Portions of many manuscripts have been reproduced in facsimile in Sherlockian journals, and several complete manuscripts have been published in book form, including “The Priory School,” “The Dying Detective,” “The Lion’s Mane,” “The Six Napoleons,” and “Shoscombe Old Place” (under what appears to have been its original title, “The Adventure of Shoscombe Abbey”).
PUBLISHING AND TEXTUAL TRANSMISSION
A publisher is someone, an individual or more commonly a firm, who takes on the responsibility for having an author’s book printed and distributed. The usual arrangement is that the author receives “royalties,” a percentage of the sale price of the book, often with a minimum payment represented by an “advance” or cash payment when the manuscript is submitted. A 10 percent royalty is a rule of thumb, but the figure can vary: in 1902 Doyle was receiving 25 percent of the sale price on copies of his best-selling The Hound of the Baskervilles in Canada. In some cases — rarely today, but more commonly in the nineteenth century — the publisher buys the book outright. The publishers of Beeton’s Christmas Annual paid Doyle £25 (a not ungenerous $2,000 in today’s currency) for the ownership of A Study in Scarlet. The author may choose to sell only certain “rights” to a publisher, restricted by geography (“North American rights”) or limited to a period of time. Whatever the exact terms of the contract, it becomes the publisher’s obligation to pay for the printing of the book, and the publisher makes a profit or takes a loss depending on how well the book sells. A publisher employs editors who do their best to improve the text of the book before it is printed, and staff whose job is to send copies to reviewers, encourage booksellers to stock the book, and so on.
It was “Sherrinford” Holmes, not yet Sherlock, when Arthur Conan Doyle first sketched out his character in 1886. The single page of notes has been reproduced publicly many times (first in Vincent Starrett’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes in 1934) but the original is thought to remain in the hands of lawyers for one of the Doyle family estates.
Doyle dealt with several publishers in the course of his career, some briefly and others over long periods. Among the latter were George Newnes, whose interests included book publishing as well as the Strand, and the great family firm of Lippincott in Philadelphia, who also published both books and magazines. Much information about the publishing and distribution of Doyle’s works is found in the fine print of Green and Gibson’s Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle (1983). Much, however, is not known, for publishers do not necessarily keep the records of their former projects. By the early 1890s, Doyle was conducting financial negotiations with his publishers through the intermediary of A.P. Watt, a professional literary agent, and it was to Watt that (for example) the Toronto publisher George N. Morang & Co. sent substantial sums as royalties. (Records of those are in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.)
Most of the Sherlock Holmes stories were published first in magazines; the author would have sold “serial rights,” for magazine publication, before the “book rights.” The manuscripts went first to an editor, such as Greenhough Smith of the Strand, and from the editor to a typesetter, whose mercy and competence largely determine the text known to succeeding generations. There is evidence, as from the manuscript of “The Three Students,” that the typesetter was given much latitude for making sense out of Doyle’s erratic punctuation and capitalization. Negative evidence, such as the survival of many inconsistencies in the stories, as well as the lack of markings on them, suggests that an editor’s hand touched the manuscripts little or not at all.
The mechanics of printing were little different in the 1890s from what they had been in Shakespeare’s day. Machinery was now powered by steam rather than by muscle, but type was for the most part still set by hand, letter by letter, allowing full scope for typographical errors of a kind now extinct, such as “wrong font” and inverted characters. The detailed study of these mechanics, as described in the definitive An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students by Ronald B. McKerrow (1962), is applied to portions of the Sherlockian Canon by Donald Redmond in Sherlock Holmes Among the Pirates (1990). A typographical error, unless very obvious, could easily be perpetuated in subsequent editions of the same text, as the new typesetter might well work from a previous printed page rather than from a reliable manuscript. The consequence is that mistakes and variations throughout the Canon survive to bedevil researchers; and a new generation of such errors has been created when the text is “scanned” into computer memory, with technology that is still somewhat fallible.
THE STRAND MAGAZINE. All the Sherlock Holmes stories except the first two novels had their first British publication in the Strand, a monthly magazine founded at the beginning of 1891 by George Newnes (1851–1910). Newnes, originally a Manchester merchant, had become a publisher in 1881 with the creation of Tit-Bits, a weekly paper of entertainment and miscellaneous information for the lower middle class, which was becoming steadily more literate after the reforms of the 1870 Education Act. He introduced the Strand as a more respectable product, with a title taken from a fashionable West End street just around the corner from the magazine’s offices. It boasted modern-looking typography and an illustration on every double page (a policy from the beginning), and it quickly became enormously successful, reaching a circulation of half a million. In its heyday, it sold a hundred pages of advertising every month. George Newnes Ltd. went on to publish dozens of other periodicals, and briefly an American edition of the Strand. The British magazine survived until 1951, when it became a victim of financial losses and a change in public reading habits.
Although Newnes (later Sir George for his contributions to journalism) was nominally editor of the Strand, its day-to-day manager was H. Greenhough Smith (1855–1935), the “literary editor” from the magazine’s beginnings, who continued at its helm until 1930. Reginald Pound in Mirror of the Century: The Strand Magazine 1891–1950 (1966) describes him:
Tall, lean, sandy-moustached, with freckles to match on a pallid expressionless face, he surveyed the world with kindly scrutineering eyes through rimless pince-nez. His distrust of emotion gave an impression of a temperament that did not fully warrant the nickname by which he was known to his fellow clubmen, “Calamity” Smith.... Wary of originality, he was prepared to encourage it but not at the expense of readability or of the reputation of the magazine.
He encouraged H.G. Wells, Grant Allen, E. Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, E.W. Hornung, W. Somerset Maugham, and countless other important figures of Victorian writing; the Strand was noted for good story telling rather than for ground-breaking literature. It carried articles about travel, science, the aristocracy, and public affairs as well, and deferential interviews with prominent persons, all in a generally complacent tone but without entirely concealing the problems of British society. Newnes, always insisting that he represented “the common man” but resplendent in the snug waistcoat of the successful businessman, cultivated — and received — the approval of prominent figures, including Queen Victoria, who more than once gave the magazine access to the royal apartments and scrapbooks.
A story by Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Voice of Science,” appeared in the first volume of the Strand, but his importance to the magazine — and its to him — began in Volume 2 no. 1, July 1891, when Smith received the first episodes of what became The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and called them “a gift from Heaven.” At first Doyle was paid £5 per thousand words for the stories of Sherlock Holmes; by the end, nearly forty years later, he received £648 14s just for “Shoscombe Old Place.” Doyle also wrote dozens of non-Sherlockian tales for the Strand, and his credibility with the magazine was such that when he appeared in 1921 with an article maintaining that two little girls’ photographs of fairies in their garden were authentic, Smith swallowed hard and published it. A collection of letters from Doyle to Smith, now at the Toronto Reference Library, was discussed by Cameron Hollyer in Baker