Detail from Richard Caton-Woodville's illustration from the Strand Magazine, 1908 |
Hello and welcome to Episode 49. This month, we look at a classic Conan Doyle short story, one the author felt was “gloomy but of [his] best” - ‘The Pot of Caviare’ from 1908.
You can read the story here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Pot_of_Caviare
Or listen to an audio recording by Greg Wagland here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yah89KYMwr8
You can listen to the episode here:
The episode will be uploaded to our YouTube channel soon,
where you can listen with closed captions. In the meantime, subscribe to our YouTube
channel for updates here: https://www.youtube.com/@doingsofdoyle
Synopsis
During the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, the small European
garrison of Ichau is barely holding out against a besieging Boxer army. A relief
force is expected but its progress is uncertain. Hope and fears both run high,
and the defenders begin to weigh up their options: relief, death or capture by
a merciless foe.
Writing and publication history
'A Gentleman in Khaki' |
“The Pot of Caviare” was one of the first projects Conan
Doyle finished in Windlesham. It was completed in December 1907, after which
Conan Doyle wrote to his mother that it was “very gloomy but of my best.”
The story was first published in the Strand Magazine,
March 1908, with illustrations by Richard Caton-Woodville, who was famed for
his battle scenes and an iconic image of Empire, a defiant Tommy with a
bandaged head, titled ‘A Gentleman in Khaki.’ Woodville also provided illustrations
for early Conan Doyle stories ‘Uncle Jeremy’s Household’ and ‘An Exciting
Christmas Eve’.
Shortly after first publication, Conan Doyle revised the
short story as a play entitled “A Pot of Caviare.” See later.
“The Pot of Caviare” was first collected in ACD’s Round
the Fire Stories in 1908. In the John Murray anthologies, it was moved to Tales
of the Ring and Camp (1922), indicating how the story could be viewed as an
example of both gothic and military fiction.
The story received praise on publication, with Dr Robertson
Nicoll in the British Weekly (14 March 1908) noting “Conan Doyle has
lost none of his skill. He can tell a story as no other writer of his time can
tell it, without superfluity, without tedium, with unerring skill and point.”
The Boxer Rebellion
'I'll try, Sir! - American troops take part in the relief of the Peking legations, by Hugh Charles McBarron Jr (Wikimedia) |
The Boxer Rebellion was an anti-foreign, anti-imperialist
uprising in North China between 1899 and 1901, which came to a head in June
1900 with the Siege of Peking. The origins lay in British and European actions to
force China open to trade. After the First Opium War (aka the First China War,
1839-42), the British secured trading rights and access to China for Christian
missionaries at the Treaty of Nanjing (1842). Nanjing opened the floodgates to
other powers, European and America.
Tensions rose through the nineteenth century as Christian missionaries
converted swathes of the population and European trade, notably in opium, had profound
social and economic consequences for the Chinese. It was also a period of
significant internal strife in China, with the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64)
being the bloodiest civil war in history.
The Sino-Japanese War (1895-96), in which China was defeated
by its smaller neighbour Japan, revealed the weakness of the Qing dynasty and
spurred the European powers to an event more rampant wave of expansion in
China, during which Kaiser Whilhelm II of Germany proposed the partition of
China as had taken place in Africa. This, combined with rising numbers of
conversions and a series of poor harvests, led to the rise of the Boxer
movement in North China, which was supported by the peasantry and eventually,
tacitly, by the Dowager Empress Cixi.
Imperial Chinese troops, 1900 |
The siege was recounted in Peter Fleming’s excellent The
Siege at Peking (1957) which was cribbed for the movie 55 Days at Peking
(1963), starring Charlton Heston, Eva Gardner, David Niven and Flora Robson (an
unlikely choice for the Dowager Empress…). Niven’s character, based on Sir Claude
Maxwell MacDonald, the British minister who commanded the defence of the
Legation, was renamed Sir Arthur for the film.
Innes in China
John Francis Innes Hay Doyle (1873-1919) |
Innes saw little action, arriving after the Siege at Peking
had been lifted, although would have been present during the period of bloody
reprisals against the Boxers. His own account survived in a letter sold at the Christie’s
auction in 2004. “I went over the Forbidden City the other day and was not
impressed at all… [the Chinese are friendly but] most annoying on the golf
course where they retrieve your ball with greatest zeal.” He returned to India
in late 1901 before moving on to South Africa in January 1902.
Conan Doyle was concerned for his brother, writing to his
mother and to Innes in February 1901 to enquire whether the unit was there to
prevent another Boxer uprising or to outflank the Russians. Here, Conan Doyle was
referencing the ‘Great Game’, the secret war between Russia and Britain for control
of central Asia, which had seeped into popular consciousness and fiction. John
Buchan’s The Half-Hearted (1900) and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901)
are early examples, the latter the classic of the genre.
Tensions among the defending Westerners
Illustration by Richard Caton-Woodville |
There is jocular rivalry between the nations as they debate
who they hope will lead the rescue party, although there are rather sharper tensions
between the Presbyterian missionary family and the Roman Catholic priest. The
nations come together in response to the threats facing them.
One wonders if this is a reflection on the European situation
when written, when tensions between the nations and fears about German
expansion were rife (although Conan Doyle was notably slow to recognise the
threat from Germany, as we discussed in Episode 4 on Danger!).
Mercer’s pessimism is one of the more unusual aspects of the
story, with Conan Doyle making the American the defeatist. American policy in
China had been marginally less aggressive and more lenient towards the Chinese,
and perhaps this is reflected here.
The ending
Conan Doyle’s story is about the evil of defeatism. Mercer’s
drastic decision to poison the caviare, only for the party to be rescued,
leaves him a suicide and multiple murderer at the end of the tale. Although a
lapsed Catholic, Conan Doyle appears to have retained the view that suicide was
a sin. In ‘The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger’ (1927), Sherlock Holmes memorably
tells Eugenia Ronder “your life is not your own… Keep your hands off it.”
The ending owes much to the conte cruel stories that
fascinated Conan Doyle and to the influence of French writers such as Villiers
de l'Isle-Adam and Guy de Maupassant. To modern audiences, it’s twist ending is
much like a Twilight Zone or Tales of the Unexpected.
As a parable on defeatism, “The Pot of Caviare” sits within
a wider set of stories that Conan Doyle would start to write which all concern
the fate of empire, which would be collected in 1922 as Tales of Long Ago.
While “Caviare” is not “long ago,” being
set seven years before the story is written, it shows Conan Doyle working
through conceptions of threats to empire. Another case in point is Danger!
(1914), which concerned the lack of British preparedness for a future submarine
war.
Chinaphobia
The Knackfuss lithograph |
Reports from China during the Boxer Revellion amplified anti-Chinese
sentiment. Arguably the worst was an account of ‘The Peking Massacre’ which
appeared in the Daily Express on 16 July 1900. The report claimed the Legation
had been breached and all inside murdered. One of the rumours attached to this
story was that the men had shot the women and children to stop them falling
into the hands of the Boxers. While the story was later retracted, it seeped
into the imagination, including potentially that of Conan Doyle.
While Conan Doyle does not explicitly show the horrors of
the Boxers in the story, he is nevertheless complicit in projecting the “otherness”
of China and negative images of the Chinese, notably through Mercer’s
remembrance of tortures. This sort of imagery would later be exploited by Sax
Rohmer for the Fu-Manchu novels, beginning with the short story ‘The Zayat Kiss’
in 1912 and The Mystery of Fu-Manchu in 1913. In the latter, Rohmer borrows
heavily from Conan Doyle’s depiction of the London opium dens in ‘The Man with
the Twisted Lip’ (1892). Conan Doyle had not been beyond his own stereotypical portrayal of the Chinese in his aborted play 'Angels of Darkness' (c 1886).
“The Pot of Caviare” also appeared towards the end of the
period of Orientalism which marked a mixture of horror and fascination with China
and the East into which the Boxer stories flooded. An example is the Wild West performances
of Buffalo Bill’s touring company who would don Chinese outfits to mimic the
Boxers.
The Play (1908, 1910)
Conan Doyle turned the short story into a one-act play in
1908, which was first performed on 13-14 November 1908 at the Jersey Opera
House, USA, dramatized by Mrs Arthur Mortimer. Between 19 April and 9 May 1910,
the play served as a curtain opener for The House of Temperley at the Adelphi
Theatre, London, before touring the provinces. Its short run was bad luck:
Edward VII died on 6 May, leading to a period of national mourning which closed
the theatres.
The play is a little different from the short story, being rather
more mawkish sentimental and including an implied love interest between Ainslie
and Jessie. These is also more tension between the Presbyterian and Catholic
missionaries. The most significant change is that Colonel Dressler of the
Hanoverian Infantry becomes Colonel Rameau, “a tall, alert, debonair Frenchman.”
This may reflect rising anti-German feeling, or simply a change of nationality
to suit the cast.
While well received, one negative review can be found in the
London and China Express (22 April 1910): ‘Never surely has anything
quite so tragic being seen on the stage as the wholesale slaughter here
depicted… The whole story is very obvious from the beginning. The play in fact,
in spite of a certain thrill produced by the knowledge of the impending
tragedy, is not a strong effort on the part of its author.’
Next time on Doings of Doyle
We reach out fiftieth episode (good heavens) and spend it in
the company of ‘The Surgeon of Gaster Fell,’ which first appeared in Chambers’
Journal in 1890, and which Conan Doyle sought to suppress in later
life…
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com), and our
supporters on Patreon and Paypal.
Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan
Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support
the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.
Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.
Mark and Paul,
ReplyDeleteI'd firstly like to say how much I enjoy your podcasts. Primarily a Holmes aficionado, The Doings of Doyle has happily led me to discover (and enjoy) many of the "other" writings. I always find the podcast entertaining and filled with enough scholarly interest to keep them informative. They are incredibly well produced as well and I appreciate the work that likely goes into creating them.
I listened to the recent program on The Pot Of Caviare with interest and there is an unusual connection that I anticipated would be mentioned during the broadcast. As it was not noted I thought that perhaps I would share that the plot of The Pot of Caviare marks significant relevance to a play written for the Grand Guignol entitled The Ultimate Torture, (La Derniere Torture). Interestingly, the play is also set in the waning days of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. The players, a myriad of characters from various backgrounds, are holed up in the French Consulate in Beijing. The action sees the consulate under siege by an army of the "Fists of Righteous Harmony," while the players discuss the various horrors that await them should the Boxers breach the fortifications. In typical Grand Guignol fashion, some of these horrors are played out for the audience. The story is filled with the requisite jingoism, ample yellow fever references, and sufficient colonial justifications. In the end, the primary character makes the decision to kill his daughter rather than have her face the horrors of capture only to then realize that the "sturm and drang" outside the fortification walls is in actuality a multi-national force suppressing the Boxers.
The story shares far too many points to be mere coincidence. Doyle's story was published in 1908 while the play, The Ultimate Torture was first performed on December 2nd 1904. The play is worth a read however it would appear that Doyle borrowed many of the themes...and perhaps too much of the plot to not raise an eyebrow. :)
Keep up the absolutely fantastic work!!
Hello Jared. Thanks so much for posting and for your kind words about the podcast. 'La Derniere Torture' - what a fantastic find! Perhaps it's unlikely that ACD would have seen the play in person, but one can imagine him pouring over the reviews and storing the idea for later. One wonders how much of this material is in the zeitgeist. ACD was certainly a great synthesiser and populariser of other trends. But the details of Andre de Lorde's play are surely so exact that it can't be a coincidence.
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