Imagine the ... Dinners: ACD, Wilde, and The Sign of the Four
Arthur Conan Doyle met Oscar Wilde at the Langham Hotel, at the invitation of James Marshall Stoddart, the influential American editor of Lippincott’s Magazine. Stoddart commissioned as yet unwritten works from both for Lippencott’s, works which ultimately emerged as The Sign of [the] Four and The Picture of Dorian Gray. (It was Stoddart who made the first drastic, censoring cuts of homosexual and, to a lesser extent, heterosexual material for the magazine’s run, without consultation with the author.) Doyle was charmed by Wilde, who expressed admiration for Doyle’s novel Micah Clarke and by Doyle’s account put his skills as a conversationalist and listener to great use that evening.
Doyle biographer Andrew Lycett notes that nods to this meeting-as-origin find their way into The Sign of the Four. Lycett notes a passing reference to the Langham, but it’s a bit more than that. Mary Morstan’s father directs her to meet him at the Langham Hotel, from which he disappears but never returns. She waits there all day to no avail—and thus begins her mystery (I think I’ve called this “composition meta,” or as we say in my business, self-reflexivity). Wilde’s presence and influence is more extensively apparent, though, in the characterization of the aesthete Thaddeus Sholto (one of two sons of the mysterious Major Sholto). Thaddeus is surrounded by Orientalist, sensualist splendor of the kind celebrated by Wilde and others in the Aesthetic movement. It’s not entirely a flattering portrayal by any means: Thaddeus is a terrible hypochondriac as well as a sensualist, but he nonetheless emerges as the only character of Mary’s connections whose heart is in the right place and who furthermore has a strong, unflinching sense of justice. His characterization is in sharp contrast to the kind of straight-up Victorian masculinity John Watson represents, and the text makes the most of this to humorous effect. But of the two men, it is Sholto who acts most consistently in Morstan’s interests, while Watson’s feelings cause him to be more selfish than not.
Watson—the narrator, of course—complies with Thaddeus’ initial request that the doctor listen to a valve in his heart, but only minutes later has to repress the desire hit his “patient”: “I could have struck the man across the face, so hot was I at this callous and off-hand reference to so delicate a matter” (Thaddeus had mentioned Mary Morstan’s father’s death). Thaddeus’ first stated desire and his motivation throughout, however, is to do Mary justice, and he goes to great trouble to do so despite his nerves and imagined ailments.
Watson’s responses to Thaddeus Sholto are in marked contrast to those of Sherlock Holmes himself. Holmes first promises Sholto confidentiality, and then follows up the tale with a rare instance of praise: “You have done well, sir, from first to last.” Watson, on the other hand, shaken at news of Mary’s likely inheritance and its probable effect on his chances with her, absentmindedly prescribes Thaddeus “strychnine in large doses as a sedative.” Where Watson seems to react violently on a visceral, bodily level to Thaddeus’ obvious queerness (both in the period sense of “oddness” and our more current sense, then already gaining currency), Holmes is nothing but respectful, consoling, even, explicitly, kind: “’You have no reason for fear, Mr. Sholto,’” said Holmes, kindly, putting his hand upon his shoulder.” Holmes has the opposite physical, intellectual, and emotional response to the man and in fact becomes Sholto’s advocate, working tirelessly to clear his name. (Watson himself ultimately will come around to calling Thaddeus “Friend Sholto”).
is only the second Sherlock Holmes story, but it’s already established that Watson consistently acts as a foil for Holmes. His everyman’s logic is always bettered by Holmes’ more brilliant, less conventional theories. Watson’s response to Sholto’s queerness—a response that we’d be tempted to call “homosexual panic”—as compared with Holmes’ thus follows this pattern as well. Yet Watson is often celebrated—particularly in the BBC’s
Sherlock—as the humanizing force behind Holmes. In
Sign of the Four, ACD’s Watson famously decries Holmes’ failure to respond to Mary Morstan’s womanly charms as evidence that Holmes is a “machine” and “inhuman,” a passage Sherlock resituates and makes much of in The Reichenbach Fall. In its original context, however, the logic of Sign has Watson’s strong heterosexual response to Mary blinding him to the obvious human and ethical value of Thaddeus Sholto. The story begins by Holmes calling Watson out on clouding the story of his deduction with romance, and Holmes’ own clear-sightedness on Sholto’s value seems to bear this theory out on the level of heterosexual romance at least. Notably, Mary Morstan has this consideration in common with Sherlock Holmes: “It is for Mr. Thaddeus Sholto that I am anxious,” she said. “Nothing else is of any consequence; but I think that he has behaved most kindly and honorably throughout. It is our duty to clear him of this dreadful and unfounded charge.”
Holmes also has several character attributes in common with Thaddeus Sholto—and with Wildean aestheticism. Holmes has marked sensualist qualities in his days of boredom and lassitude, explicit here in his cocaine use, and is also shown to be prone to nervousness. Lycett remarks on these aestheticist qualities in Holmes as well, although he also notes where they part ways. Yet there is something in Holmes’ conversation at the dinner he gives to Watson and Jones:
Holmes could talk exceedingly well when he chose, and that night he did choose. He appeared to be in a state of nervous exaltation. I have never known him so brilliant. He spoke on a quick succession of subjects,—on miracle-plays, on medieval pottery, on Stradivarius violins, on the Buddhism of Ceylon, and on the war-ships of the future,—handling each as though he had made a special study of it.
This account puts Holmes more in the style of the Wilde that Conan Doyle happily recalled in a “golden evening” recounted in his autobiography: “his conversation left an indelible impression upon my mind. He towered above us all” but made his company feel interesting as well. In Wilde’s already famous “Decay of Lying” he had spoken of medieval art and was well-known for Orientalist tastes and interests; in this evening as Doyle recalls it, he discussed “the wars of the future.” Holmes at dinner is modeled on this Wilde.
At the time of this “golden evening,” Wilde was married but already associated with homoeroticism and homoromanticism (an equally famous essay argued—then somewhat scandalously—that Shakespeare had addressed his most passionate love sonnets to a man), and his dandyism had long been lampooned in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. Doyle’s sympathy with Wilde’s style and substance is a reminder that gradations of masculinity, gender, and even sexuality were tolerated, even embraced, by liberal thinkers—but not getting caught in the act. It was not, ultimately, Wilde’s style of behavior or even his defense of male love that brought him down, it was the testimony of male prostitutes.
Doyle closes out his reminiscence on Wilde with the insistence that he found him “mad” in later years, but that there had been no hint of “coarseness” in his demeanor that evening (read “coarseness” for “rough sex with male prostitutes”). Doyle saw “the monstrous development that ruined him as pathological” and believed it was better suited for hospital treatment than prison, a position he took with consistency throughout his life. He continues to celebrate Wilde in a subsequent passage, and was consistently opposed to his sentencing.
Since such a view continues to do so much damage to young gays and lesbians sent to “cure” treatment, it’s hard to recognize that this position at the time was a liberal one. It was a position Doyle adhered to in calling for clemency to his former friend, the convicted traitor Roger Casement, whose explicit journals detailing a life of cruising male prostitutes were circulated by the British government. Doyle, again, saw these habits as further evidence of mental illness. But in pleading for compassion for them, he takes a position consistent with his portrayal of “queer” Thaddeus Sholto, the caricatured aesthete and hypochondriac—and the treatment of Sholto as pathological and Wildean suggests much more awareness on Doyle’s part of Wilde’s tastes than his later denial of “coarseness” would allow.
The parallel between Holmes’ and Wilde’s most brilliant dinner conversation is more suggestive. Wilde, having been (for Doyle) humanized and aestheticized at a dinner party to which this story pays homage, provides a (then hidden, unknowable) queer model—and in the context of a story that more overtly advocates that queer characters be treated in accordance with their ethics and actions, not their style or their “pathologies.”
