A TRULY LITERARY EVENING

I've been reading about a remarkable dinner party held in August 1889 - The editor of the American magazine, Lippincott's Monthly arranged the evening and besides himself there were three guests. The first was a young doctor who had made several sales to the popular and literary and popular magazines of the day, he went by the name of Arthur Conan Doyle. Secondly there was the Irish poet and Socialite, Oscar Wilde and the third guest was the Irish politician T.P Gill.

Imagine being a fly on the wall that night - what conversations would have wandered around their luxurious food and intoxicating drinks? Cigar, pipe and cigarette smoke would have made spectral shapes in the air perhaps even forming images of masterpieces to come from the two young writers.

The evening was certainly productive and not only for those in attendance but the world in general.

Stoddart secured agreements from both Wilde and Doyle that they would each write a novel for his magazine. At this stage Doyle had already written his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet which had been published to only minor success in Beaton's Christmas Annual. But Wilde on the other hand initially balked at the idea. He had written the odd short story but nothing of novel length.

The result was that Doyle gave us The Sign of Four and Wilde, who had lately been considering the fact that great beauty must age, delivered The Picture of Dorien Gray.

Doyle referred to the dinner party many times over the years - " Wilde's conversation left an indelible mark on my mind. He towered above us all and yet he had the art of seeming to be interested in all we had to say."

After the party Doyle went onto massive fame and fortune but Wilde went on a downward spiral that saw his work praised almost universally but his personal life fell apart. To be homosexual in that day and age was to be an outcast, a pariah from society.

Doyle and Wilde met only once more and Doyle wrote of this later meeting many years later, "He (Wilde) had an air of madness about him. I thought at the time, and still think that the monsterous development that ruined him was pathological. And that a hospice rather than a police court was the place for its consideration."

T.P.Gill on the other hand, never went onto write any stories but did enjoy a long and distinguished career in British politics.