Moriarty Unmasked: Conan Doyle and an Anglo-Irish Quarrel. An evening with author Jane Stanford, and secondary level students for a discussion on Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Homes.
Moriarty Unmasked: Conan Doyle and an Anglo-Irish Quarrel, Jane Stanford. (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’.
