the problem with 'sources'

Reading 'The Adventures of Conan Doyle' by Charles Higham recently, he describes a possible source for Professor Moriarty. One 'George Moriarty' appeared as a rather strangely behaved criminal in the pages of The Times:

It appeared that the person was of an unsound mind, and had been sent to prison from this court several times during the last 15 or 20 years with drunkenness and assaults. He had also been committed from there several times as a lunatic.

He then went on to brandish a knife, smash a window and try to throw himself through it, apparently unsuccessfully. It must be said that as a source for Holmes' arch-nemesis this chap seems unlikely. He's a drunken violent lout, hardly a criminal mastermind. There is by no means enough there to even warrant us supposing that the name stuck in Doyle's mind as some sort of byword for criminality. Even Higham's telling us that Doyle "always read The Times" is hardly cast iron proof.

Higham is so keen to place this as a source for Moriarty that a more obvious connection escapes him: Jefferson Hope's attempt, in STUD, to smash and jump through the glass window at 221b, whereupon Holmes and Lestrade spring upon him like so many staghounds.

*

The problem with this sort of 'source-hunting' is that it presents any similar-sounding incident or story as being necessarily the inspiration for a novelist's mind. If taken literally one can read all of these supposed 'sources' and come away thinking the novelist was just an empty-headed vessel, waiting for a likely sounding story to pinch and dress up. Higham alas falls into this trap at several points, telling us of news stories in Chambers Journal of 1886 about grooms, a clergyman, a Hercules-type strongman, gold-rimmed spectacles and a man with red hair, then writing:

It cannot be mere coincidence that, in 'A Scandal In Bohemia' Conan Doyle disguises Holmes as a humble groom and clergyman, that the King of Bohemia is described as resembling a "Hercules", that Conan Doyle later wrote a story entitled 'The Golden Pince-Nez', or that his next tale was 'The Red Headed League'.

Yes, Mr Higham, it actually can be mere coincidence! Besides which SCAN and REDH were penned five years later, and GOLD in 1904, meaning Doyle would have to have somehow been impressed enough by this story to carry around the ingredients of it for up to 18 years!

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