55. The Blood-Stone Tragedy (1884)

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

The story was inspired by a real-life incident. In mid-January 1884, Dr William Price, the self-professed Archdruid of Pontypridd, was charged with cremating his recently deceased son, an act which attracted an angry mob of locals from whom Price narrowly escaped a lynching. ACD spotted the opportunity for a tale, wrote it within two weeks and submitted it to Cassell’s Saturday Journal, who printed it without an author’s credit in their 16 February 1884 edition.*

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.

The lack of attribution in the original Cassell’s printing made it possible for others to pass off the work. On 14 June 1884, The Saturday Evening Post, Philadelphia, printed the story with credit given to M. W. Paxton. This is possibly Matthew White Paxton, publisher of the Rockbridge News in Lexington, Virginia.

*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)

William Price (1800-1893) was born in Glamorganshire in 1800, the son of a Church of England clergyman, and studied medicine at Barts, becoming a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. In the 1820s he returned to Wales, where he became interested in neo-Druidism and radical politics. In 1839, he supplied the Chartists with field artillery which they used in the Newport Uprising. Though Price did not take part, he was forced to flee to France, dressed as a washerwoman.

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

Price was charged on five counts, chief among them an act of illegal cremation, and appeared before the Assizes. The presiding magistrate was Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894), brother of Leslie Stephen, and therefore Virginia Woolf's uncle. Sir James was also the father of James Kenneth Stephen, a close friend of M. R. James. Sir James was the presiding judge at the trial of Florence Maybrick in 1889, where he made several controversial statements, and subsequently resigned from the bench. Being believed to be going mad, he was naturally enough given a Baronetcy.

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

The later Victorian era – obsessed with Darwinism, ideas of degeneration, and a crisis of faith – was fertile ground for stories about Paganism more broadly. For an interesting recent study, comparing Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’, and M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, see ‘Paganism in Late Victorian Literature (1891-1904): fear, fantasies, and mythmaking’ by Clémentine Guio (2021 thesis) https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-03575318v1/document.

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

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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/.