Conan Doyle came to maturity in the heyday of the British Empire, and as a youth read much of the fiction of empire, such as G.A. Henty’s novels, but this had not previously been a particular theme in his work. It is such here, often using the retired Major living upstairs as a foil. The tone of neither is jingoistic, even though the Major at one point is willing, even eager, to resort to force over a perhaps imaginary Russian offence in Asia. Not only Smith but also the Major describe in firm terms the human cost of war and the bureaucratic stupidities accompanying empire. Smith, described as having spent much of his life in the colonies, believes out there is where life is really life, at both its best and its worst. But Conan Doyle also looks into the far future to see the British Empire but third of the world’s four great powers, outranked not only by the kindred United States but also by China. Even so, in Chapter 5, the last complete chapter in the novel, the final few pages are devoted to a poem very Kiplingesque in tone about colonial warfare, ‘Corporal Dick’s Promotion,’ which Conan Doyle would include in other work of his in years ahead.

 For all its energy and ideas, The Narrative of John Smith conspicuously lacks the storytelling technique that would distinguish Conan Doyle’s later career. It affords a striking contrast with The Stark Munro Letters, written some ten years later, in which the author made use of many of the earlier manuscript’s ideas and incidents, but with canny revisions demonstrating his growth as a writer. Dr Stark Munro is a young man struggling to find his way in the world, imparting an atmosphere of discovery to its long passages concerning ideas and philosophy. In the hands of the older, becalmed John Smith, these same passages had quickly descended into pedantry. ‘You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales,’ Sherlock Holmes once complained to Dr Watson, accusing himself of ‘pandering to popular taste’ in his accounts of the detective’s cases. By that measure, Holmes might well have preferred John Smith, but most readers will gravitate to the Watsonian romanticism of Stark Munro.

Be that as it may, The Narrative of John Smith affords a rare glimpse of Conan Doyle’s apprentice period, and demonstrates at least one attribute essential to any professional writer: he was not afraid to set aside a failing manuscript – nor to go back to it for elements he could usefully rework for later tales. Conan Doyle’s later comments about the Narrative make it clear that he was well aware of the many shortcomings of this juvenile effort and, indeed, that he was embarrassed by it. In the same article in The Idler – again referring to the lost manuscript and perhaps offering a warning to future scholars and editors of his work – he wrote: ‘I must in all honesty confess that my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again – in print.’

Why, then, did he take the trouble to embark on rewriting a novel of which he had serious doubts at the time? However harsh his retrospective judgement might have been, and although he abandoned it – for reasons unknown – before he completed the rewriting, it seems likely that he at least began to reconstruct the text in the belief that it might yet be a work worth saving. Indeed, his dismissive comments about the work are not borne out by the fact that numerous similar and sometimes verbatim passages from it were retained in some subsequent works of his (including The Stark Munro Letters, Through the Magic Door, and some others noted in the annotations to the text).

Incomplete and in a state of arrested revision, the Narrative remained a work-in-progress for Conan Doyle. Although one which he eventually had second thoughts about publishing, it nonetheless has a significant part to play in allowing a fuller understanding of his development as a writer; and thus, we believe, offers ample justification for us to transgress his wishes and allow it to appear – in print.

CHAPTER 1

‘GOUT OR RHEUMATISM, Doctor?’ I asked.1

‘A little of both, Mr Smith,’ said he.

‘And pray, sir, what is the exact difference between them?’ I continued, under a natural impulse to gain a little knowledge in exchange for the red-hot skewer which was transfixing my right foot.

‘Why,’ said my good physician, tapping his tortoise-shell snuff box,2 ‘the one is a punishment and the other is a misfortune – one is in the hands of Providence and the other in your own. You can’t command the weather which governs your rheumatism, but you can command your appetites which govern your gout.’

‘And so,’ said I, ‘this diabolical pain in my foot is the hybrid form of torture known as rheumatic gout which unites the disadvantages of both diseases to a dash of malignancy all its own.’

‘You are certainly suffering from rheumatic gout,’ observed Dr Turner.

‘And can only be cured by colchicum?’3

‘And alkalis,’ cried the doctor.

‘And flannel?’

‘And poppyheads,’ cried the doctor.4

‘And abstinence?’

‘And a week’s complete rest.’

‘A week!’ I roared, partly from emotion and, frankly, in response to a twinge which shot through my foot. ‘Do you seriously imagine, Doctor, that I am going to lie upon this sofa for a week?’5

‘Not a doubt of it,’ he said composedly. It is astonishing how calm and free from all human weakness these doctors can be, until their own turn comes round to be patients and then they raise up their voices and bellow with the best of us. ‘A week’s rest is essential to your cure.’

‘It’s very hard,’ I grumbled. ‘I am an open-air man, and have not spent a day indoors for five years.6 Surely if I get well enough to walk without pain I may go out?’

‘My dear Mr Smith,’ said Dr Turner, screwing up his stethoscope and picking up his very shiny broad-brimmed hat. ‘If you wish to run the risk of pericarditus, endo-carditus, embolism, thrombosis and metastatic abscess, you will go out. If not, you will stay where you are.’

As an argument it was a ‘clincher.’ I felt that nothing short of a conflagration or an earthquake would move me off the sofa. The very names sent a pringling and a tingling through my system. ‘Not another word, Doctor,’ said I. ‘I take my complaints one at a time. I am not a selfish man. Why should I have all these when there are so many poor folk who have not an ache to their backs? But for goodness sake, what am I to do with myself? I shall die of ennui.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ he answered cheerily, with his hand upon the handle of the door. ‘What is it the poet says? “The mind is its own place and in itself can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell.”7 You must muster your books round you and have a literary gorge to atone for bodily abstinence.