know the difference between good work and bad'. His primary intention, he
claimed, had not been to tell a good action story, but 'to draw the exact types
of character of the folk then living'.^^ ^ j,g grandly declared in an interview in
1892, ' I really think I have succeeded in reconstrucdng the fourteenth
century.'^*
This was not simply bravado. For h im there were serious ideological issues
at stake in writing historical fiction which made its mimetic powers indispensable.
Part of the distinct value of these supposedly authentic literary
reconstructions lay in their serious political purpose. From the outset he saw
his novels about the past as a means o f bringing about the future world order
which, as we have seen, depended in his view on a strong Anglo-American
alliance. I n 1891 he dedicated The WhiU Company, ' T o the Hope of the Future /
The Reunion of die English-Speaking Races' and called the novel a 'Chronicle
of Our Common / Ancestry'. And, two years later, he v»nrote to his mother
about The Refugees (1893), which centred on die fate of a Puritan New
Englander and a New York woodsman i n the court of Louis X I V :
If I, a Britisher, can draw their early types so as to win their approval I should indeed
be proud. By such international associations nations are drawn together, and on the
drawing together of these two nations depends the future history of the world.'*
These assumptions make sense o f his lofty prediction, made i n October 1894,
that 'the age of fiction is coming - the age when religious and social and
political changes will all be effected by means of a novelist'.^* These were not
the views of a literary purist, but they were those of a writer w i th an ambitious
extra-literary mission for whom the historical genre was not mere entertainment.
This scheme of literary values, which generated many of Conan Doyle's
positional anxieties, had a significant impact on the rest o f his career.
Unlike A Study, Micah Clarke was not a fluent version of a popular genre. It
took a year to research and five months to write. When it was completed in
early 1888, he recalled, ' I diought I had a tool i n my hands that would cut a
path for me.'^* This time his hopes were rewarded. After being refused by
Payn and Blackwood, among odiers, it was finally published, on Lang's advice,
by the equally well-established firm of Longman, Green, i n February 1889, in
an elegant 6s first edition of 1,000 copies, bound in dark blue cloth widi no
advertisements for soap or patent medicines.^' With Lang's endorsement,
which Conan Doyle called his 'first real opening', as well as Longman's
imprint, good reviews, and impressive sales, he felt he had, ten years into his
career, 'the first corner-stone laid for some sort of literary reputation'.^® With
a new sense of direction, i n Easter 1889 he began the extensive background
research for The White Company, his second historical novel, and by 19 August
he was ready to write.'^ The novel would eventually consolidate his position as
an historical novelist, and give him the satisfaction of a coveted Comhill
serialization and die sober respectability of a 31s 6d three-volume first book
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