The Narrative of John Smith

by Arthur Conan Doyle

  82. Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), known to the world as Mark Twain. Conan Doyle once lamented to a reporter that he had ‘never had the good fortune to run across Mark Twain’ in his travels in America (speaking of a three-month lecture tour there in 1894), but in June 1907 he attended a London dinner for Clemens given by US ambassador Whitelaw Reid, when Clemens came to England to receive an honorary degree from Oxford.

  83. ‘“They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains,” [Holmes] remarked with a smile. “It’s a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.”’ (A Study in Scarlet). Carlyle’s remark comes from his Life of Frederick the Great.

  84. Here, one suspects, he is thinking of Dr Joseph Bell of Edinburgh, under whom Conan Doyle worked as a medical student. Bell had uncanny powers of observation and deduction as a physician, and also as a forensic witness in criminal trials, and Conan Doyle gave him public credit for the Sherlock Holmes method depicted in his tales. ‘His intuitive powers were simply marvellous,’ Conan Doyle said, describing the manner in which Bell could ‘at a glance’ construct a patient’s entire medical history and personal background.

  85. Sir Edwin Arnold (1832–1904), English journalist (reporting on Asia, notably) and poet. The reference to ‘instinct is memory’ may come from his essay ‘The Indian Upanishads,’ collected in his 1896 book East and West, Being Papers Reprinted from the Daily Telegraph: ‘the marvels of what we call instinct, which looks like a pre-natal memory.’ Arnold goes on to give several examples, the first perhaps suggesting the one Conan Doyle gives in his next paragraph: ‘the jungle-chicken pecking its food, distinguishing wholesome from unfit seeds, on the very first day of its emergence from the egg.’

  86. Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867), English journalist, lawyer and antiquarian, whose posthumously published Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence is a significant source about the leading figures of England’s Romantic movement.

  87. A viewpoint Conan Doyle would shortly transfer to Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet: ‘I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.’ (See also p. 74.) Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes repeat his brain-attic view again in the 1891 story ‘The Five Orange Pips.’ (Not that he was consistent: the time Holmes quotes Carlyle without attribution in A Study in Scarlet, Watson had previously said: ‘Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naïvest way who he might be and what he had done.’)

  88. It was Watson’s consternation at discovering Holmes did not know the earth revolved around the sun, nor cared, that prompted the dissertation in the preceding note. When Watson protested ‘But the Solar System!’ Holmes replied: ‘What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would make not a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.’ (At the time, Watson did not yet know what that work was.)

  89. William Parsons, third Earl Rosse (1800–1867), an astronomer who in 1845 built the nineteenth century’s largest telescope, known as the Leviathan.

  90. Dr Turner has suddenly become Dr Julep for the remainder of the manuscript, perhaps a sarcastic or even snide reference to the word’s Middle English meaning, of a sweet syrupy drink to which medicine can be added.

  91. Perhaps reflecting his physician’s apprehension about his father Charles Doyle’s trajectory. Because of worsening alcoholism he was sent for treatment to an Aberdeenshire institution called Blairerno, the first of several asylums for increasingly serious mental problems from which Charles Doyle never re-emerged, dying at the Crichton Royal Hospital in Dumfries, Scotland, in 1892.

  92. Three novels by Charles Reade (1814–1884), also the author of The Cloister and the Hearth, mentioned in Conan Doyle’s next sentence along with several other mid-Victorian novels as ‘fine examples of pure storytelling’ – none of which has endured as well as his own 1901 Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles or his 1910 science-fiction novel The Lost World as fine examples of pure storytelling.

  93. Conan Doyle would return to this theme in Through the Magic Door. ‘This I am sure of,’ he says, ‘that there are far fewer supremely good short stories than there are supremely good long books. It takes more exquisite skill to carve the cameo than the statue. But the strangest thing is that the two excellences seem to be separate and even antagonistic. Skill in the one by no means ensures skill in the other.’

  94. Conan Doyle was to become one of the most successful short-story writers in his own or other languages, but here he praises predecessors immensely important to him. Poe he once called ‘the supreme original short story writer of all time,’ saying on another occasion that ‘If every man who receives a cheque for a story which owes its springs to Poe were to pay tithe to a monument for the master, he would have a pyramid as big as that of Cheops.’ Bret Harte, another American writer, was counted by Conan Doyle as a strong influence, including on his first Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet, with its flashback set in the American West in a style reminiscent of Harte. Stevenson, the Scottish writer with whom he corresponded late in that writer’s life, was a great favourite: his ‘Pavilion on the Links’ Conan Doyle had described, before knowing Stevenson was its author (it was published in The Cornhill in 1880 without a by-line), as ‘a splendid story… one of the most powerful I ever read.’

  95. Conan Doyle would probably have said his hobby was sports. He was an avid cricketer, footballer and boxer, and played many other games as well in the course of an active lifetime. Many similes and allusions in his fiction come from sports and their worlds.

  96. Conan Doyle’s famous citation of Hafiz occurs in the 1891 story ‘A Case of Identity,’ in which Holmes tells Watson: ‘You may remember the old Persian saying, “There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.” There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.’ And Conan Doyle not only read Persian poets, but about them as well; Sir William Jones and Baron von Hammer-Purgstall were referenced again as authorities in his 1889 potboiler The Mystery of Cloomber. But according to Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr, noted translator of Hafiz, the proverb in ‘A Case of Identity’ is not by him, nor by any of the other Persian poets Conan Doyle mentions above.

  97. Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire (1805–1895), author of a number of mid-nineteenth-century books about Buddhism, as well as with works on many other subjects.

  98. Conan Doyle would not have described himself as a mathematician, but did harbour some warm feeling for the fifth proposition of Euclid. ‘Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner,’ Holmes told Dr Watson peevishly in The Sign of the Four about the latter’s account of A Study in Scarlet: ‘You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.’

  99. A malediction cited in Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy. The French-born Ernulphus (1040–1124) was a one-time prior of Canterbury Cathedral who later became Bishop of Rochester, with the entire lengthy, comprehensive curse contained in the medieval manuscript Textus Roffensis. Conan Doyle would invoke this curse again in The Stark Munro Let
ters: ‘I must mention no names,’ Dr Stark Munro declares at one stage, ‘for the curse of Ernulphus, which includes eight and forty minor imprecations, be upon the head of the man who kisses and tells.’

  100. Uncle Toby is a leading character from Tristam Shandy.

  101. Conan Doyle was a happy composer of doggerel verse his entire life, but in the area of medicine his father had suggested, as a mnemonic device, writing verse about facts he needed to remember, and Conan Doyle had written many along the lines above during medical school, into his copy of The Essentials of Materica Medica and Therapeutics by Alfred Baring Garrod (Longmans, 1877), now at the University of Texas. About the effects of quinine, for example, Conan Doyle wrote: ‘In ears a sound, in eyes a flash, / Vomit, headache, nausea, rash, / Thirst, no hunger, heart goes slower, / Then if he goes and swallows more, / He’ll die from cardiac paralysis, / Shown by a post mortem analysis.’

  102. A simile he would use again to describe literary characters; in the 1904 Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of Black Peter,’ for example: ‘The first who entered was a little Ribston pippin of a man with ruddy cheeks and fluffy white side-whiskers.’

  103. Perhaps citing Sir John Bowring’s religious poem of that title, but more likely Goethe’s. (‘Goethe is always pithy,’ Conan Doyle once had Sherlock Holmes observe.)

  104. An infection of the tip of the finger.

  105. Where Conan Doyle, as a medical student, had clerked for Dr Joseph Bell.

  106. ‘Hard and forceful punishment,’ abolished in Great Britain in 1772.

  107. A closed four-passenger horse-drawn carriage.

  108. ‘“You have erred, perhaps,” [Sherlock Holmes] observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood,’ said Dr Watson in the 1892 story ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.’ Long cherry-wood pipes make appearances in a number of Conan Doyle’s tales in these years, another his 1890 novel The Firm of Girdlestone.

  109. Not many, perhaps, would have chosen to stay in a boarding house kept by Charlotte Corday, after she stabbed French Revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat to death in his bath.

  110. John William Colenso (1814–1883), a controversial Anglican theologian in whom the young Conan Doyle was interested. To the dismay of his fellow churchmen and many laymen, Colenso had challenged the historicity of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. Three years earlier, while preparing for his Arctic voyage aboard the whaler Hope in February 1880, Conan Doyle reported to his mother: ‘The chief engineer came up from the coal hole last night & engaged me upon Darwinism, in the moonlight on deck. I overthrew him with great slaughter but then he took me on to Colenso’s objections to the Pentateuch and got rather the best of me there.’

  111. A term out of phrenology, the pseudo-science popular in the first half of the nineteenth century, and not a unique figure of speech. It occurs, for example in Vol. 18 of Bentley’s Miscellany for 1845, in an instalment of Glimpses and Mysteries, a series by Alfred Crowquill, entitled ‘The Old Woman at the Corner.’ Perhaps not entirely coincidently, Bentley’s Miscellany at the time was running a multi-part series about seventeenth-century murderess the Marquise de Brinvilliers, whose crimes were the inspiration in 1903 for one of Conan Doyle’s most famous Tales of Terror and Mystery, ‘The Leather Funnel.’ Bentley’s Miscellany was edited by Charles Dickens originally, and in 1868 merged with Temple Bar magazine, publisher of some of Conan Doyle’s earliest stories. Bentley’s Miscellany was also one of the first to carry Edgar Allan Poe’s tales in Britain, beginning with four in 1840 including ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’

  112. ‘But no woman has a voice,’ states Conan Doyle’s ‘liberated-woman’ Mrs Westmacott in his 1892 novel Beyond the City. ‘Consider that the women are a majority in the nation. Yet if there was a question of legislation upon which all the women were agreed upon one side and all the men upon the other, it would appear that the matter was settled unanimously when more than half the population were opposed to it. Is that right?’ Yet Conan Doyle never supported women’s suffrage. He counted himself a Liberal Unionist in politics, running for Parliament unsuccessfully twice, in 1900 and 1906, in Edinburgh and northern English constituencies.

  113. Usually spelled Stuart.

  114. Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church in America, a subject of interest to Conan Doyle who gave A Study in Scarlet a strong Mormon sub-plot of revenge against two fugitive Mormons responsible for the death of the killer’s beloved years before.

  115. Conan Doyle refers to the so-called Tichbourne Claimant case of the 1860s and ’70s, one of British jurisprudence’s longest, not finally settled until 1873 when Conan Doyle was a schoolboy at Stonyhurst College. The heir to a moneyed title, who had been missing since 1854, apparently reappeared in 1866, but was challenged by members of the family and eventually proven to be a former butcher from Wagga Wagga, Australia, named Arthur Orton. Conan Doyle and his schoolmates had taken an interest in the case during its 1872–1873 perjury trial phase because the missing heir had been a Stonyhurst graduate, and a favourite teacher of Conan Doyle’s had been called to testify.

  116. English inventor Samuel Rowbotham (1816–1884), whose Zetetic Society promoting his astronomical theory was succeeded by the still-existing Flat Earth Society.

  117. Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), German Romantic poet and scholar.

  118. ‘A fool always finds one still more foolish to admire him’ (Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux). Conan Doyle would give the quote to Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet.

  119. Chamonix in the French Alps and the Rigi mountain in Switzerland.

  120. A phrase that could have had a number of origins for Conan Doyle in his reading, including Reason: The Only Oracle of Man, A Compendious System of Natural Religion, by Ethan Allen (Boston, 1854), or from Freemasonry.

  121. Conan Doyle was seriously interested in psychic phenomena by the time he wrote this novel, experimenting with various forms of it in Southsea under the guidance of his friend, retired Major-General Alfred Drayson. While he sounds convinced here, and would sound quite won over in a letter to the psychic journal Light, in its 2 July 1887 issue (see Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, p. 269), his actual conviction to spiritualism would wax and wane for many years, until he finally committed to that faith in 1916.

  122. A trace of the theosophist Alfred Percy Sinnett (1840–1921). ‘I read Sinnett’s Occult World and afterwards with even greater admiration I read his fine exposition in Esoteric Buddhism, a most notable book,’ Conan Doyle wrote in Memories and Adventures: ‘I also met him, for he was an old friend of General Drayson’s, and I was impressed by his conversation.’ In Occult World Sinnett wrote a good deal reflected in Conan Doyle’s ideas, including: ‘It is not physical phenomena, but these universal ideas, that we study; as to comprehend the former, we have first to understand the latter. They touch man’s true position in the universe.’

  123. From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s conclusion to his 1836 essay Nature, first published anonymously, which laid the foundation of Transcendualist doctrine. Conan Doyle quotes it incompletely here, dropping these exultant sentences with 104 words about the perfect world to come, and abridging the final sentence which actually reads: ‘The kingdom of men over nature, which cometh not with observation, – a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God, – he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.’

  124. Sentiments such as these never left Conan Doyle, especially after witnessing war at first hand as a correspondent for the Westminster Gazette during Kitchener’s campaign on the Nile in 1896, and as an army field surgeon in South Africa during the Boer War in 1900. (His brother Innes from an early age aimed at an Army career, rising during the World War to the rank of brigadier.) After the Boer War, Conan Doyle became part of the military reform mov
ement that followed, to the irritation of the War Office. In 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War, he published a story called ‘Danger!’ that warned of the peril posed to Britain by German submarines. When the World War began, he also sent the Admiralty further unwelcome life-saving ideas, like inflatable rubber belts for sailors. ‘We can spare the ships,’ he declared; ‘We can’t spare the men.’

  125. Once again (and not for the last time) reflecting the young Conan Doyle’s belief that he was a Bohemian personality living a Bohemian life. ‘When shall I marry, and who?’ he asked his mother in June 1882, but in fact his letters home from Southsea these first years mention going to dances of various kinds (at one, getting so drunk he had proposed to every unmarried woman present, he claimed), playing on several local sports teams, expanding his circle of professional colleagues, joining the Portsmouth Literary & Scientific Society and giving a presentation on ‘The Arctic Seas,’ constantly writing and submitting stories to the magazines, and hosting friends from out of town, along with seeing to his younger brother Innes’s welfare, and sparring with income tax commissioners.

  126. ‘To appreciate a woman one has to be out of sight of one for six months,’ he wrote in Memories and Adventures about his six months at sea aboard the Arctic whaler Hope in 1880: ‘I can well remember that as we rounded the north of Scotland on our return we dipped our flag to the lighthouse, being only some hundreds of yards from the shore. A figure emerged to answer our salute, and the excited whisper ran through the ship, “It’s a wumman!” … She was well over fifty, short skirts and sea boots – but she was a “wumman.” “Anything in a mutch!” the sailors used to say, and I was of the same way of thinking.’