Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may have found everlasting literary fame as the creator of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Dr Watson, but his lost first novel was published for the first time on Monday.
Sir Arthur, who shot to fame with his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, in 1886, wrote his first novel between 1883 and 1884 when he was just 23 years old.
Sir Arthur, who had trained as a medical doctor, lost the manuscript of his first novel, The Narrative of John Smith, after he posted it to the publisher.
He then rewrote the novel from memory. “Although he continued to revise the text and drew on various passages from it in subsequent writings, Conan Doyle never re-submitted the novel for publication, later claiming in jest: ‘My shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again — in print,’” according to British Library, which published the manuscript on Monday.
Semi-autobiographical in nature, the novel focuses on John Smith’s period of confinement in his room during an attack of gout. The novel is essentially a series of reflections and conversations with his doctor, friends and other visitors concerning a range of contemporary debates on literature, science, religion, war and politics.
Several ideas and incidents in the novel anticipate the Sherlock Holmes stories like Smith’s garrulous landlady, Mrs Rundle, seems to be a precursor of Martha Hudson, Sherlock Holmes’s housekeeper at 221B Baker Street, a fictional London address.
It is “fortunate that he kept the manuscript, and provided us with a unique window into the mind, thinking, and often emphatic opinions of a young man who in just another year or so would create literature’s best known character, Sherlock Holmes,” Jon Lellenberg, representative of the Conan Doyle Estate and co-editor of the novel said.