Dr William Price |
Hello and welcome to episode 55. This time, we look at a story that was for a long time not included in the works of Conan Doyle - 1884’s ‘The Blood-Stone Tragedy: A Druidical Story.’
Read the story here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Blood-Stone_Tragedy:_A_Druidical_Story
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Synopsis
Whilst travelling in the English Midlands, the narrator
hears a strange tale from a fellow traveller whose wife, in their pre-marital
days, underwent a terrifying experience during a family holiday in North Wales.
Frustrated by the domestic restrictions imposed upon her while the men of the
party enjoy climbing expeditions, the intrepid Miss Madison decides to indulge
in some local exploration on her own. She eventually becomes lost amongst the
mountains and the valleys and is close to despair when she discovers a primitive
hut and its odd inhabitant, a wild and bearded figure dressed in a white robe.
But her relief at finding a potential guide soon turns to unease as her new
acquaintance begins to talk of strange gods and human sacrifice…
Writing and publication history
The November 1885 letter |
That the story was written by ACD was not known until the
mid-1980s, when a batch of papers from the Cassell archives were put up for auction.
Michael Halewood, a bookseller in Preston, Lancashire, purchased two letters
from ACD to Cassell’s. One of them, dated November 1885, was a request to reprint
‘The Blood-Stone’ in a planned (and later aborted) anthology.
In the mid-1990s, Halewood contacted the Arthur Conan Doyle
Society, the forerunner of today’s ACD Society, with the suggestion that they
publish this lost work. They did so in 1995, with an introduction by
Christopher and Barbara Roden and an extensive afterword by Owen Dudley
Edwards.
*Update October 2024: We have since found a letter from Conan Doyle to his mother, dated February 1884, in which he explains that Cassell's write to ACD asking him to write a story based on Dr Price. He turned it around in three days.
Dr William Price
Portrait of Price by A. C. Hemming (1918) |
While in Paris, he translated a Greek tablet in the Louvre
which he believed prophesied his part in the restoration of Druidism and Welsh
independence. Returning to Wales, he settled in Llantrisant, set himself up as
Archdruid and became something of a local eccentric. His peculiar druidic garb
was noted in the London journals on many of his trips.
In 1883, he fathered a son by his servant, Gwen, which he
named Jesus Christ. The child did not survive five months. In January 1884, he was
in the act of cremating the body on a hill-top near Llantrisant, when the flames
attracted the locals who at first believed he was sacrificing the child. A post-mortem
proved the baby was already dead.
Sir James Fitzjames Stephen |
At his trial, Price successfully argued that, while
cremation was not explicitly permitted, nor was it expressly illegal. He was cleared
of all charges and was freed to cremate his son. When he died in 1893, he was
cremated as per his own wishes. The Price trial became a test case and
ultimately led to the 1902 Cremation Act, by which cremation in Britain was officially
accepted.
Price’s story inspired Dylan Thomas, who wrote a short story,
‘The Burning Baby’, in 1935. It is an intensely disturbing story of incest, assault
and hypocrisy, and draws on the imagery of the fire on the hilltop. The atmospheric
opening line of the story reads: “They said that Rhys was burning his baby when
a gorse bush broke into fire on the summit of the hill.”
Ap-Griffiths, Druidism and Theosophy
Stonehenge c. 1740s from a work by William Stukeley |
The mad Druid, Ap- Griffiths, is an amalgam of lots of different influences. In addition to the story of William Price, ACD draws on what was then known about Druids generally plus there are elements of Theosophy.
The best recent study of Druidism is Ron Hutton’s Blood
and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (Yale,
2009). Druids existed c. 2000 years ago, across North West Europe. Julius
Caesar encountered Druids in Gaul. In 57 AD, the Romans, under Suetonius
Paulinus, suppressed the main Druid settlement on the Isle of Anglesey (known
then as Mona), North Wales.
Over the next 1,500 years, Roman and Christian life
supplanted Druidism. While Druidism was referenced in folk stories and literature,
it was not until the 17thC when Druids began to be restored in the public imagination.
John Aubrey, writing in the Restoration period, conducted a survey of monuments
and suggested that Stonehenge was built by the Druids, an idea furthered by
William Stukeley in the 1740s.
Around that time and across Europe, Druidism was being revisited
as part of the rise of nation states and emergence of nationalism as countries looked
to their mythic past. In Wales especially, Druids became part of the national
story. Welsh Antiquarian Edward Williams, known as Iolo Morganwg, collected
Welsh texts and republished them, making his own extensive amendments, in the
early 19thC. Williams and his successors established the Gorsedd, the Druidic
ceremony which opens the Eisteddfod festival to this day.
Ap-Griffiths (which should be Ap-Griffith - singular) is a
fusion of Price and received wisdom about Druidism, plus references to “Avatars”
suggests the inclusion of Theosophical ideas. The story was written in 1884, a
few weeks after ACD joined the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, where
he came under the influence of retired major Alfred Drayson, who was greatly
interested in Theosophy and psychical research.
Druids and Pagans as villains
Arthur Machen |
Arthur Machen was especially interested in the pre-Christian
world and how that impacts the modern. He mixes Paganism with science and pseudo-science
in stories like The Great God Pan (1894). Robert E. Howard, creator of
Conan the Barbarian, was interested in earlier times too in his work on the pre-Ice
Age Hyborian Age and stories about Bran Mak Morn and the Picts.
Druids would go on to become pulp villains. H. P. Lovecraft,
in ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (1924) alludes to the Druidical roots of some
ancient terrors. His protégé Robert Bloch also wrote several Druidical tales
for the pulps, including notably ‘Power of the Druid’ in Strange Stories,
June 1940, in which Emperor Nero is pitted against the Druids.
Similarities to other Conan Doyle works
The opening with the household at play is reminiscence of
1882’s ‘The Winning Shot.’ In that story, ACD experimented with a female narrator,
and he may have thought twice about trying again, hence the nested narratives
of this story which have the Ms Madison a largely agency-less character.
The story bears some similarities to ‘The Surgeon of Gaster
Fell’ (1894), notably the headstrong young woman, the journey into the
dangerous hills, and the madman on the loose. The scenery in ‘The Blood-Stone’
is rather less reminiscent of Wales than of Masongill, the setting for ‘Gaster
Fell’.
Next time
‘John Barrington Cowles’ (1884) – published two months after
‘The Blood-Stone Tragedy’ in Cassell’s and far better! – is our story
next month. You can read it here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/John_Barrington_Cowles
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Michael Halewood of Halewood and Sons
of Preston for his help on this episode: https://www.pbfa.org/members/halewood-sons;
https://www.abebooks.co.uk/halewood-sons-aba-ilab-1867-preston/277945/sf
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/.
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