was ‘Buddhism and other kindred heathen systems; their character and influence compared with those of Christianity’.... Sir Monier Monier-Williams [the president of the conference] at once proceeded to place in contrast the Bible of Christianity and the Bible of the Buddhists.” Among other matters in the account, evident anti-Catholic accounts would have attracted Conan Doyle’s attention. As to miracle plays, Geoffrey S. Stavert, in his recent A Study in Southsea, points out that the Rev. H. Shaen Solly of Southampton spoke to the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society (in which Conan Doyle was very active) on this exact subject....
After Mary Morstan had left their sitting-room, Sherlock Holmes was probably striving for effect when he “smiled gently” at Watson’s shocked reaction to Holmes’s languid put-down, and cried, “I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money....” In the Sherlock Holmes Journal (vol. 11, Summer 1973, pp. 58–63) I looked at this remark, with instances.
Many such connections are of course conjectural. In the absence of a full reading of everything Doyle can have read over a period of several decades, much will emerge only by chance. And it is often unclear whether a correspondence between something in the news, or in an earlier author, and something in Doyle is deliberate allusion, unconscious repetition, or pure coincidence. The researcher can easily be tempted to substitute wishful thinking for evidence. Patterns do, however, emerge. Donald Redmond reports in Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources (1982) that at least eight of the Scowrers, and some twenty-three other characters in The Valley of Fear, appear to be named after medical acquaintances of Doyle. Many characters in A Study in Scarlet share surnames with neighbours of Doyle in Southsea and Portsmouth, where he lived when he wrote that book. Often, it appears, a character is named for more than one original, or takes a name from one and an attribute (“club foot” or “tiger hunter”) from another.
Sherlock Holmes’s own name has been the subject of much interest, especially in the light of his first incarnation as “Sherrinford Holmes” in a page of Doyle’s handwritten notes. The author claimed that he had taken the “Sherlock” from a bowler of the Marylebone Cricket Club against whom he once had a run of luck — although the eighteenth-century theologian Thomas Sherlock lurks in the background, and James McCord revealed in the Baker Street Journal in 1992 that Jane Sherlock Ball was the mother of one of Doyle’s aunts. “Holmes,” meanwhile, is popularly assumed to come from Oliver Wendell Holmes the elder, the American doctor and author, whom Doyle much admired. Another possibility is a physician friend and neighbour of Doyle’s. Dr. John H. Watson probably takes his name from Dr. James Watson, a medical colleague of Doyle’s in Southsea; the first Moriarty ever encountered by Doyle was a master at his school, Stonyhurst College.
JOSEPH BELL. Doyle always maintained that Sherlock Holmes was modelled on Dr. Joseph Bell (born December 2, 1837, died October 4, 1911), professor of surgery in Edinburgh, and the teacher who impressed the young Doyle most. He wrote in his autobiography, Memories and Adventures, that when he came to create Holmes, “I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details.” Elsewhere in the same book, he tells an anecdote or two about Bell the master of diagnosis, including the famous exchange, quoted in many writings about Doyle, in which Bell begins by greeting a patient: “Well, my man, you’ve served in the army... Not long discharged?... A Highland regiment?” And so on.
Ely M. Liebow accepts that attribution in his biography Dr. Joe Bell: Model for Sherlock Holmes (1982), although he acknowledges that Holmes had other origins as well. (“His importance can be exaggerated,” Richard Lancelyn Green agrees in his Introduction to the Adventures volume of the Oxford Sherlock Holmes.) Bell was editor of the Edinburgh Medical Journal from 1873, and a teacher from 1878, as well as an expert consulted by the police in forensic matters, but it was as a practising surgeon that he was best known. Says Liebow:
Joe Bell was an operator, a great one. He was in all probability better than Syme, better than Lister or Annandale, or any other contemporary, with the exception of the great-but-silent Patrick Heron Watson. While he was in the post-Listerian age, and the post-Simpson age, he would be operating many times in his life without anesthesia and when septicemia still plagued the hospitals. “Rapidity,” writes a colleague, “was his keynote, swiftness in operating.”
His textbook, A Manual of the Operations of Surgery (1866 and subsequent editions), is available in modern facsimile. Doyle, as a medical student, was chosen to be clerk for Bell’s clinics at the Royal Infirmary, and heard the great man assess patients with rapid perceptions that he would later put into Holmes’s mouth: “This man’s limp is not from his hip but from his foot. Were you to observe closely, you would see there are slits, cut by a knife, in those parts of the shoe where the pressure of the shoe is greatest against the foot. The man is a sufferer from corns, gentlemen.” Such flashes of insight made an impression, and when Doyle created Holmes he wrote to Bell, “I do not think that his analytical work is in the least an exaggeration of some effects which I have seen you produce in the out-patient ward.” Bell’s compassion, and his thirst for justice, may also be reflected in Sherlock Holmes.
Doyle wrote his stories in longhand, in a firm, squat, generally legible script but with apparent disdain for the rules of punctuation and capitalization. (“For a medical man, Conan Doyle’s handwriting was commendably legible, though his o could look like an ‘a’,” Owen Dudley Edwards wrote in 1993. For that matter, the o could pass for an s on occasion, and vice versa.) There is evidence in the known manuscripts that his first draft was also generally his last; on occasion he left a space in which he would later fill in a name or phrase. It is generally assumed that at least in later years, the text was then typewritten for attention by editors and printers, but no such typescripts seem to survive.
The manuscripts have been thoroughly dispersed by the publishers or by the author’s heirs, and the whereabouts of some is unknown. A number, including The Sign of the Four and The Valley of Fear, are in private hands. Others are in public collections — “The Red Circle” at Indiana University, “The Three Students” at Harvard, three short stories and a chapter of The Hound of the Baskervilles at the New York Public Library. A census of the manuscripts by Peter E. Blau can be found, amid many other useful resources, through Randall Stock’s web site www.bestofsherlock.com.
Portions of many manuscripts have been reproduced in facsimile in Sherlockian journals, and several complete manuscripts have been published in book form, including “The Priory School,” “The Dying Detective,” “The Lion’s Mane,” “The Six Napoleons,” and “Shoscombe Old Place” (under what appears to have been its original title, “The Adventure of Shoscombe Abbey”).
PUBLISHING AND TEXTUAL TRANSMISSION
A publisher is someone, an individual or more commonly a firm, who takes on the responsibility for having an author’s book printed and distributed. The usual arrangement is that the author receives “royalties,” a percentage of the sale price of the book, often with a minimum payment represented by an “advance” or cash payment when the manuscript is submitted. A 10 percent royalty is a rule of thumb, but the figure can vary: in 1902 Doyle was receiving 25 percent of the sale price on copies of his best-selling The Hound of the Baskervilles in Canada. In some cases — rarely today, but more commonly in the nineteenth century — the publisher buys the book outright. The publishers of Beeton’s Christmas Annual paid Doyle £25 (a not ungenerous $2,000 in today’s currency) for the ownership of A Study in Scarlet. The author may choose to sell only certain “rights” to a publisher, restricted by geography (“North American rights”) or limited
