After ten years of such work I was as unknown as if I had never dipped a pen into an ink bottle.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES
During his first few months at Bush Villas, Arthur turned his imagination to his whaling voyage two years earlier. The dramatic scenes of the Arctic, its ethereal beauty, and the romantic melancholy it inspired had remained with him, and he drew upon vivid memories to write a ghost story, “The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star,’” which he sold to Temple Bar for a satisfying ten guineas. It showed no great originality in his conception of a ship captain haunted by the ghost of his former love, who lures him onto an ice floe, where he dies. But the setting was vivid, the atmosphere forbidding, and Arthur conjured a dramatic sense of tragic fate. Turning toward his own experience for background, resurrecting scenes he had witnessed—he even made the narrator a young ship’s doctor—he soon rose above his first tales situated in exotic but poorly imagined settings such as the Australian gold fields or the North American frontier.
During 1883, continuing to harvest his seafaring memories, he wrote “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” and began sending it to magazines. Arthur was fascinated by the already legendary fate of a British merchant brigantine named the Mary Celeste. He had been reading about it for more than a decade. In early December 1872, when Arthur was thirteen, the 282-ton ship was found derelict four hundred miles east of the Azores, with its cargo of seventeen hundred barrels of industrial alcohol still in the hold but threatened by three feet of sloshing water. The ship had been at sea for a month, its last log entry dated November 25. Unmanned but still under full sail, it was drifting toward Gibraltar. Its captain, his wife, their young daughter, and seven crewmen had vanished—along with the ship’s single lifeboat. One of her pumps had been disassembled, but there was no sign of violence or accident to explain the absence of people. Pirates would have looted; a storm would have wrecked. During the intervening decade, despite government investigations and idle speculation, no trace of the family or crew had been found.
For some reason, Arthur changed the name of the ship from Mary Celeste to Marie Celeste, while keeping the real name of the captain and even of the rescue ship, the Dei Gratia. Most of his account was fictional. To make his own story more eerie, for example, Arthur claimed that both of the ship’s lifeboats were present. He added the supernatural-sounding detail that the ship, despite its abandonment, had remained so becalmed that a thread bobbin had not even rolled off the sewing machine.
In the summer of 1883, Arthur was delighted when “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” was accepted by James Payn, editor of The Cornhill, probably the most distinguished publisher of short fiction in Britain. The esteemed monthly—to whose pages Arthur had long aspired—had been founded in 1859 by the since legendary editor George Murray Smith. He was the son of George Smith, cofounder of the publishing firm Smith, Elder & Co., which was known for the high quality of its offerings, ranging from Charles Darwin’s scientific travelogue, Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle, to Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. To steer The Cornhill, the primary rival of Dickens’s monthly All the Year Round, Smith hired William Makepeace Thackeray, Dickens’s primary rival as a novelist. The Cornhill’s status was such that Queen Victoria chose it to serialize her Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands.
James Payn was a writer himself, author of moderately popular novels such as Lost Sir Massingberd and Richard Arbour, or The Family Scapegrace. He had written many stories before venturing to tackle a novel. After more than a decade editing Edinburgh’s own Chambers’s Journal, he had become editor of The Cornhill as recently as 1883, when Leslie Stephen, the former editor, stepped down.
When Arthur got his hands on a copy of the January 1884 issue, there was his story, the lead, with half the first page taken up by a striking illustration of a half-naked black African. To Arthur’s delight, his story did not disappear into the void. A year later the Boston Herald reprinted it, apparently construing it as a factual account.
Meanwhile, Arthur’s 1882 London Society story “Bones, or, The April Fool of Harvey’s Sluice” had been reprinted in 1885 by the U.S. publisher Dodd, Mead in volume four of its anthology Tales from Many Sources. Therein Arthur and other young British authors such as Thomas Hardy stood amid their better-known colleagues—Wilkie Collins, popular children’s author Juliana H. Ewing, James Payn, and Charles Reade. It was Arthur’s first appearance between book covers.
A second soon followed. In October 1887 the editor George Redway included “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” in his prominent three-volume anthology Dreamland and Ghostland: Strange Stories of Coincidence and Ghostly Adventure, which bore the misleading extended subtitle Embracing Remarkable Dreams, Presentiments, and Coincidences, Records of Singular Personal Experience by Various Writers, Startling Stories from Individual and Family History, Mysterious Incidents from the Lips of Living Narrators, and Some Psychological Studies, Grave and Gay. Redway chose a couple of Arthur’s other stories as well, but only those narrated in the first person in a manner that might be interpreted as factual. Thus Arthur’s imagined details, including the newly French-sounding name Marie Celeste, soon became part of the ship’s myth.
“Have you seen what they say about your Cornhill story?” a friend called to Arthur on a Portsmouth street one winter day in early 1884. He was waving a London evening newspaper.
Eager for praise but cautiously donning a modest expression, Arthur peered over his friend’s shoulder as the man turned to the column and read aloud: “The Cornhill this month has a story in it which would have made Thackeray turn in his grave.”
Arthur said later that the alleged friend escaped assault only because there were witnesses nearby on the street.
This incident reminded Arthur of the rare benefits of anonymity. Mostly, like other writers, he experienced only the frustrations attending anonymous publication. Soon, however, praise helped balance the scales. More than one reviewer speculated that the author of “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” was Robert Louis Stevenson. This mistake was flattering—Arthur admired the work of his fellow Scot—but it did nothing to enhance Arthur’s own reputation, except with editors. Distant critical applause could not be heard at Arthur’s upstairs desk in Southsea.
But Stevenson himself suffered the same questions of identity when he published shorter tales rather than novels. Less than two years earlier, Arthur had picked up a two-year-old issue of The Cornhill, dated September–October 1880, and with excitement read a long story, “The Pavilion on the Links.” Not until later that year did he, along with many other readers, confirm the authorship of this story—and of others he had enjoyed—when they appeared together in New Arabian Nights, under the byline of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Such speculation was rampant in publishing. Most fiction published in periodicals at the time was unsigned. Political journalists earlier in the century had worn anonymity as their armor, and afterward it remained in fashion. Although his editorship drew readers, Charles Dickens had used writers’ anonymity to mask the extent of his own contributions to his periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round. Dickens felt that such intrusive editing lent his periodical a unified voice, an overall house style, but many contributors considered it an erasure of their individuality. By Arthur’s time, anonymous publishing was slowly expiring but not yet dead. Publishers had realized that a famous author’s name on the cover or masthead would lure subscribers, and that anonymity had at times disguised slanderers and other irresponsible writers. And writers were increasingly eager to gain credit for their labors.
Gradually the ambitious Arthur decided that only with publication of a novel could he draw attention to his work. In 1883 he wrote his first novel, a rather awkward and static tale with the bland title The Narrative of John Smith. In it Arthur gazed into a mirror and wrote about a medico who yearned to write fiction. Arthur made an effort to step outside himself by making the narrator twice his own age and handicapped with gout, thus forced to narrow his focus onto a stack of blank paper, but it was an unconvincing personation. He speculated on the origins of religion, on the urge to write, on politics, on women, on life in general. The book was more a series of sketches and miniature essays than a novel.
Finally Arthur sent out the manuscript—only to have it lost in the mail. It was never received by the publisher and never returned to the author. To his inquiries, the post office replied on its standard blue forms that they had no record of it. Arthur tried rewriting it from memory, but he seems to have given up in frustration or simply lost interest, perhaps because this freshman project went stale as he outgrew it. He never finished the rewrite.
Summoning his usual determination, he tried again. During 1884 and 1885, Arthur wrote a novel entitled The Firm of Girdlestone. The melodramatic plot somewhat resembled that of A Lost Name, an 1868 novel by Sheridan Le Fanu, the celebrated Irish master of ghost stories and Gothic thrillers. Stepping considerably outside his own experience this time, Arthur told the story of the escalating chicanery perpetrated by John Girdlestone, founder of the London firm of Girdlestone and Company, and his son Ezra, in their desperate attempts to hide the financial ruin caused by the elder Girdlestone’s speculations. Arthur moved from a static structure for The Narrative of John Smith to a frenetic one for The Firm of Girdlestone. He told his sister that his book abounded in exciting murder scenes, and added, “I would need a private graveyard to plant all my characters in.”
Arthur didn’t try to hide his contempt for the Scrooge-like financiers. When three crew members die on one of the firm’s ships, the younger Girdlestone remarks mercilessly, “We know very well what that means. Three women, each with an armful of brats, besieging the office and clamouring for a pension.”
From the beginning, Arthur realized that the novel was derivative and uninspired. To his mother he described it as “fairly good as light literature goes nowadays.” But he kept sending it out. Publishers just as reliably returned it, in what Arthur later described as “the circular tour” that manuscripts take from writer to editor and back to writer like homing pigeons. Privately sharing their opinion, he felt that he couldn’t blame publishers for not snapping up Girdlestone.