Scarlet, after Holmes explains final details of his deductions to Watson, they read in The Echo:
It is an open secret that the credit of this smart capture belongs entirely to the well-known Scotland Yard officials, Messrs. Lestrade and Gregson. The man was apprehended, it appears, in the rooms of a certain Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who has himself, as an amateur, shown some talent in the detective line, and who, with such instructors, may hope in time to attain to some degree of their skill. It is expected that a testimonial of some sort will be presented to the two officers in fitting recognition of their services.
Upon reading this passage, Sherlock Holmes bursts out laughing. “Didn’t I tell you so when we started? That’s the result of all our Study in Scarlet: to get them a testimonial!”
“Never mind, I have all the facts in my journal,” murmurs Watson, “and the public shall know them.”
Rather than end on Watson’s prophetic words, Arthur could not resist echoing Edgar Allan Poe one more time. Poe garnished many of his innovative stories with old-fashioned trappings, including quotations in other languages. He introduced “The Purloined Letter” with a Latin epigraph by the first-century Roman philosopher Seneca, closed “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” with a line in French from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1761 epistolary novel Julie, or the New Héloise. In context, the Rousseau quotation—Dupin’s final words in the last sentence of the story—becomes a sarcastic commentary upon the bureaucratic incompetence of the official police force. Of G——, the prefect of police, Dupin remarks that “he has ‘de nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas’”: “to deny what is and to explain what is not.”
In the closing paragraph of A Study in Scarlet, Arthur invoked the classics with a quotation spoken by Sherlock Holmes, whom Watson had first imagined to be ignorant of most literature: “In the meantime you must make yourself contented by the consciousness of success, like the Roman miser—‘Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo / Ipse domi simul ac nummos contemplor in arca.’” The line, from Horace’s Satires, translates, “The public hisses at me, but I am pleased with myself in private when I look at the money in my box.”
It was not a particularly apt remark when proclaimed by a young man who had no client and had earned no fee during the investigation of the Lauriston Gardens murder. Not surprisingly in a novel written in only six weeks, the closing quotation reads like a last-minute touch with little thought behind it. Perhaps Arthur felt that he owed one last payment to Edgar Allan Poe, who had lent him so much capital to invest in the creation of Sherlock Holmes.
CHAPTER 23
A Born Novelist
If the secret history of literature could be written, the blighted hopes, the heart-sickening disappointment, the weary waiting, the wasted labor, it would be the saddest record ever penned.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE NARRATIVE OF JOHN SMITH
“Arthur has written another book,” Touie Doyle was soon writing to Arthur’s sister Lottie, “a little novel about 200 pages long, called A Study in Scarlet.”
But no one seemed eager to publish Arthur’s new book. Laboriously, he made a fair copy of the manuscript in his neat round hand, rolled it up and inserted it into one of the standard mailing tubes, and sent it out to publishers. He had not been surprised when publishers refused to gamble on The Firm of Girdlestone. But he was disappointed to find A Study in Scarlet making the same old circular tour. He considered this new novel superior to its predecessor.
Optimistically, he sent the manuscript to James Payn at Cornhill, who had published “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.” Arthur hoped for serialization in that magazine. Payn replied that he liked the tale but that it was too short for a novel and too long for a story. Arthur agreed. And clearly A Study in Scarlet would never be picked up by the lending libraries, even if he could sell it as a magazine serial, for Mudie’s seldom gambled on one-volume debut novels.
Nonetheless, in May 1886 Arthur sent the manuscript to J. W. Arrowsmith, a publisher situated in Bristol. It was a reasonable bet. In 1877 Arrowsmith had renamed the firm after succeeding its founder, printer William Browne, and had experienced growing success, especially since founding Arrowsmith’s Annual in the early 1880s.
Yet in July Arrowsmith returned A Study in Scarlet. Determined not to give up, Arthur mailed it to a couple of other publishers. Each rejected it. Finally he thought to send it to Ward, Lock & Company, which specialized in sensational popular novels.
While Arthur was trying to sell A Study in Scarlet, a detective novel by the New Zealand novelist Fergus Hume demonstrated just how much commercial potential this field offered to hardworking (and lucky) authors. Hume first self-published The Mystery of the Hansom Cab and soon sold the copyright for £50—which he must have regretted, because the novel eventually sold a hundred thousand copies in Australia and half a million through the widely distributed Jarrold edition from London.
In the Australian gold rush era, Melbourne police assign the working-class detective Gorby to unravel the story of a corpse found in a hansom. Hume’s debt to Gaboriau was so obvious that an 1888 parody was entitled The Mystery of a Wheelbarrow, or Gaboriau Gaborooed, an Idealistic Story of a Great and Rising Colony. Like Arthur, however, Hume was quick to reference his own genealogy, even having characters cite earlier detective story writers, from Poe to Anna Katharine Green. To keep the reader acquainted with Gorby’s thought processes during the investigation, Hume gave him a curious habit: “Being a detective, and of an extremely reticent disposition, he never talked outside about his business, or made a confidant of anyone. When he did want to unbosom himself, he retired to his bedroom and talked to his reflection in the mirror.” After Poe, Dickens, Collins, Gaboriau, and Hume, readers expected detectives to be eccentric.
In Ward, Lock’s offices in Salisbury Square—the publisher had outgrown its birthplace in Fleet Street—Arthur’s mailing tube crossed the desk of George Thomas Bettany. A former professor of botany and biology at Cambridge, Bettany edited several of Ward, Lock’s series, including Popular Library for Literary Treasures, Science Primers for the People, and the Minerva Library of Famous Books. He was also the London editor of the distinguished U.S. periodical Lippincott’s.
Overworked, like most editors, Bettany thought this little novel, A Study in Scarlet, might be outside his area of expertise. He took it home to his wife, the former Mary Jean Hickling Gwynne, who had studied medicine and who wrote fiction herself under the name Jeanie Gwynne Bettany. Her novel The House of Rimmon had been published by Remington in 1885, and Ward, Lock was publishing Two Legacies in 1886.
“I should be glad if you would look through this,” Bettany recalled saying, “and tell me whether I ought to read it.”
She read through the pages and enthusiastically reported back to her husband, “This is, I feel sure, by a doctor—there is internal evidence to that effect. But in any case, the writer is a born novelist. I am enthusiastic about the book, and believe it will be a great success.”
In late October Arthur received Ward, Lock’s r
eply.
Dear Sir,
We have read your story A Study in Scarlet, and are pleased with it. We could not publish it this year, as the market is flooded at present with cheap fiction, but if you do not object to its being held over until next year we will give you £25/–/– (Twenty-five Pounds) for the copyright.
We are,
Dear Sir,
Yours faithfully,
Ward, Lock & Co.
30 October 1886
Disheartened by this less-than-enthusiastic—and only modestly remunerative—response, Arthur replied immediately, on the first of November, with a request that Ward, Lock pay him royalties instead of purchasing the copyright in its entirety.
The English mail was efficient, as usual. “We regret to say,” replied Ward, Lock on the following day, “that we shall be unable to retain a percentage on the sale of your work as it might give rise to some confusion. The tale may have to be inserted with some other, in one of our annuals, therefore we must adhere to our original offer of for [sic] the complete copyright.”
Arthur agonized over his next decision. He was offended by the contract offered, but he also hated to think of his latest creation stagnating in a drawer for months or years instead of garnering his career a little more of the attention he felt he was beginning to deserve. Finally he agreed to Ward, Lock’s terms.
A few weeks later, he wrote a painful letter concluding the bargain:
November 20th 1886
In consideration of the sum of Twenty-Five Pounds paid by them to me I hereby assign to Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co., of Warwick House, Salisbury Square, E.C. Publishers the Copyright and all my interest in the book written by me entitled A STUDY IN SCARLET.