In Through the Magic Door, a book on writers and writing published in 1907, Conan Doyle called this practice ‘a most iniquitous fashion by which all chance of promotion is barred to young writers.’ With Habakuk he realised that short-story writing would not furnish the means to fulfil any serious literary ambition. ‘What is necessary is that your name should be on the back of a volume,’ he said in an April 1884 letter home: ‘Only so do you assert your individuality and get full credit or discredit of your achievement.’5

The Narrative of John Smith represents Conan Doyle’s first attempt to make the transition from short-story writer to novelist. An 1883 letter points to his growing confidence in his ability to succeed in this venture. He is convinced too of a quality of originality in his work, although less certain whether this originality may produce critical approbation or censure:

Why should I not have a future before me in letters? I am conscious … of a well marked style of my own which should single me out among the crowd for good or evil, could I only get my head above water.6

His self-assurance fluctuated, however, with any belief he had in his technical proficiency tempered by doubt. In an April 1884 letter, he confided to his mother:

Sometimes I am confident, at others very distrustful. I know I can write small stories in a taking way, but am I equal to a prolonged effort – can I extend a plot without weakening it – can I preserve the identity of a character throughout – these are the questions which vex me.7

On the evidence of the Narrative, the answer to his questions was a resounding ‘no.’ There is very little in the way of plot or characterisation: the work is essentially a series of lengthy reflections on contemporary debates occupying the young Conan Doyle in his early twenties. They are voiced by John Smith, a man of fifty who, due to illness, is confined to his rooms for a week. These reflections frequently appear as internal monologues; less frequently, in dialogue between Smith and his doctor, and the other characters who also largely function as extensions of himself. The Narrative is not successful fiction, but offers remarkable insight into the thinking and views of a raw young writer who would shortly create one of literature’s most famous and durable characters, Sherlock Holmes.

In 1883, when the 23-year-old Conan Doyle was first writing The Narrative of John Smith, he had already sold a story that had attracted some critical attention. This was ‘The Captain of the “Pole-Star”,’ a ghost story based upon his Arctic experiences. That spring he had started his novel, but then had the idea for his breakthrough story ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,’ based on the Marie Celeste mystery.8 But when he then returned to and finished his novel, and sent it off to the publisher, the manuscript disappeared forever. ‘No I never got poor John Smith,’ he told his mother at the beginning of 1884. ‘I am going to rewrite him from memory, but my hands are very full just now.’9

 

Smith is presented as a man who has seen much of the world and been many things in life. Now middle-aged, laid up by gout in the boarding-house where he lives, he spends his time conversing with his doctor, landlady, a neighbour and a fellow-lodger who is a retired army major, and ruminating to himself as well, about a variety of matters which constitute the themes of this book. Smith’s illness preoccupies him, a topic that flows into broader considerations of medicine, science and human nature. These also connect to discussions of religion, and all relate in various ways to discussions of literature.

Much is semi-autobiographical in nature, Conan Doyle using Smith and the other characters to expound personal views of his own. He had been raised in an intensely Roman Catholic family, and despite scant means his mother had managed to provide him with a very good Jesuit education at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire in the north of England. But while at Stonyhurst he began to renounce the Church in which he had been raised. ‘Nothing can exceed the uncompromising bigotry of the Jesuit theology,’ he said in his autobiography Memories and Adventures:

I remember that when, as a grown lad, I heard Father Murphy, a great fierce Irish priest, declare that there was sure damnation for everyone outside the Church, I looked upon him with horror, and to that moment I trace the first rift which has grown into such a chasm between me and those who were my guides.

Though he did not become an atheist, he rejected most church doctrine and organized religion itself, continuing to search for religious answers compatible with his scientific and medical education. By the time he was writing The Narrative of John Smith, he had begun to experiment with psychic phenomena, a road that would culminate in his acceptance of spiritualism in 1916.

The themes in the Narrative had autobiographical sub-texts as well, instances of which are annotated in the text. Conan Doyle wanted readers to witness the high-mindedness of the physician’s calling, even as he argued the incompleteness of medical knowledge, and inveighed against the smugness of the scientific establishment constantly enthroning its current set of theories as unquestionable fact. He not only praised Pasteur’s new views on microbes and antibodies, he championed theories such as evolution that were very controversial at the time. Against occasional scientific opposition to such views, he saw even worse pomposity and bigotry in organized religion – finding truer religious feeling in a metaphysics of medicine than in the settled doctrines of the churches, and quoting dozens of thinkers against the latter. At one point Smith debates with a cleric calling upon him at home, outraging the latter into departing in high dudgeon, an episode that may be based upon an actual incident in Conan Doyle’s early Southsea days.

Smith may be of middle age, but his opinions and the fervour with which he argues them are those of a young man with insufficient experience of life as yet to have become diffident regarding life, society, human nature and the like. Conan Doyle held some of those beliefs to the end of his life, but not all. In 1910, in a talk at St Mary’s Hospital, London, entitled ‘The Romance of Medicine,’10 he looked back with greater humility at what he and his contemporaries at Edinburgh in the 1870s had believed about science as the answer to everything. In Chapter 5, when Smith turns to human nature again, he calls Woman but a ‘supplement of a man.’ If that was Conan Doyle’s view then, it was not how he presented women in his later fiction. It also seems inconsistent with his view at the time of his mother, Mary Foley, who was better educated than most women in Victorian Britain, and had a strong personality and will of her own. After he had more experience under his belt, some of his later literary heroines were very independent women indeed.

One more major theme arises in Chapter 2 and continues to the end: Empire and Nations.