If the secret history of literature could be written, the blighted hopes, the heart-sickening disappointment, the weary waiting, the wasted labor, it would be the saddest record ever penned.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE NARRATIVE OF JOHN SMITH
“Arthur has written another book,” Touie Doyle was soon writing to Arthur’s sister Lottie, “a little novel about 200 pages long, called A Study in Scarlet.”
But no one seemed eager to publish Arthur’s new book. Laboriously, he made a fair copy of the manuscript in his neat round hand, rolled it up and inserted it into one of the standard mailing tubes, and sent it out to publishers. He had not been surprised when publishers refused to gamble on The Firm of Girdlestone. But he was disappointed to find A Study in Scarlet making the same old circular tour. He considered this new novel superior to its predecessor.
Optimistically, he sent the manuscript to James Payn at Cornhill, who had published “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.” Arthur hoped for serialization in that magazine. Payn replied that he liked the tale but that it was too short for a novel and too long for a story. Arthur agreed. And clearly A Study in Scarlet would never be picked up by the lending libraries, even if he could sell it as a magazine serial, for Mudie’s seldom gambled on one-volume debut novels.
Nonetheless, in May 1886 Arthur sent the manuscript to J. W. Arrowsmith, a publisher situated in Bristol. It was a reasonable bet. In 1877 Arrowsmith had renamed the firm after succeeding its founder, printer William Browne, and had experienced growing success, especially since founding Arrowsmith’s Annual in the early 1880s.
Yet in July Arrowsmith returned A Study in Scarlet. Determined not to give up, Arthur mailed it to a couple of other publishers. Each rejected it. Finally he thought to send it to Ward, Lock & Company, which specialized in sensational popular novels.
While Arthur was trying to sell A Study in Scarlet, a detective novel by the New Zealand novelist Fergus Hume demonstrated just how much commercial potential this field offered to hardworking (and lucky) authors. Hume first self-published The Mystery of the Hansom Cab and soon sold the copyright for £50—which he must have regretted, because the novel eventually sold a hundred thousand copies in Australia and half a million through the widely distributed Jarrold edition from London.
In the Australian gold rush era, Melbourne police assign the working-class detective Gorby to unravel the story of a corpse found in a hansom. Hume’s debt to Gaboriau was so obvious that an 1888 parody was entitled The Mystery of a Wheelbarrow, or Gaboriau Gaborooed, an Idealistic Story of a Great and Rising Colony. Like Arthur, however, Hume was quick to reference his own genealogy, even having characters cite earlier detective story writers, from Poe to Anna Katharine Green. To keep the reader acquainted with Gorby’s thought processes during the investigation, Hume gave him a curious habit: “Being a detective, and of an extremely reticent disposition, he never talked outside about his business, or made a confidant of anyone. When he did want to unbosom himself, he retired to his bedroom and talked to his reflection in the mirror.” After Poe, Dickens, Collins, Gaboriau, and Hume, readers expected detectives to be eccentric.
In Ward, Lock’s offices in Salisbury Square—the publisher had outgrown its birthplace in Fleet Street—Arthur’s mailing tube crossed the desk of George Thomas Bettany. A former professor of botany and biology at Cambridge, Bettany edited several of Ward, Lock’s series, including Popular Library for Literary Treasures, Science Primers for the People, and the Minerva Library of Famous Books. He was also the London editor of the distinguished U.S. periodical Lippincott’s.
Overworked, like most editors, Bettany thought this little novel, A Study in Scarlet, might be outside his area of expertise. He took it home to his wife, the former Mary Jean Hickling Gwynne, who had studied medicine and who wrote fiction herself under the name Jeanie Gwynne Bettany. Her novel The House of Rimmon had been published by Remington in 1885, and Ward, Lock was publishing Two Legacies in 1886.
“I should be glad if you would look through this,” Bettany recalled saying, “and tell me whether I ought to read it.”
She read through the pages and enthusiastically reported back to her husband, “This is, I feel sure, by a doctor—there is internal evidence to that effect. But in any case, the writer is a born novelist. I am enthusiastic about the book, and believe it will be a great success.”
In late October Arthur received Ward, Lock’s reply.
Dear Sir,
We have read your story A Study in Scarlet, and are pleased with it. We could not publish it this year, as the market is flooded at present with cheap fiction, but if you do not object to its being held over until next year we will give you £25/–/– (Twenty-five Pounds) for the copyright.
We are,
Dear Sir,
Yours faithfully,
Ward, Lock & Co.
30 October 1886
Disheartened by this less-than-enthusiastic—and only modestly remunerative—response, Arthur replied immediately, on the first of November, with a request that Ward, Lock pay him royalties instead of purchasing the copyright in its entirety.
The English mail was efficient, as usual. “We regret to say,” replied Ward, Lock on the following day, “that we shall be unable to retain a percentage on the sale of your work as it might give rise to some confusion. The tale may have to be inserted with some other, in one of our annuals, therefore we must adhere to our original offer of for [sic] the complete copyright.”
Arthur agonized over his next decision. He was offended by the contract offered, but he also hated to think of his latest creation stagnating in a drawer for months or years instead of garnering his career a little more of the attention he felt he was beginning to deserve. Finally he agreed to Ward, Lock’s terms.
A few weeks later, he wrote a painful letter concluding the bargain:
November 20th 1886
In consideration of the sum of Twenty-Five Pounds paid by them to me I hereby assign to Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co., of Warwick House, Salisbury Square, E.C. Publishers the Copyright and all my interest in the book written by me entitled A STUDY IN SCARLET.
A. Conan Doyle, MD
Bush Villa, Southsea
Eventually publication was scheduled for more than a year later, in the 1887 issue of Beeton’s Christmas Annual.
In 1852 an English publisher named Samuel Orchart Beeton, barely in his twenties, made his name by gambling on publication of an incendiary anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by an American woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe. The same year, he launched a pioneering periodical, The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. The son of a Cheapside publican, Beeton yearned to pursue a more ambitious profession.
In 1856 he married a smart and enterprising young woman, Isabella Mary Mayson, who soon became renowned in her own right as the mage of practical domesticity, Mrs. Beeton. The couple made themselves a household name by publishing many diverse volumes, such as Beeton’s Dictionary of Useful Information, Beeton’s Historian, Beeton’s Book of Birds, Beeton’s Book of Chemistry, even Beeton’s Book of Jokes and Jests. The Beetons first published Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management in 1861, with sequels and related volumes snatched up by an eager public. Beeton founded an equally original and successful periodical for children, Boy’s Own Magazine.
When Mrs. Beeton died in 1865, her devoted husband was all but crippled by grief. Already they had lost three children. The following year, however, fate dealt Beeton another blow. Following a banking collapse in May, many businesses closed. Beeton’s only path to escaping bankruptcy lay in selling the copyrights of all his publications. The publisher Ward, Lock and Tyler bought them, retaining the experienced Beeton at a handsome salary. The company had been known as Ward and Lock until a third partner named Tyler joined in 1865. When Tyler departed in 1873 it reverted to its earlier name, so that by the time Arthur submitted the rolled manuscript of his brief novel in 1886, the firm was again merely Ward, Lock & Company.
By this time Beeton’s Christmas Annual was a small-format magazine, of the size known in publishing as demy octavo, roughly eight and a half inches tall by five and a half inches wide. Some version of this holiday issue had appeared every winter since 1860. During its first decade, it had remained blandly noncommittal about contemporary affairs, but in 1872 and 1873 Beeton turned in a new direction and included political satire. Ward, Lock complained, despite the high sales and newspaper attention the satire drew, and Beeton lost his job. He died of tuberculosis in 1877, twelve years after his wife. Immediately the publisher changed the format of Beeton’s annual Christmas issue to feature short stories—including three by Mark Twain in the first new issue—and plays intended for home performance.
Arthur had seen his stories in Christmas issues of several magazines. He had published one in the Boy’s Own Paper, for example, every Christmas since 1883, beginning with his own holiday story, “An Exciting Christmas Eve; or, My Lecture on Dynamite.” In 1886 “Cyprian Overbeck Wells. A Literary Mosaic” appeared. By Arthur’s time, the Beeton’s annual miniature anthology was so popular that a contemporary review described it as “an old institution, and as regularly looked for as the holly and the mistletoe.” Thus Arthur was pleased to learn from Ward, Lock that his novel would appear in the 1887 issue of Beeton’s Christmas Annual—the entire short novel in the December issue, not serialized, and in a venue likely to attract notice.
He was not the only family member contributing to periodicals. Back home in Scotland, near the coast north of Edinburgh, in Montrose Royal Asylum, a small in-house magazine had been launched, ambitiously titled The Sunnyside Chronicle. Arthur’s anxious, capricious, talented father soon channeled his frustrated creativity into writing and drawing for it.
In mid-October 1886, two weeks before Ward, Lock offered to buy the copyright of A Study in Scarlet, Joseph Bell retired from the Edinburgh Infirmary. As Bell himself later wrote, for thirty-two years he had “never willingly spent a day in Edinburgh without entering its gates.” He was forty-nine, and was leaving only because the Infirmary’s bylaws specified limits to various positions, including his role as senior surgeon. He had been on the full-time staff for fifteen years.
“Lord,” he wrote in his diary, “comfort me I pray thee in my sadness in parting from my dear Wards and dear friends and nurses.”
With Florence Nightingale as one of the organizers and a primary contributor of funds, a subscription began to honor Bell’s service to medicine and in particular to nursing. A few months later, in January 1887, a group called upon him at his home on Melville Crescent—a body of nurses and other staff and faculty representing not only the Royal Infirmary but also the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, the Princes Street Training Institution, and the Hospital for Incurables. They brought him enough tributes to furnish a new office, carrying in a pair of silver candelabra, a brass pen and inkwell set, a paperweight—and, as a setting for these, a beautiful oak writing table and chair.
Not that Joe Bell was going to retire from medicine. He was writing a textbook for nurses and remained editor of the Edinburgh Medical Journal. The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh elected him president. And in May, a ceremony in the Hall of the Royal College of Surgeons presented Bell with a large portrait of himself and a raft of testimonials from colleagues. “Mr. Bell’s whole career has been distinguished by the most honorable attention to his duties,” proclaimed his colleague Henry Littlejohn on behalf of the Infirmary,
whether as a teacher of systematic surgery in the Medical School, or as a teacher of clinical surgery in the Infirmary, whether as regards the patients committed to his charge, the nurses on his staff, or the students who thronged his classrooms and wards. An accomplished and dexterous surgeon, he secured the confidence of his patients and the public. His teaching powers were freely devoted to the nursing establishment of the Infirmary, while to the students he endeared himself by the practical character of his teaching and his frank and sympathizing manner.
In November 1887 the Royal Hospital for Sick Children appointed Bell surgeon to the children’s ward, where almost half the cases were already attended by him because of his legendary way with young people. Herds of diseased, handicapped, and wounded children swarmed through the hospital. There were fractures and contusions resulting from falls on Salisbury Crag or from tenement windows, broken limbs from tram and carriage accidents. Birth defects of every kind were rampant: harelip, cleft palate, clubfoot, spina bifida. Neglect especially angered Bell. Frequently he treated small children who suffered from starvation, frostbite, eczema, ulcers, burns, and even genital injuries. He worked to both rescue the children and punish their alleged caretakers. A testament to scientific knowledge guided by compassion, the man who had served as Arthur’s model for Sherlock Holmes was flourishing.