Dowson Letters

323 Medical Casebook of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle [1984] , who argue convincingly that Doyle was successful as a physician and as a medical thinker; that Doyle gave up medicine only in order to find time to write.) Literary source hunting stands or falls on documentary evidence. There can be no question that Harrison has found a remarkable number of names, or their variants, that appear in both the newspaper reports of criminal cases, especially the Galley case, and in the Sherlock Holmes stories. It is possible, even probable, that Doyle did read newspaper accounts of these cases because the papers were full of these crimes and trials. However, despite ingenious arguments about blue-stones, puns, variants and mutations of names, Harrison can offer no actual documented proof that Poyle did read the newspapers cited as source material. His discovery of similar names provides the grounds for interesting speculation , but is hardly conclusive enough to justify such a long book. Harrison attenuates his study with a tedious retelling of the Galley case that takes up three chapters. And he relies too much on the free association of names and word play. Of course, such syntheses do occur in a writer's creative imagination, but exactly what form they take is impossible to prove without using letters, diaries and journals. Harrison was wise to title his book "A Study in Surmise," for that is exactly what his study is. Edward S. Lauterbach Purdue University 10. DOWSON LETTERS New Letters from Ernest Dowson. Edited with a Preface by Desmond Flower. Andoversford, Gloucestershire: Whittington Press, 1984. Dowson has been more than adequately served by scholars. Desmond Flower furnished an excellent edition of the poems in 1934, which includes quite a volume of unpublished items that from their personal nature Dowson had not seen fit to include in Verses (1896) and Decorations (1899); some of them are of distinct merit. This edition also collected those portions of W. H. Ireland's translation of Voltaire's L_a Pucel Ie contributed by Dowson and which were regrettably omitted in the reprint of the poems. Flower also provided brief but informative notice of the dedicatees (dedication was a habit Dowson shared with Lionel Johnson and John Gray) and a list of manuscript variants. Some years later a biography that was relatively full and balanced appeared from Mark Longaker; the collected short 324 stories were published and Adrian Rome, a novel by Dowson and his friend Arthur Moore, has recently been issued by the Garland Press. The image of the poet, an elusive personality , was further clarified by the excellent edition of his letters edited by Flower and Henry Maas in time for the centenary of Dowson's birth in 1967. In addition, the poet's work has attracted admirable critical response by John R. Reed, Jan B. Gordon, Chris Snodgrass and others. Recently Flower was informed by the Cambridge University Press that a further packet of letters from Dowson were extant among the papers of Charles Sayle (1864-1924), that "great introducer," who was an assistant at the University of Cambridge library from 1893 until his death. Also in that same library are Sayle's journals which have passing references to 1890s figures. Altogether there are twenty new letters ranging in date from 1887 to 1892, most of them brief. Nonetheless they add something to the sum of our knowledge about the poet. The earlier letters, for example, make it clear that when Dowson went down from Oxford without taking his degree he made some attempt to study the law. Later letters document his attraction to Latin Catholicism, in which Sayle, though himself a high Anglo-Catholic, played some role. As Flower observes, it seems a little odd that Dowson should have turned to Sayle (rather than to Lionel Johnson or John Gray) in his spiritual distress, but he was under the impression that Sayle was himself a Latin Catholic and in any case his friend was "a gentle and understanding man who knew how to deal with those in distress." Certainly the letters given here are "among the most deeply-felt of all his correspondence." Dowson seems to have wished that his decision to convert and his...