The very image of the late Victorian British Empire, Conan Doyle was born in Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh, and came to consider himself the very soul of Englishness, and yet-on both his father’s and his mother’s side-was descended from a long line of Irishmen, and Catholics to boot. A Catholic in a Presbyterian city-no matter its large number of his co-religionists; an Irishman in England; and an Englishman to the world: it is little wonder that these stresses would so bedevil their author that only his most famous creation could give them voice, and resolution.
“I am half Irish, you know,” Conan Doyle once said, explaining an outburst of temper, “and my British half has the devil of a job to hold the hotheaded rascal in.” So far, so stereotypicaclass="underline" the image of the quicktempered Hibernian was one already long established in the British hierarchy of racial classification. And, indeed, Conan Doyle himself seemed to accept the conventional archetypes of Irishness, using them as a kind of handy shorthand to explain some “un-English” behavior or other. Stumping for a Liberal Unionist candidate, he recalls in Memories and Adventures that he found himself being pushed on stage to address an audience of three thousand: “I hardly knew myself what I said, but the Irish part of me came to my aid and supplied me with a torrent of more or less incoherent words and similes which roused the audience greatly, though it read afterwards more like a comic stump speech than a serious political effort.” Temper and the gift of the gab: two hallmarks of the stage Irishman, which Conan Doyle obviously, desperately, did not want to be.
For at the same time, he was dead set against Gladstone’s policy of Home Rule for the perennially fractious colony of Ireland. As Britain moved inexorably toward the twin crises of the Great War and the Easter Rising, Conan Doyle, at the peak of his literary fame, was essentially a collaborator with the enemy.
It is my contention in this brief monograph that Conan Doyle’s distaste for his own Irishness, lightly and comically alluded to in the excerpts above, was in reality deep-rooted and far-reaching. It is largely masked in his letters, now available in Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters [1], but we need not trouble ourselves with mere mundane reality. The proof is precisely where it ought to be: in the Canon, which is a veritable feast of anti-Hibernian sentiment that would make the most bigoted Englishman blush. Do we want a villain? And not just any villain, but the Napoleon of Crime, the spider at the center of a vast web of criminality that affects all England? Very well, Conan Doyle-through the amanuensis of a sturdy Scotsman, Dr. John Hamish Watson-gives us a corker in Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime.
Does Moriarty want a second? A man of ruthless cunning and one of the finest shots in the Empire? Very well, then-Colonel Sebastian Moran is just your man. Throughout the Canon, Irishmen are nearly always portrayed in an unflattering light, as men of either overt criminality or, at the very least, violence. In addition to Moriarty and Moran, consider McMurdo, the former prizefighter and servant to Bartholomew Sholto in The Sign of the Four who, tellingly, had once boxed with Holmes. “If instead of standin’ there so quiet you had just stepped up and given me that cross-hit of yours under the jaw, I’d ha’ known you without a question.”
McMurdo-a name with deep significance for Conan Doyle, as we shall see-oft recurs (or perhaps “occurs,” given the sequencing of the stories) in the Sherlock Holmes novel that is itself a veritable symphony of anti-Hibernian sentiment; I refer, of course, to The Valley of Fear.
In this novel, which no Irishman or Irish-American can read without shuddering, we find proof positive of not only Conan Doyle’s self-loathing, but his active support of the forces that would crush the brave Irish men and women of Vermissa Valley. Adumbrating Liam O’Flaherty’s classic about the Irish revolution, The Informer, Conan Doyle presents us with a “hero” who goes by a number of names, including Jack McMurdo, Birdy Edwards, and John Douglas. This traitor, working for the despised and brutal Pinkerton Agency, infiltrates the Scowrers in a Pennsylvania coal town, where they are fighting for justice, and eventually breaks them. Like Gypo Nolan, Edwards flees his treachery and heads for California, where he strikes gold. Later, in England as “Jack Douglas,” he is acquitted of murder, but is eventually lost overboard as he flees again, this time by sea. So, in a sense, the story does have a happy ending after all.
What are we to make of this?
These are very deep waters, indeed. And without resorting to armchair psychoanalysis, it seems clear that Conan Doyle, in a successful attempt to penetrate English society, masked himself à la Birdy Edwards-and later, most ominously, as Holmes himself-and yet felt such a sense of self-loathing that he was forced to confess his sins to his alter ego, Dr. Watson.
And so it is in the pages of the Canon that we see the Conan Doyle psychodrama played out, where the Irishman battles the Englishman with the Scotsman as referee. And the Irishman-or in one particular case, the Irishwoman-always loses.
There is no question that his Celtic heritage was a source of endless fascination for Conan Doyle. Edinburgh has, since the Irish exodus of Black ’47, hosted a large Irish minority, as do several other British cities, including most prominently Glasgow and Liverpool. Looked down upon, often despised, the Irish were to the English what the Africans and the Indians were to eighteenth- and ninetheenthcentury Americans: a dark and savage people, by turns childlike and murderous, given to song and dance but appallingly prone to sudden outbursts of the most appalling violence. Incapable of controlling their thirst for drink-“the Creature,” in Irish parlance-they were clearly second-class citizens (if indeed citizens at all).
The Doyle family had been in Britain for generations, but the Foley family-Sir Arthur’s beloved mother was the Irish-born Mary Foley-brought him close to his origins. “My real love for letters, my instinct for storytelling, springs from my mother, who is of Anglo-Celtic stock, with the glamour and the romance of the Celt very strong marked.” (Even when discussing his own mother-“The Mam”-Conan Doyle felt compelled to resort to Irish stereotype.)
But that was the happy face of the Celts. The dark side, the Creatureobsessed, was symbolized by none other than his father, Charles Altamont Doyle, whose powerful thirst damaged a promising career as an artist-the wreck of whom we have visible evidence in the six drawings he made for his son’s A Study in Scarlet, featuring a bearded Sherlock Holmes.
So… Moriarty, Moran, McMurdo, even Morgan the poisoner. All Irish names, each one beginning with some variant of “mor,” the linguistic signifier of distress and death. The most powerful resonance of all, of course, is the Irish phrase An Gorta Mor-the Great Hunger-referring to the famine of the mid-nineteenth century, which changed, changed utterly, the fate of That Most Distressful Nation.
Can you see the pattern emerging here?
Mordred. Fata Morgana. Even Tolkien’s fictional Mordor-each of these Celtic formulations indicates danger and darkness. For Tolkien, “Mordor” was the Black Land, an etymological throwback to the roots of our common tongue and the source of our word “murder.” Clearly, in the works of Conan Doyle, the prefix “mor” immediately indicates that the person named is not to be trusted, is not only dangerous but murderous-someone with whom an interaction may well be fatal.