The Narrative of John Smith
The Narrative of
John Smith
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
JON LELLENBERG, DANIEL STASHOWER
AND RACHEL FOSS
THE BRITISH LIBRARY
JON LELLENBERG, US agent for the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd, is the editor of The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1995) and co-editor of the award-winning BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters (2007).
DANIEL STASHOWER is a two-time Edgar Award-winning author whose books include Teller of Tales: The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1999); The Beautiful Cigar Girl (2006) and (as co-editor with Jon Lellenberg) Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters (2007).
RACHEL FOSS is Lead Curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts at The British Library.
The Editors wish to thank, for their assistance, Catherine Cooke, Alison Corbett, Susan E. Dahlinger, Michael Dirda, Richard Fairman, Dr Robert S. Katz, Randall Stock and Peter Wood.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The Narrative of John Smith
NOTE ON THE MANUSCRIPT
Copyright
IN AN ARTICLE called ‘My First Book,’ published in The Idler in January 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle, recounting his struggles as an aspiring young author, referred to an early manuscript which was lost in the post on its way to the publishers. With mock dramatic flourish, he wrote:
Alas for the dreadful thing that happened! The publishers never received it, the Post Office sent countless blue forms to say that they knew nothing about it, and from that day to this no word has ever been heard of it.
This work was The Narrative of John Smith, a novel with a ‘personal–social–political complexion’ that Conan Doyle undertook during his early years in Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth, as he attempted to establish himself both as a doctor and as a writer. In June 1881, after five years of study, he had attained his Bachelor of Medicine (MB) and Master of Surgery (CM) from the University of Edinburgh. One year later, after the second of two stints as a ship’s surgeon and a short-lived venture as a partner in the Plymouth practice of George Budd, a fellow Edinburgh medical graduate, Conan Doyle arrived in Southsea and rented a house at number 1 Bush Villas, intent on finally making a successful independent start in his chosen profession. ‘I took the most central house I could find,’ he told a family friend, ‘determined to make a spoon or spoil a horn,1 and got three pounds worth of furniture for the Consulting Room, a bed, a tin of corned beef and two enormous brass plates with my name on it.’2
In spite of his qualifications, energy and experience, he faced a considerable challenge. He was acquainted with neither the city nor any of its residents, and had practically no money to cover day-to-day expenses while building up his practice. Family circumstances only increased the pressure. His father, Charles Doyle, after suffering failing health and alcoholism for many years, had been admitted to a ‘health resort,’ as Conan Doyle described it, straining the family’s already precarious finances. As the adult son, Conan Doyle was now ‘practically the head of a large struggling family,’ and deeply conscious of this responsibility. ‘Perhaps it was good for me that the times were hard,’ he wrote, ‘for I was wild, full-blooded, and a trifle reckless, but the situation called for energy and application so that one was bound to try to meet it. My mother had been so splendid that we could not fail her.’3 Two of his sisters had taken positions as governesses in Portugal, sending their pay home, and Conan Doyle was also eager to contribute to the family’s welfare, sending for his ten-year-old brother Innes and assuming responsibility for him. Conan Doyle’s letters home meticulously detail his efforts and successes on this score, frequently itemising the particulars of his bills and other outgoing expenses as well as income gained from medicine and writing. These letters paint an evocative picture of how precarious a business it was for him to keep afloat.
By 1884 Conan Doyle was able to report proudly to his mother that there were more than a hundred Southsea families for whom he was sole medical adviser. But in 1882 and 1883, patients were few and far between, and even when an appointment in 1883 as a medical examiner for the Gresham Life Assurance Society provided some badly needed extra funds, it was primarily writing that he looked to for additional income. An 1882 letter home makes clear that, although small at the time, the income from writing was crucial: ‘In the meantime we try to keep the thing going by literature – yesterday I got the proofs of a photographic article – not much but a pound I daresay.’4
A decade later, Conan Doyle was to abandon medicine in order to devote himself solely to writing, a decision he later described as ‘one of the great moments of exultation of my life.’ But in Southsea he divided his labours and loyalties between medicine and writing, which were sometimes complementary and sometimes antagonistic undertakings. (‘It is hard to say which suffered most,’ he later joked.)
He had started writing short stories and poetry as a student and regularly tried his luck with magazine submissions. One story in late 1877 or early 1878 was sent to Edinburgh’s prestigious Blackwood’s Magazine. ‘The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe – a True Ghost Story’ failed to appear in print, its manuscript sitting in the magazine’s archives for many decades unsuspected. His first success came with a story strongly influenced by Edgar Allan Poe: ‘The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,’ which was published in Chambers’ Journal on 6 September 1879, earning him the princely sum of three guineas. ‘After receiving that little cheque I was a beast that has once tasted blood,’ he would tell an interviewer, ‘for I knew that whatever rebuffs I might receive – and God knows I had plenty – I had once proved I could earn gold, and the spirit was in me to do it again.’ He also started publishing articles, some of them unpaid in the British Medical Journal or the Lancet to position himself professionally, but also a few paid ones in the British Journal of Photography.
He did not allow early rejections of his fiction to discourage him. He took heart from contacts such as James Hogg, editor of the monthly London Society and the first of several magazine editors to take an interest in the fledgling writer’s work. By 1883, the magazines which had published Conan Doyle included All the Year Round, Blackwood’s, London Society, Chambers’ Journal, Temple Bar Magazine, Good Words and Boy’s Own Paper. It was, however, the publication in January 1884 of his story ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’ in The Cornhill which constituted Conan Doyle’s greatest early success. The Cornhill was Britain’s foremost literary magazine, published by George Smith of Smith, Elder & Co., which had made its name in 1847 with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Conan Doyle’s story’s success cemented a budding association with James Payn, an editor he had long admired, and for the first time brought him into the general orbit of London literary society.
His sense of triumph, however, was mingled with frustration owing to the practice of the time, among journals such as The Cornhill, of publishing contributions anonymously. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, critics attributed Conan Doyle’s story to Robert Louis Stevenson. While proud and flattered by the comparison – Stevenson, like Poe, was a Conan Doyle favourite – it was hardly helpful in his desire to make his name.
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