The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes by Andrew Lycett

Author:Andrew Lycett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2007-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

Boer War and Aftermath

1899–1901

While Undershaw ran smoothly, it was hard to fathom the emotions swirling beneath the surface. But there was no mistaking the desperately personal nature of Arthur’s plea to his mother at the start of 1899, begging her to advise one of her friends against marrying a man with tuberculosis. He said that consumptives should be banned by law from matrimony. And if the Mam’s friend thought she would be helping her prospective husband, she was wrong. In fact she would be adding to his worries and making his position much harder.

Arthur’s insistence on this point showed how much Louise’s condition had preyed on his mind. In the six years since her diagnosis, his distress about her illness had developed into a phobia. Somehow he managed to convey this to his mother as concern for the victim and his (or her) suffering. But this was verbiage, as he had never given much thought to the hurt he caused his wife through his dalliance with Jean, or, more to the point, he had never felt reason to act upon it.

Underlying his attitude were some surprisingly anachronistic views about genetics and heredity. Arthur seemed to regard tuberculosis as both an inheritable and communicable disease, which helps explain his treatment of Louise. As she was still of childbearing age, he was apprehensive that sex with her might produce a consumptive child. This rationalization may have helped assuage his conscience over his affair with Jean, but it also pointed to something deep-rooted in his make-up—a very Victorian fear that aspects of Charles Doyle’s illness, even madness, had been passed on to him.

At the time Arthur was in the middle of writing A Duet which, in the circumstances, seemed more than ever a description of an idealized marriage to Jean. He threw himself into the book, finishing it before the end of January, barely three months after starting. Grant Richards played his part by rushing the book out in March. But despite the positive response from H.G. Wells, the general reaction was unenthusiastic and sales were modest. Though satisfied that he had tried something new, Arthur blamed himself for jeopardizing the success of his young friend’s fledgling publishing house. To make matters worse, four years later he encouraged Richards to publish a mystery novel, The Episodes of Marge: Memoirs of a Humble Adventuress, written under the pseudonym H. Ripley Crowmarsh by his sister Dodo. This was a flop and Arthur later had to buy up half the copies.

In the case of A Duet, Arthur was particularly annoyed that Robertson Nicoll, editor of the journal The Bookman, had exerted what he felt was undue influence by reviewing the book negatively in several different outlets, using a variety of pseudonyms. His public attack on Nicoll showed his tetchiness, particularly at this juncture, but it also reflected his genuine concern at declining standards in the book trade. (By the same token he had crossed swords a couple of years earlier with the novelist Hall Caine, whom

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.