(4) Why Poverty Exists: Conan Doyle And Stephen King

In this post, I'm continuing my search to understand poverty and why it exists in the modern world. I’m looking at a writer who presented to the world a fictional character whose name is as well known around the world as that of Jack the Ripper.

A character who appeared just one year before the Whitechapel murders. Sherlock Holmes first appeared in 1887 in A Study in Scarlet. With that story, Arthur Conan Doyle created one of literature’s best-known characters.

I can’t resist beginning by mentioning one quote by Conan Doyle that I think is worth keeping in mind when we try to understand one mystery around the Jack the Ripper murders. The mystery of how the killer has escaped detection.

In the short story, The Naval Treaty Holmes explains that:

“The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless.”

Is it possible that the Whitechapel murders were purposeless?

Is it possible that the killer didn’t have a vendetta against prostitutes?

In the case of the first four victims, were they murdered simply because they were easy targets?

They were homeless, and nights when they didn’t have fourpence for a doss house bed, they slept rough. Could they have been easy targets for a passerby? Were they just ‘purposeless’ mindless acts of extreme random violence? Just one result of the extreme poverty that existed in Victorian London.

Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, learned early in life the threat that poverty posed for many. His father was an alcoholic who ended up in an asylum. The family experienced periods of poverty while Arthur was a child.

At the beginning of A Study in Scarlet Doyle has Dr John Watson explain why he has ended up in London.

“London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.”

A Study in Scarlet and the stories that follow present a genteel image of Victorian London, with our heroes enjoying the comfort and status of their rooms in Baker Street, but the world of poverty occasionally peeks out from below that image.

Sherlock’s Street Arabs - ‘The Baker Street Irregulars’ - offers a whimsical portrayal of life for boys growing up in a world where the nearest thing to unconditional love is the camaraderie of the street gang.

One short story explores one view of poverty. By 1891, Arthur Conan Doyle had secured his place in Victorian society. Four years after creating Sherlock, Doyle was a long way from poverty.

The Man with the Twisted Lip, first first appeared in The Strand magazine in 1891 and later in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The short story follows Holmes as he tries to discover the whereabouts of Neville St Clair.

This wealthy chap, who had a wife and two children, regularly commuted to London from his home in Kent.

One day, his wife journeys separately into London. While walking down a ‘vile alley’ near the docks, she sees her husband looking out of a second-floor window.

The room behind the window was used by a crippled beggar with a twisted lip who was known to the police as Hugh Boone.

Neville St Clair's clothes and traces of blood were found in the room, and Holmes believes the beggar murdered him. However, Neville St Clair’s body cannot be found.

The mystery deepens when Mrs St Clair receives a letter in Neville’s handwriting, enclosing his wedding ring. The letter tells her not to worry.

The mystery is solved when Sherlock realizes he has been tricked. He goes to the police station and washes off the make-up Neville St Clair has been applying each morning after he arrives respectably suited in London.

St Clair explains that he could make a living by begging.

“All day, a stream of pennies, varied by silver, poured in upon me, and it was a very bad day in which I failed to take two pounds.”

Conan Doyle does not have Holmes or Watson question the fact that a beggar in Victorian London could make two pounds a day, which would have been a reasonable weekly wage for a skilled worker.

Stephen King, in his book of short stories Hearts in Atlantis, explores the idea that begging can be a lucrative occupation for the right man.

In Blind Willie, eight days before Christmas, in the middle of the Reagan years, somewhere in Connecticut, a man wakes as his radio alarm sings, “Do you hear what I hear?” He’s a typical commuter kissing his wife as she fixes his tie—blue, never red.

Stephen King gives enough information for us to know that he is one of many suited men heading into Grand Central Station carrying a briefcase—an empty briefcase apart from a ball of tinsel he’d asked his wife to get for him.

He enters his building, exchanging meaningless greetings, and makes for an office - “one of two he keeps in the building” - nothing much inside of value except a colour copier he bought the year before but has never used.

Then he fetches a stepladder, climbs it, and removes a ceiling tile.

Then, with all the inventions of a Mission Impossible film, Bill Shearman changes buildings and characters until he is re-born as “Blind Willie, a Fifth Avenue fixture since the days of Gerald Ford.”

He takes up his position with his sign fringed with tinsel announcing that he lost his sight while fighting in Vietnam and was “robbed of his benefits by a grateful government.”

By 10:45, he’s up “four or five hundred dollars in all, which puts him on the way to a three thousand-dollar day, not great for this time of the year, but not bad either.”

Three thousand dollars a day? Back in the days of President Ronald Reagan? I’m obviously in the wrong business.

Vietnam veteran Bill Shearman is a Stephen King character who is living proof of King’s adage that “The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.”

There are, of course, descriptions of acts of violence. Bill Sherman’s memories haunt him. In horror fiction, violence is inevitable, and violence plays its part in other genres, too.

Sometimes violence is at its most chilling when it is mindless violence.

Violence for financial gain can be understood even when it is condemned, but violence for its own sake is something else.

Again, that brings us back to Jack the Ripper. Were these murders committed because a woman desperate for her ‘doss money’ deliberately put her life at risk with a man she doesn’t know in an unfrequented byway? A man who then turns out to hate prostitutes?

Or could they have been just opportunistic, mindless, and motiveless acts of violence perpetrated on a woman sleeping rough because she had no money for a bed?

Then there is the idea of art mirroring nature or, occasionally, nature - human nature - mirroring art.

Do some novels, films, theatre and media reports breed their own real-life offspring?

And do the stories written by successful writers influence the way we view the world?

Does the idea of a beggar sustaining an affluent other life nudge us towards a slightly different attitude toward the poor? Are we less inclined to view poverty as a serious problem that needs solving?

Does that help breathe life into poverty and help sustain it?

Or are our views on troubling subjects like poverty, climate change and war, views that are deeply ingrained?

Are our views innate and unchanging, whatever evidence the world presents us with?