The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The trouble was, that although the Whitechapel murders acquired instantaneous mythic status, the authorities relied on the services of real-life policemen, the equivalents of Lestrade and Gregson in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Holmes himself was required.fn1 It was in fact one month before the first of the Whitechapel murders – in July 1888 – that A Study in Scarlet, the story in which the greatest detective of them all makes his début, was first published in book form, though its author, a young doctor called Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), first published the tale the previous year in Beeton’s Christmas Annual.15

  Sherlock Holmes was very much a thinker of his time, his view of the nature of things absolutely in tune with the English Idealists F.H. Bradley and T.H. Green.

  A logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known, whenever we are shown a single link of it. Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study, nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it.16

  When common-sense Dr Watson reads this article in a magazine he exclaims, ‘What ineffable twaddle!’ He cannot believe, as the article suggests, that ‘By a man’s finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs – by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.’17

  Needless to say, it transpires that the author of the article is the man with whom Watson is sharing lodgings at 221B Baker Street. He immediately demonstrates his skills by ‘deducing’ – from merely looking at him across the street – that a man on the pavement is a retired sergeant of the Marines. He has no sooner met Watson than he can know, by his supposedly scientific method, that he had been wounded in Afghanistan. In a later story, The Sign of Four, he enrages Watson by telling him that his brother was ‘left with good prospects; but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died’. All this is inferred by looking at the dead brother’s gold watch and noticing its scuffed appearance and the pawnbroker’s number scratched minutely on the case.

  It seems entirely apt that by far the greatest Victorian of the later part of the Queen’s reign should be a character in fiction. The triumph of the first story, A Study in Scarlet, partly derives from its clumsy construction. A murder story set in London, it is concerned with the Mormons, and its second half – a lengthy flashback explaining the crime – takes us away from Baker Street to the state of Utah and the country of the Saints. What reader of the story has not pined, as for a dear friend, during those American pages, and rejoiced when we return to the bachelor apartments and the great amateur detective?

  Holmes evolves through several stories. In A Study in Scarlet we find him in a laboratory – he never seems to return to it in the Strand Magazine short stories which – reprinted as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in book form – are the best in the collection. Also in A Study in Scarlet Holmes does not wish to clutter his brain with general learning which does not relate to his profession. He says he is ignorant of the work of Carlyle (while going on to quote him) and, less probably, ignorant of the Copernican theory of astronomy. In later tales, Holmes has become a polymath. (‘Breadth of view … is one of the essentials of our profession’ – The Valley of Fear.) In A Study in Scarlet Watson dismisses the notion that Holmes was ‘addicted to the use of some narcotic’ because ‘the temperance and cleanliness of his whole life’18 forbade such a notion. In the later stories we discover that Holmes is a cocaine addict and frequents opium dens.

  Yet in spite of all the inconsistencies, Holmes comes before us as totally real. T.S. Eliot said that ‘when we talk of him we invariably fall into the fancy of his existence’.19

  Much has been written about the evolution of Holmes in the mind of his creator. His deductive method owes a lot to similar tricks performed by the Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Bell when Doyle was a medical student; his relationship with Watson is partly derivative from Boswell and Johnson. But he is also archetypically of his time. Like the great scientists who turned their cleverness into technological miracles – telegraph, bicycles, electricity, telephones – Holmes marries intellectual skill with commonplace observation. When he has nothing to use his great mind upon he turns, decadent as the decade in which he became so prodigiously popular, to the syringe and the needle:

  Hence the cocaine. I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, Doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them?20

  Watson, like the empiricist philosopher Mill, never sees connections – or what philosophers call relations – unless they are externally explained. Holmes discovers the nature of reality by inductive methods which presuppose the idealist belief in ‘internal relations’. He is the most modern of philosophers but – here again – operating in a wholly mundane and yet bizarre world: the fogbound courts and streets of London, where the actual Whitechapel killings had revealed ‘the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life’.21

  fn1 In December 1965 the BBC broadcast ‘The Case of the Unmentioned Case’ by L.W. Bailey, which points out that when the entire police force was at its wits’ end trying to solve the Whitechapel case, Holmes was not consulted. Inevitably, Bailey suggested that Holmes, with his rudimentary knowledge of anatomy and supposed misogyny, was the Ripper – a thesis which more than one listener was right to find ‘shameful’: the essence of Holmes’s appeal consisting in his virtue. See Wilson & Odell, p. 191.

  38

  The Fall of Parnell

  ARTHUR BALFOUR, LORD Salisbury’s clever nephew, succeeded Hicks Beach as Irish secretary in March 1887 and was immediately faced with the prospect of dealing with the so-called ‘Plan of Campaign’, which called on tenants all over Ireland to organize, and to treat with landlords as if they were a united body. Parnell privately disapproved of the Plan of Campaign. Important as the Land Issue was to him – the basic issue of how the Irish rural population could till the land, and eat, without being squeezed into unbearable poverty – he never lost sight of the larger political dream, from which agitation over Land Acts detracted. Balfour was his uncle’s stooge, but he was also highly ambitious, and he was anxious to use the Irish situation to prove himself. A keen amateur philosopher, a bachelor who enjoyed being spanked by his friend Lady Elcho, he had been known at Cambridge by the nicknames ‘Clara’, ‘Tiger Lily’ and ‘Pretty Fanny’. His emotional and inner life remain something of a mystery, the more so when we have read the story of his psychic involvement with Mary Catherine Lyttelton, to whom he was almost engaged when he was twenty-three, and who died on Palm Sunday 1885 in her twenty-fifth year.1 For the next fifty-five years, Balfour would spend Palm Sunday with the friends he had in common with Mary Lyttelton (the Talbots). Spiritualists believe that Mary and Balfour’s younger brother Frank (1851–82) made frequent attempts to communicate with the Tory statesman, often referring to Palms, or using Palm imagery in their language in commemoration of that dire Palm Sunday. The voluminous Spirit-speeches, made while the medium was in a state of trance, which record Mary Lyttelton’s continued obsession with Balfour from Beyond, are kept at the Society for Psychical Research. ‘Tell him he gives me joy,’ she was saying to him, as a medium stroked his hand, as late as 1929.2 In Ireland he was to be known simply as ‘Bloody Balfour’.

  On the one hand he allowed some concessions to the tenants, but on the other he brought in a new Crimes Act – the Criminal Law and Procedure Act, 1887 – which was much more drastic than any previous legislation. Boycotting, resistance
to eviction, intimidation and conspiracy now carried much heavier penalties. Suspects – before they had committed any of these offences – could now be held and examined. Those accused could be moved away from their own districts for trial. Six months’ hard labour was the maximum sentence.3

  Salisbury wanted even tougher measures. Ireland was the test case, before the eyes of the world, of British competence to govern. If Britain could not rule Ireland, ‘what right have we to go lecturing the Sultan as to the state of things in Armenia or in Macedonia?’4

  ‘Loot, loot, pure loot, is the sacred course for which the Land League has summoned the malcontents to its standard,’ Salisbury had written in the Quarterly Review in 1881. If the government surrendered to ‘land hunger’, why should not governments give way in the future to ‘house hunger’, ‘consols hunger’ or even ‘silver plate hunger’? Salisbury was not himself a harsh landlord. When times were bad, he entirely remitted rents on his 20,000 acres, all of which were held in England. (‘How pleasant it must be to have nothing but Consols,’ he remarked to a friend.)5 His opposition to the Irish and ‘the amiable practice to which they were addicted of shooting people to whom they owe money’ was deep, and his Irish policy drew on his wells of cynical pessimism. In 1872 he had written, ‘the optimistic view of politics assumes that there must be some remedy for every political ill. But is not the other view barely possible? Is it not just conceivable that there is no remedy that we can apply to the Irish hatred for ourselves?’6

  One remedy to mutual hatred is divorce, but for the Imperialist reasons already stated, Salisbury was unwilling to contemplate Home Rule. He was astute politically and could see that the Irish Party and the Irish ‘question’ possessed a vulnerable, not to say spurious, unity. Land agitation and individual cases of hardship were not the same as an ideal for political independence; Fenian nationalism had been different in texture from Parnell’s Home Rule idea – and the differences between Parnell and some of his followers could be exploited. The era of ‘Parnellism’ in Irish politics was one in which issues were subsumed in one superbly attractive personality, Parnell himself, who by masterful political manoeuvre and charm, deployed in equal measures of skill, had managed to unite the various aspirant Irish nationalists and Irish liberals with the English Liberal Party, itself a coalition. Destroy Parnell, and the Tories would have managed in large measure to divide the enemy. It would not make the problem of Ireland go away but it would make it – which was Salisbury’s ideal – utterly insoluble.

  So, while Balfour with great parliamentary aplomb was seeing his contentious Crimes Bill through the Commons, The Times printed what purported to be the facsimiles of letters from Parnell condoning the Phoenix Park murders of Lord Frederick Cavendish and his secretary. The old slur – that by associating with Irish nationalism you were rubbing shoulders with murderers – was very much helped by The Times ‘revelations’. Parnell immediately denounced them as a ‘felonious and bare faced forgery’.7 Salisbury and Balfour must have had their suspicions that this was the case, even if they did not know it for certain. Would so highly literate a man as Parnell spell the word as ‘hesitency’? At the time, it suited them very well to believe so. The Crimes Bill became law – nicknamed the ‘Jubilee Coercion Act’ by its enemies. ‘The hot weather has been too much for us,’ Salisbury said. ‘I wonder when these fiendish Irishmen will let me go.’

  In September 1887, at the opening of the trial of William O’Brien, MP – this nationalist with strong links to the Irish in Chicago was being prosecuted under the new act for inciting tenants to resist landlords and to boycott those who moved into farms where these had been evicted – O’Brien’s parliamentary colleague John Dillon, another nationalist, was addressing the crowd of 8,000 who had congregated at Mitchelstown, County Cork. A scuffle broke out, the police moved in, and as they were driven back by the crowds, a number of officers opened fire. One man was killed, several others injured.

  Edward Carson (1854–1935), the thirty-three-year-old counsel for the Irish attorney general, told ‘Pretty Fanny’ Balfour, ‘It was Mitchelstown that made us certain we had a man at last.’8 Others were less impressed. A coroner’s jury found wilful murder against the county inspector and five constables. The Queen’s Bench in Dublin, five months later, quashed the verdict on technical grounds.9 The lengths to which the Tory Unionists in government were prepared to go had been revealed. Gladstone, addressing a rally in England that Jubilee autumn, declared, ‘I have said and say again, “Remember Mitchelstown!”’ Salisbury did not mind. When he arrived in Oxford and found three-foot-high posters reading ‘Lord Salisbury is coming. Remember Mitchelstown’, he was perfectly happy that the people should do so. ‘I was delighted to see you had run Wilfrid Blunt in,’ he told Balfour after he had imprisoned this eccentric poet under the Crimes Act.10 The year, he told his nephew, had ‘enormously added to your reputation and influence’.

  Unfortunately for Salisbury and Balfour, Parnell insisted on a Special Parliamentary Commission to look into The Times forgeries. He also took legal action against the newspaper for its articles ‘Parnellism and Crime’. He was vindicated. The letters were shown to be the work of a clever forger called Richard Pigott (not so clever as to be able to spell hesitancy), who admitted his crime in the witness box. Pigott’s humiliation caused him to flee abroad, to Madrid. There he committed suicide.11

  Parnell now, in the period of 1889–90, enjoyed unprecedented popularity and public support. His truthfulness had been proven by a Special Commission to Parliament. When he first appeared in the House after the collapse of Pigott, the entire Opposition, including Gladstone, rose to their feet and cheered for some minutes. He found himself a hero not only in Ireland but among the English public. Even in the Unionist press, it was said that if the Irish government – i.e. Dublin Castle, acting under directions from London – had wished to make the coercive system appear as odious as possible, they would act as they were acting.12

  Yet Parnell’s triumph was short-lived. On Christmas Eve 1889, Captain William O’Shea, the MP for Galway, filed for divorce, citing Parnell as co-respondent. The trial of the case came up nearly a year later, in November 1890, and though O’Shea clearly lied in pretending that his wife’s relations with Parnell were very shocking to him, and that he had heard about them only shortly before filing for divorce, the central fact was not contested. Parnell and Mrs O’Shea were lovers.

  Gladstone had known about it for years, and often used Mrs O’Shea as a go-between when negotiating with the Irish Party. Given the willingness of Salisbury’s government to make political capital out of the Dilke divorce, and the Pigott forgeries, one does wonder whether they made it worth Captain O’Shea’s while to destroy Parnell. After all, O’Shea had been totally complicit for ten years. Three of his wife’s children were Parnell’s.

  There are many remarkable things about the whole story, which, because it has passed into legend, is difficult to deconstruct. For something approaching a year – from January to November 1890 – the Irish Party was in suspense, awaiting the outcome of the trial. Parnell assured his close supporter Michael Davitt that ‘he would emerge without a stain on his reputation’.13 Either this was a simple untruth, or we are to assume that Parnell meant he had not broken the code of a gentleman; he had not deceived O’Shea. The Press, in Ireland and England, was not silent, and for this whole period there was plenty of time for the implications of the story to sink in. Yet almost all Irish public bodies, all the MPs and the Catholic bishops remained loyal and expressed confidence in Parnell’s leadership. When one considers how extremely puritanical the Irish were (until our own generation) about such matters, the loyalty, and the political maturity, thus demonstrated is all the more extraordinary.

  The crisis came in the middle of November 1890, when Mrs O’Shea accepted in court that she had been unfaithful to her husband. The leader of a parliamentary party was now legally defined as an adulterer.

  Politically speaking, what matter
ed was how many votes this would cost the cause of Home Rule. How many Liberal MPs would be moved to change sides over the Irish issue because of it? How many Irish MPs would feel tempted to form an anti-Parnellite faction? What would the electorate in the Irish constituencies feel about it all?

  Cardinal Manning, less than a week after the O’Shea divorce proceedings, urged Gladstone to repudiate Parnell, and much more importantly he had advised the Irish bishops that Parnell could not survive politically, and that on their part, ‘plain and prompt speech was safest’. ‘We have been slow to act,’ the archbishop of Dublin telegraphed to one of the Irish members, ‘trusting that the party will act manfully.’

  Yet although W.B. Yeats, in common with many Irishmen, believed that

  The Bishops and the Party

  That tragic story made …

  this was not strictly true. At least in chronological terms, it was the English Liberals who at first made it clear that they would no longer continue supporting Parnell. It so happened that there was a Liberal convention meeting in Sheffield on 22 November, from which Harcourt reported back that the assembled Northern grocers and Methodistical aldermen with their silver watch-chains could not tolerate co-operation with Irish Home Rulers so long as they were led by an adulterer. Gladstone thereafter wrote a letter – which he subsequently had published – to John Morley conveying the views of the Liberal Party and saying that Parnell’s continuation as leader would render Home Rule ‘almost a nullity’. Davitt meanwhile was writing articles complaining about the silence of the Catholic bishops on the subject.

  The real drama of the story began when Parliament reassembled and the Irish MPs met in Committee Room 15 to ratify Parnell’s leadership for the next session. On all previous occasions this had been a mere formality. After an agonizing week, forty-five members withdrew from the Committee Room, leaving Parnell with twenty-eight followers. The Press Association summarized the situation with the words, ‘the old Irish party no longer exists’.14