sketchbook - the illustrious client part 3

“He gave no explanations and I asked for none. By long experience I had learned the wisdom of obedience.”

meanwhile, with Holmes and the estimable Miss Winter...

"I knelt by the injured man and turned that awful face to the light of the lamp. The vitriol was eating into it everywhere and dripping from the ears and the chin. One eye was already white and glazed. The other was red and inflamed. The features which I had admired a few minutes before were now like some beautiful painting over which the artist has passed a wet and foul sponge. They were blurred, discoloured, inhuman, terrible. ... I could have wept over the ruin had I not remembered very clearly the vile life which had led up to so hideous a change."

As the story goes, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle had dinner together once in 1889. Doyle left with new inspiration for his detective character, and wrote the second Holmes story, the Sign of the Four (in which we see a much more languid, witty, cocaine-using Holmes...Wilde's influence?). Wilde left with inspiration to write The Picture of Dorian Gray, a story which uses very similar language to the above passage to tie together ideas of beauty and sin with horror and portraiture. I like to think that this passage in the Illustrious Client was Doyle paying homage to his old (and long-dead at time of publication) friend.