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.) Also: ‘When the Gas and Water Gazette asked him to translate a German submission, Conan Doyle drew on his shaky schoolboy German to produce an article entitled “Testing Gas Pipes for Leakage.” Years later, in a speech to the Authors’ Club, he would claim that this had been the great breakthrough of his career, rather than A Study in Scarlet, as one might have supposed.For the first time, he noted dryly, a publisher had asked for his services, rather than the other way around.’ (Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, Holt, New York, 2000, pp.82–3.)30.The London Aquarium was another sight he wrote home about as a teenager.Surprising about this reference is its flippancy regarding drunkards.His own father Charles Altamont Doyle’s excessive drinking had caused the family pain and hardship, especially after his career as an artist and draughtsman terminated early, and it led to Charles Doyle’s institutionalization for the remainder of life.31.‘Tab’: northern British slang for a cigarette.32.Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819–1900), Astronomer Royal for Scotland, was the progenitor of theories about the Great Pyramid’s design and construction which had a considerable vogue.Conan Doyle was always fascinated by such things, and in Southsea was already under the influence of a retired major-general named Alfred Drayson who was an amateur astronomer of some repute, author of controversial theories about the creation of the world, and the man who introduced Conan Doyle to psychic research at this time.33.Lady Teazle and Mrs (actually also Lady) Sneerwell are characters from the 1777 play The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816).While Conan Doyle did not publish or even complete this rewriting of his first novel, this passage indicates that he kept the manuscript at hand for years, drawing from it occasionally for other writings of his.The preceding passage went into his semi-autobiographical novel of 1895, The Stark Munro Letters, and two years before that into his contribution to a non-fiction anthology entitled My First Book.Conan Doyle also transferred to The Stark Munro Letters more or less intact the earlier passage on pp.21–2, the following one on p.24 about dermoid cysts, plus ch.2, pp.34–5 and 38; ch.3, p.60; ch.4, pp.77–8; and ch.5, pp.87–8 and 108–12.34.An issue which never ceased to rumble inside Conan Doyle.In his 1912 novel The Lost World, for example, his great scientist character Professor Challenger says to a rival: ‘No, Summerlee, I will have none of your materialism, for I, at least, am too great a thing to end in mere physical constituents, a packet of salts and three bucketfuls of water.’35.Conan Doyle speaks for himself.However far-ranging his reading and writing, he was a life-long athlete and outdoorsman, devoting a chapter of his autobiography Memories and Adventures to his experiences in those areas.36.Mrs Rundle is a precursor of Mrs Hudson, Sherlock Holmes’s landlady at Baker Street.Their real-life inspiration was Conan Doyle’s own housekeeper at Bush Villas, a Mrs Smith, who like Mrs Rundle occupied the basement of the house, and whom he mentioned frequently in his letters home during these years.37.‘Half-pay’ refers to the reduced salary of a military officer retired or not on active service.Dr Watson refers to himself as a ‘half-pay surgeon’ in The Sign of the Four, the second Holmes tale.38.Conan Doyle had been a boy at Stonyhurst College, a medical student at Edinburgh, and harboured hopes of becoming a literary man in London.He had travelled to the Arctic, West Africa and parts of Europe.He had not been a soldier in America, of course, though he was interested in the US Civil War, and he had not been a diamond digger at the Cape.But his first published story, ‘The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,’ in Chambers’ Journal several years before, had been set in the diamond fields of South Africa.39.A sentiment he long held, in these years of constant story submissions met usually by repeated rejection slips.‘My poor “Study” has never even been read by anyone except [the editor James] Payn,’ he complained two years later to his mother, having failed so far to find a publisher for his first Sherlock Holmes tale A Study in Scarlet: ‘Verily literature is a difficult oyster to open.’40.As presumably the original manuscript of The Narrative of John Smith had been in 1883 – never to be seen again!41.Conan Doyle had assumed the care of his young brother Innes, who had come to live with him during the summer of 1882.While he was delighted to have Innes, the responsibility for raising and educating the young boy sometimes wore heavily upon Conan Doyle during these lean years.Most of these comments about the difficulty of getting started as a writer are autobiographical in nature, and echoed in his letters in Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters.42.‘Fifty little cylinders of manuscript did I send out during eight years, which described irregular orbits,’ declared Conan Doyle in 1893 in My First Book, ‘and usually came back like paper boomerangs to the place that they had started from.’43.Conan Doyle refers to James Payn (1830–1898), once co-editor of Chambers’ Journal and now editor of The Cornhill, Britain’s leading literary magazine.Payn had published Conan Doyle’s first story in 1879, and his true breakthrough story (though without a byline), ‘J.Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,’ in 1883.Conan Doyle remained devoted to Payn for the older writer’s life, even though, when Payn read A Study in Scarlet in manuscript, he had told Conan Doyle that he shouldn’t waste his time with ‘shilling shockers.’ (In 1893 Conan Doyle came to agree, killing off the by then immensely popular Sherlock Holmes in the story ‘The Final Problem.’)44.‘I determined that literature should be my staff, not my crutch, and that the profits of my literary labour, however convenient otherwise, should not, if I could help it, become necessary to my ordinary expenses.’45.Alluding to the eighteenth-century London district known for writers at the low end of literary life.Samuel Johnson called the term ‘originally the name of a street … much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems, whence any mean production is called grubstreet.’ In 1891 it inspired a novel by Conan Doyle’s friend George Gissing entitled New Grub Street.46
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