Moriarty Unmasked: Conan Doyle and an Anglo-Irish Quarrel

Moriarty Unmasked: Conan Doyle and an Anglo-Irish Quarrel, Jane Stanford, Carrowmore, August, 2017, is available to buy on Amazon, paperback and ebook.

Arthur Conan Doyle, best known for the Sherlock Holmes stories, was of Irish descent, describing himself as an Anglo-Celt. Born in Scotland, he made his home in England but he visited Ireland often and numbered among his close friends the Irish literary and political giants of the age. Actively involved with a resolution of the Irish Question, Doyle explores in his fiction the inherent obstacles to peace. His creation, Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ arch-enemy, embodies the Fenian threat at the very heart of the British Empire.

 

PART ONE

Who is there outside England who really knows the repeated and honest efforts made by us to settle the eternal Irish Question and hold the scales fair between rival Irishmen?

Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures, XIX.

… the resistless moral force of heroic action.

John O’Connor Power, ‘Edmund Burke and His Abiding Influence’, North American Review, 1897.

Conan Doyle scholars have generally neglected his abiding enthusiasm for the Irish Question, and the many allusions in his writings to the activities of the Fenian movement or, to give it its more formal name, the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

For centuries, British misrule in Ireland was periodically challenged by the fighting Irish, but insurrections, faced with the superior weaponry of English armies, inevitably ended in catastrophic failure. Rebels were slaughtered, their homes and villages destroyed, their  land, livestock and food stores confiscated.

However, in the 1840s, it was a natural disaster, the failure of the potato, the staple food of the poor, which dealt a near fatal blow to a subject people. Field by field, a devastating blight destroyed the crop. A sweet, sickly smell announced its arrival. Potatoes, when lifted, were sodden and black.

The apocalyptic years of the Great Famine, the Great Hunger, resulted in the deaths of over a million Irishmen. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation. Others were felled by the typhus, cholera and smallpox epidemics, which followed in the famine’s wake. Over a million emigrated, desperately seeking refuge in England, North America and Australia. Their journeys were precarious and many died of hunger and disease. Only the hardiest survived.

Uprooted from their native land, the exiles carried with them a deep hatred of the English and their Empire. A dispersal of a people bore the seeds of a worldwide rebellion. The Irish and their descendants regrouped. In 1858, not more than a decade after the ‘Irish holocaust’, the Irish Republican Brotherhood was founded. A secret, oath-bound society, the IRB’s aim was to free Ireland by force of arms and establish independence. For many its purpose was to wreak vengeance on England and dismantle its Empire.

Conan Doyle was conflicted on Ireland and Fenianism is not always dealt with directly in his stories. Allusions are often oblique, hidden in plain sight. The Irish Republican Brotherhood was intent on the restoration of an Irish Parliament. Doyle, an Imperialist, opposed Home Rule and favoured a local government solution. Professor Moriarty’s appearances in the Sherlock Holmes canon coincide with legislative measures marking significant shifts in Anglo-Irish relations.

In That Irishman, the biography of John O’Connor Power, I identify the member of Parliament for Mayo as an inspiration for the ‘Napoleon of crime’, Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ ‘intellectual equal’.

See also www.theirishstory.com  ‘Arthur Conan Doyle and the Irish Literary Society’.

And Tuam Herald, February 2018

 

Additional Notes

P. 25. ‘We would all meet at Clashaganny pub for a day’s hunting.’ That Irishman, 235. Irish Times, 23 February, 1906.

P.38. Roger Casement was a guest at a Johnson Club supper in 1896. Was he ‘Dr Severall’ in ‘The Fiend of the Cooperage’ which appeared in 1897? Or was it fellow guest, Joseph Conrad?

P.44  The Green Flag.  ‘P0sted in the Sudan … Captain Foley urges them to battle.’  William Boyd in his spy novel, Waiting for Sunrise, 2012 , appropriates the name Foley. His Sergeant Foley is involved in a World War One skirmish. In Boyd’s Solo, a James Bond revival novel published in 2014, he references Doyle’s, ‘The Crooked Man’. see Moriarty Unmasked, p.86.

Pps 59-60.   James Lynam Molloy, composer of ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’, married Florence Baskerville. His brother, Bernard Charles Molloy, MP, barrister and penal reformer, was O’Connor Power’s best man in September 1893.

Florence’s father, Henry Baskerville of Crowsley Park, Oxfordshire was High Sheriff of the county. The gates to the Park had statues of hell-hounds , spears through their mouths. There was also one over the entrance to the house. James Molloy moved to nearby Henley-on Thames.

The Molloys were originally from Kings County, now County Offaly, where Conan Doyle had spent holidays with his cousins.

Pps 21-22.  Mycroft, Holmes’ older brother, appears for the first time in ‘The Greek Interpreter’, 1893, the year of the Second Home Rule Bill.  In the story Holmes intervenes in a forced marriage. In ‘The Final Problem’, 1893, Mycroft -my land – drives the plot onwards.

Pps. 35-36.  In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, teachers at St Jarlath’s college were addressed as Professor.

Pps 82-84.  Irishman, Barry Edward O’Meara, 1756-1836, was Napoleon Bonaparte’s doctor when he was imprisoned on the island of St Helena. O’Meara wrote an account of his relationship with Napoleon, Napoleon in Exile, 1822.

P. 71. Thaddeus Sholto inspired by Oscar Wilde. The Marquess of Queensbury’s full name was John Sholto Douglas.

Pps. 72-75, Diogenes Laertius was frequently quoted by Dr Johnson in his conversatons. See ‘Dr Johnson as a Grecian’,  J. Gennadius,  The Johnson Club Papers, 1899, p. 23, endnote 1.

P. 79.  ‘His son, two brothers and nephew died in the First World War.’

The Refugees, 1893, – ‘But then came a return of that common sense which lies so very closely beneath the impetuosity of the Celt.’

Sherlock, The Reichenbach Fall, 2012. Series 2, Episode 3.

Moriarty visits Sherlock Holmes in his home in Baker Street. They talk of the final problem  – ‘what’s the final problem?’ – while drinking tea out of china cups, white with a green pattern, a map of Ireland and the UK. Later at the Diogenes Club, Mycroft makes a reference to the troubles of 1972, ‘We don’t want a repeat of 1972.’ Is it a reference to Bloody Sunday in Derry? Moriarty blows up the Tower of London, breaks into the vault at the Bank of England and opens the gates of Pentonville Prison.  In the early 1880s, the Fenians were targeting well known sites in London. A bomb was placed in the banqueting hall in the Tower of London. Irish revolutionary, Roger Casement, was hanged in Pentonville prison in 1916. Irish statesman, Eamon de Valera, was briefly in Pentonville before being transferred to Lincoln jail* from where, with apparent ease, he made a dramatic escape.

Anderson of the Metropolitan police makes an appearance.  Anderson is a nod to Sir Robert Anderson of Scotland Yard,  an Intelligence officer and arch-enemy of the Fenians. He was behind the Special Commission on Parnellism and Crime, 1888-1889, and highest ranking officer on the Jack the Ripper Case. See Moriarty Unmasked, pps. 48,49.

Mark Gatiss, co-creator of the Sherlock Series, plays Mycroft.  His mother was an O’Kane from Derry.

Moriarty: A Novel, Anthony Horowitz, 2015, gives Moriarty’s birthplace as Ballinasloe,  County Galway. Horowitz depicts him as a twin , born to a respectable family, ‘My father was a barrister but when I was eleven or twelve years old he became involved in the Irish Republican Brotherhood.’  The twin boys were sent to England for their safety.

Roy William Neill (1887-1946), an Irish-born film director, directed many of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series including  The Woman in Green, 1945, and Dressed to Kill, 1946.  In Dressed to Kill Holmes plays Danny Boy on his violin. He and Watson solve the mystery with a Samuel Johnson quote: There is no problem the mind of man can set that the mind of man cannot solve.  They join a tour of The Johnson House, now a museum.

Neill directed and produced The Woman in Green.  At the bar of Pembroke House Inspector Gregson says ‘Make mine Irish’ when asking for whiskey. Pembroke House is identified by the flap on the match book.  Later Holmes invites the lady in green for a drink,’Join me for a cocktail at Pembroke House.’

 

Inversion of the characteristics of a real person to create a fictional character was in fact a common technique used by Arthur Conan Doyle. Jane Stanford in her book Moriarty Unmasked  gives three such instances of inversions in Doyle’s work.

New Light on George Boole, Desmond MacHale and Yvonne Cohen,  Atrium, 2018

 

There is hardly a branch of the numerous British Services in which sworn Fenians do not hold office.

Mr Parnell M.P. and the I.R.B., pamphlet, London 1886, Anon.

*See Page  De Valera and Lincoln Jail.