victorian221b | ACD meeting Oscar Wilde

From Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, by Daniel Stashower:

Why, then, should he have wanted to make his detective a drug user? For the modern reader, the image of Sherlock Holmes plunging a needle into his arm comes as an unpleasant shock. To Conan Doyle’s way of thinking, however, the syringe would have been very much of a piece with the violin, the purple dressing gown, and the interest in such abstruse subjects as the motets of Lassus. With Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle intended to elevate the science of criminal investigation to an art form. To do so, he needed to cast his detective as an artist rather than a simple policeman. Conan Doyle himself, with his broad shoulders, muscular frame, and ruddy complexion, could easily have passed for a stolid London patrolman. Holmes offered a striking contrast. He was thin, languid, and aesthetic. He easily fit the pattern of a bohemian artist, with all of the accompanying eccentricities and evil habits—one of which, sad to say, was cocaine. “Art in the blood,” as Holmes was to say, “is liable to take the strangest forms.”

The image of the Victorian habitué would have been very fresh in Conan Doyle’s mind as he sat down to write The Sign of the Four. Only a few days earlier, he had met a young man he regarded as the very “champion of aestheticism.” In August of 1889, Conan Doyle found himself invited up to London for a literary soiree. The editor Joseph Marshall Stoddart, of Philadelphia’s Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, had come to London to arrange for an English edition of his publication. While in Britain, he hoped to commission work from some of the country’s promising young writers. At the time, Conan Doyle’s work was receiving far greater exposure in America than in Britain, owing to the lack of American copyright protection for foreign authors. Several of Conan Doyle’s stories had appeared in pirated anthologies, which, he noted with dismay, “might have been printed on the paper that shopmen use for parcels.”
Conan Doyle may have regretted the lost profits from these unauthorized printings, but they brought him a substantial American readership at a time when his name was less well known in Britain. Now, with Joseph Stoddart anxious for a meeting, Conan Doyle had reason to feel warmly toward his American audience. “Needless to say,” he later wrote, “I gave my patients a rest for a day and eagerly kept the appointment.”
The dinner was held in the West End at the prestigious Langham Hotel, a setting that would feature in three future Sherlock Holmes adventures (SIGN, SCAN, and LADY—my note). Two other guests enjoyed Stoddart’s hospitality that night. The first was Thomas Patrick Gill, a former magazine editor who had gone on to become a member of Parliament. The second was Oscar Wilde.
At thirty-five, Oscar Wilde was already a notorious figure in London society. Though his great plays were still ahead of him, he had made his reputation with his early poetry and with essays such as “The Decay of Lying” and “The Truth of Masks.” From the first, however, his true fame owed less to his literary output than to his celebrated wit and flamboyant personality.
It would be difficult to imagine two men more unlike each other than Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle, and their first meeting must have produced raised eyebrows on both sides. The hale and hearty provincial doctor, with his bone-crushing handshake and earnest, direct manner of speaking, had traveled up from Portsmouth in his best professional suit. The world-weary, languorous Wilde cut a rather different figure. “He dressed as probably no grown man in the world was ever dressed before,” the actress Lillie Langtry once wrote of him. “His hat was of brown cloth not less than six inches high; his coat was of black velvet; his overcoat was of green cloth, heavily trimmed with fur; his trousers matched his hat; his tie was gaudy and his shirtfront very open, displaying a large expanse of manly chest.” One assumes that such attire was not a familiar sight in Southsea.
The two men also differed in their literary views. Conan Doyle, the champion of historical realism, was a born storyteller, and took pride in his clear, unadorned prose style. Wilde, by contrast, had set himself up as the leader of a movement dedicated to “art for art’s sake.”
Even so, the two writers got along famously. “It was indeed a golden evening for me,” Conan Doyle said of his meeting with Wilde. “His conversation left an indelible impression upon my mind. He towered above us all, and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say. He had delicacy of feeling and tact, for the monologue man, however clever, can never be a gentleman at heart.” Only eight years earlier, Conan Doyle had gone up to London to see Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, which featured a thinly disguised parody of Wilde in the character of Bunthorne, the “fleshy poet.” Now he found himself sitting beside the “singularly deep young man” himself, while the pair of them basked in the attentions of a renowned American publisher.
Wilde impressed Conan Doyle with his “curious precision of statement,” as when he described how a war of the future might be waged: “A chemist on each side will approach the frontier with a bottle.” Not all of Wilde’s remarks showcased his famous wit. To Conan Doyle’s surprise, Wilde had not only read Micah Clarke but expressed enthusiasm for it. One must treat this report with caution. It is frankly difficult to conjure an image of Oscar Wilde, the archetype of Victorian aestheticism, with a lily in one hand and Conan Doyle’s robust epic in the other. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell expresses her disdain for the “three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality” that she has found in a perambulator. One imagines that Micah Clarke would have brought a similar reaction from Wilde, though he may not have wished to say so to the author.
The evening ended with both men agreeing to produce a short novel for Lippincott’s. A few days later, Conan Doyle wrote to Stoddart to propose an idea. “I shall give Sherlock Holmes of A Study in Scarlet something else to unravel,” he declared. “I notice that everyone who has read the book wants to know more of that young man.”
Oscar Wilde also did well out of his association with Lippincott’s. His contribution was The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of the finest novels of the age. Upon publication, however, Wilde’s book came under attack for its perceived immorality. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” Wilde declared, by way of defending himself. “Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Conan Doyle, who came to regard some of his own stories as a trifle risqué, would not have endorsed this sentiment. Nonetheless, he thought Wilde’s book was excellent and sent a letter saying so. “I am really delighted that you think my treatment subtle and artistically good,” Wilde wrote in reply. “The newspapers seem to me to be written by the prurient for the Philistine.”

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To summarise, this excerpt supports the points previously discussed elsewhere:

1. The influence of the aesthetic movement and Wilde in particular on the image of Holmes. No wonder Holmes comes off as queer-coded. He is queer intrinsically.

2. Doyle admired Wilde and was vocal about it but chose to be more cautious in his own writing.