I’ve been reading some early works by Arthur Conan Doyle. Some of this material was only rediscovered in recent years.
At the age of twenty, while still in medical school in Edinburgh, he shipped out on a whaling ship for six months. The ship went to the remote arctic islands of Spitzbergen [Svalbard] and Jan Mayen, and Doyle had his twenty-first birthday on the rim of the polar icepack. This was no tame adventure. It was 1880, and Doyle’s ship reached within three degrees of the record point that the British Arctic Expedition had turned back from in 1876. A year later, George DeLong’s American expedition would perish at a similar latitude. The pole would not be reached with certainty until 1926, when Doyle was an old man. Peary and Henson, often credited with reaching the pole in 1909, are now considered doubtful. Doyle’s voyage was on a commercial whaler and sealer, driven by profit, not glory, but it was certainly a dangerous and spectacular adventure for a bookish young Scott, and he later wrote that he left as a boy and came back as a man. He kept a diary, quite well written, but rather terse, and decorated with his drawings. On his return, he became caught up with his exams and his first attempts to build a medical practice, and so the diary was forgotten. It was not published until 2012, when it appeared as Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure.
Doyle was already a published writer at the time of the arctic adventure, having sold a story just before he left. After a few more sales, he attempted a novel, The Narrative of John Smith, in 1883. After the usual long wait for the inevitable rejection, he learned that it had never reached the editor — it was lost in the post. There was only the one copy. Doyle vowed to re-write it from memory, and got fairly far before work and financial pressure compelled him to stop. But he continued to write, and struck gold in 1886 with A Study in Scarlet, which introduced Sherlock Holmes. The incomplete re-written manuscript of his first novel was also forgotten, and did not see publication until 2011.
The Narrative of John Smith is not exactly a good book, but it is readable, and a rather odd thing to be produced by a 24-year old. It’s not really a “novel”, but more something along the line of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, a salmagundi of musings within a framing device. The narrator is an old man, normally an active outdoor type, who suddenly finds himself confined indoors by gout. There is no plot. He merely spouts his opinions on a wide range of topics, sometimes directly to the reader, and sometimes in dialogue with an assortment of visitors. Doyle, always an opinionated man, must have thought it great fun to put his notions in the mouth of someone far his older than himself.
Both the arctic diary and this first attempt at writing a book form a window into the mind of a remarkable young man in the Victorian era, and show aspects of the period that one will not find elsewhere. On the whaling ship, Doyle grew to respect and admire men that most Victorian era writers would have considered beneath them. He remained remarkably free of class snobbery throughout his life, no mean accomplishment in his circumstances. It might best be summed up by the scene in A Scandal in Bohemia, where an imaginary King of Bohemia is trying to cover up an affair with a commoner, an American actress:
“What a woman — oh, what a woman!” cried the King of Bohemia, when we had all three read the epistle. “Did I not tell you how quick and resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?”
“From what I have seen of the lady she seems indeed to be on a very different level to your Majesty,” said Holmes coldly.
In the fine television adaptation of 1984, the actor Jeremy Brett delivers this line with a splendid understanding of its deep and echoing sarcasm.
But nothing prepared me to read this remarkable passage in Doyle’s apprentice “novel”. It is far removed from one’s normal image of Victorian era sentiments in Britain:
“I should like to see a little more transfusion in the Empire,” he remarked after a pause. “More black faces in the streets of London and more white ones in the country parts of India. We should find billets in England for a thousand bright Hindoo youths every year, and send out as mnay of our own young fellows to work at the tea and indigo. It would help us towards consolidating the union between the countries. A few Indian regiments in English garrison towns would have the same effect. As to our parliament, it should be a piebald assembly with every hue from jet to brown, red and yellow, with occasionally a bronze-coloured premier at the head of them. What’s the odds how much pigment a man has in his skin, if he has a level head and a loyal heart. Gad, sir, I’ve seen our British regiments glad enough of their help on the day of battle — why shouldn’t we be equally ready to have their assistance at our councils?”
Considering that a “bronze-coloured” English Prime Minister would still be considered an improbability today, when the U.K. has become a multi-ethnic society, this is a most surprising idea to be floated in 1883. Doyle was indeed an interesting man.
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26087. (Arthur Conan Doyle) The Narrative of John Smith
26101. (Arthur Conan Doyle) Dangerous Work: The Diary of an Arctic Adventure
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