Today I will continue my recent delvings into Angels of Darkness, the (earlier) version of
Study,
a bit further. In one of my first posts
last week, I extended existing scholarship about the thinly veiled allusion by Doyle
in the second part of Study to Sir Richard Burton’s City of the Saints. I claimed that Doyle had
in particular picked up on Burton’s discussion of Lucifer in Mormon theology,
and therefore called his tragic heroine “LucyFer-rier” in order to point to the
Mormon conception of Lucifer’s role in the occurrence of human sin, sin having
been a central theme in Study in a variety of ways.
Thanks once again to Kate Donley of this group, I have now read the chapter
(in A Tangled Skein: A Companion Volume to the Baker Street Irregulars’
Expedition to The Country of the Saints” edited by Leslie Klinger) called “The City of the
Saints: Richard F. Burton in SLC” by Donald Pollock. In that chapter, Pollock
goes into excellent detail about Burton’s journey to Salt Lake City as research
for his widely read portrait of life there, entitled The City of the
Saints, the
title of which Doyle obviously parodied in his title for part 2 of Study.
Reading Pollock’s argument through the lens not only of Study, but also of Angels
of Darkness, I
was particularly struck by Pollock’s following comments: “[Burton] found the
Book of Mormon excruciatingly boring and something of a self-evident fraud—he described
reading it as “a painful but appropriate exercise…”
As you will recall, the main point of my last post yesterday, on the
subject of Angels of Darkness, was that the character Sir Montague (Monty) Brown
(originally “Willoughby” instead of “Montague”) was the proto-Sherlock Holmes,
i.e., that Doyle invented the character of Sherlock Holmes out the character of
Sir Monty Brown, cannibalizing certain key elements of the latter’s character,
and incorporating them into a radically improved (obviously) character which
captured the reading world’s attention and admiration.
Today, I wish to amend that claim, but asserting that Sir Monty Brown
was only the “father” of Sherlock Holmes---his “grandfather” was none other
than the real life Sir Richard Burton! And as Exhibit A in making that
assertion, I refer to the extremely close parallel between Pollock’s
description of Burton’s characterization of the Book of Mormon as “excruciatingly
boring and something of a self-evident fraud”, on the one hand, and Sir Monty
Brown’s comments about his ennui while traveling the world:
Sir.
Mont: Ah, my complaint is one you can’t
cure, don’t you know, doctaw. There’s no dwug can do me any good, you know.
Dr.
Watson: What’s the matter, then, Sir
Montague?
Sir
Mont: I’m BAWED, deah boy. I’m BAWED. I’m the most BAWED thing in cweation,
don’t you know, unless its an Artesian well.
Watson: You must rouse yourself.
Sir
Mont: I can’t.
Watson: See life.
Sir
Mont: I’ve seen it. It’s not worth
seeing, don’t you know, I mean to say its such a BAW! Believe me, deah boy,
it’s a BAW.
Watson: Travel then.
Sir
Mont: So I do. Then I twavel back again.
If you twavel far enough you find yourself where you started from. That’s the
worst of the world being round, don’t you know. I mean to say that if it was
flat, or square, or lopsided, it wouldn’t be half such a BAW.
And
then shortly thereafter in the same scene:
Doctor:
(to Sir Mont) Why did you vex [the
Count, being Drebber in disguise] so?
Sir
Mont: The fellow’s a FWAUD, deah boy. I’ve been watching him for a day or two.
He’s as well as you are, and has never been in Egypt or in Fwance either in his
life.
My take on the above is that Doyle has, in Study, enjoyed a very clever
private joke---i.e., the proto-Sherlock detective I’ve perceived in Angels
of Darkness had
read Burton as part of his research for his case, the goal of which was to protect Lucy
Ferrier from abduction by her disguised Mormon pursuers, and, with a keen sense
of ironic humor, adopted a disguise persona of a bored world-traveling English “Sir”
based on Richard F. Burton himself!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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