Conan Doyle's Magic Door and the amazing Kipling coincidence

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling have appeared in many posts on here, both separately and together.

These posts attract large numbers of readers. The article about Conan Doyle, Kipling and the Isle of Wight has, rather surprisingly, recently reached the top ten in terms of the number of viewings.

Another article lists some more common elements in the lives of these two great writers. That article was created some years ago; I have since learned of something else that Conan Doyle and Kipling had in common.

The first article inspired by Conan Doyle's Through the Magic Door, which I discovered only recently, introduces the book and lists a few minor topics and references that appear in both his book and my articles. 

This article features a fascinating story that Conan Doyle has to tell about a reputation-saving 'coincidence'. This incident in his life is of interest not only for its own sake but also because Rudyard Kipling had a very similar experience.

More about the Magic Door
While Through the Magic Door contains some relevant and quotable material, Conan Doyle is verbose – he says himself that he indulges in didactic talk and long digressions - his language is rather old-fashioned and much of his commentary doesn't hold my attention.

I said this about Joyce Collin-Smith's book Call No Man Master:

“...her work has a...duality: it is both very interesting and very boring. Some of the content fascinates me and resonates very strongly while some of it means very little so I skip over it.“

I feel much the same about Through the Magic Door!

While I am not for example particularly interested in the lives and works of many of the 18th and 19th century writers Conan Doyle thinks very highly of, some of the other material definitely gets my attention.

For me, one of the most riveting parts of the book is where Conan Doyle tells of his narrow escape from being accused of plagiarism. This story is all the more interesting because it closely matches a story told by Rudyard Kipling.

Conan Doyle's Magic Door: great minds think alike!

This article might never have existed if I hadn't decided at the last minute to 'pull' the article about books, reading and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in favour of one about Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood & Co. books, which was next in the queue and all ready to go.

The Conan Doyle article was originally scheduled to be published on April 7th, but I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable because two of the quotations in it had no source. They are widely attributed to Conan Doyle, but without any indication of where they originally came from.

I had a strong feeling that I should dig deeper to find the origin of these quotations: it just didn't seem right to release the article before I had done all that I could to find the sources.

I guessed that they might have come from Conan Doyle's letters, but eventually found them in Through the Magic Door (1907), a collection of essays about books, writers and reading. 

I thought that this title was a good coincidence: the Magic Door leads to a world of books, and I had said in the Conan Doyle books and reading article that my first books had magical titles and opened a door to new worlds.

I took a very quick look at Through the Magic Door; I saw immediately that it contained enough coincidences, references to familiar topics and other relevant material to inspire at least one article. Some of the content would have been suitable for the books and reading article, but I decided to publish this in its original form after just adding the quotations' source and to forget the Magic Door until I had finished some work in progress.

Ever since I read that dropping existing activities when something new and exciting comes along is a sign of emotional immaturity, I have been trying not to do this!

I wanted to give Through the Magic Door my undivided attention, which meant first getting some outstanding work out of the way. I returned to the book after completing a few half-finished articles; this post is the result of giving it a much closer look.

Something about Through the Magic Door
The Magic Door is a portal to another world, one that is entered by reading. Conan Doyle gives a tour of his library to an imaginary visitor; he introduces his favourite books and authors and gives his views on many of them. Some of his comments and references stand out because they are similar to material in various articles on here, including the Conan Doyle books and reading one.  

This is quite a coincidence considering that not only had I not read Through the Magic Door until after I had posted the material that we have in common, I had never even heard of it!

A last look at Rachel Ferguson and The Brontës Went to Woolworths

The series of articles inspired by Rachel Ferguson's novel The Brontës Went to Woolworths ends as it began by covering some miscellaneous material of interest. 

The remaining content to be featured includes some insightful and philosophical comments from Deidre Carne, the main narrator of the story, and the article ends with something about Rachel Ferguson herself.

Coincidences and creating reality
The possibility that a writer's imagination can create reality is a topic of great interest that is featured in several other articles. 

Deidre Carne is a journalist and would-be novelist. She has written a book that took on a life of its own:

“I had smugly intended my book to be about a family rather like ours, but...it’s already turned into an account of a barmaid’s career in an Edgware Road pub, and I can’t squeeze us in anywhere!

Odd things happen, too. I had called my pub, ‘The Three Feathers,’ and counted on there being heaps of pubs in Edgware Road, not called that, but looking a bit like my description. Before we left home, I went down Edgware Road to investigate, and found my pub, even down to the old-fashioned phonograph on the table in the upstairs sitting-room. And I thought, ‘I built that place.’”

Such 'coincidences' are very common in the lives of fiction writers. Diana Wynne Jones is just one example of someone whose imaginings came true.

Deirdre is aware of the possibility that unseen influences may be at work:

“But we’ve guessed right so often that it may be justifiable. On more than one occasion we’ve sent Toddy overnight to some public function, and found in the morning papers that he was actually there, or at something amazingly similar.”

She asks herself:

“I wonder how much one does create by brooding over it?”

Create - or just describe something that is sensed? Create - or just predict after glimpsing the future? Obtaining information via metaphysical means is relevant to the prescriptive versus descriptive issue.

More 'coincidences': how the Farjeons found some books

I have on several occasions experienced something that I think of as positive paranoia: this is when people believe that the universe favours them and looks after their interests, often by ensuring that they are in the right place at the right time and giving them things that they need. 

The universe has often helped me to get a lot of good-quality reading material and to find specific books that I wanted for producing articles for this blog. Useful books that I didn't even know existed have also been put in a good position to attract my attention.

As a child I always lived close to a good public library, and one librarian told me that I could go down to the stockroom and take whatever I liked; then there was the occasion when I felt a sudden inner prompting to visit a small town in Kent, where I found a fantasy book by Sheri S. Tepper that I had long been searching for without success; there were also the books that had been put in the right place and at just the right height to ensure that I would see them as I walked past, including one by L. M. Boston.

Finding the right books 'by chance' and people who were helpful without even being asked are experiences of particular interest and significance to me. I found some examples of other people who were favoured by fate in this way in A Nursery in the Nineties (1935), an autobiographical work by the writer, poet and playwright Eleanor Farjeon.

Benjamin Farjeon and the helpful bookseller
Eleanor Farjeon tells us about something that happened to her father, Benjamin Farjeon, when he was a boy of 14 and working in the printing trade:

“On his way to the office, Ben had to pass a second-hand bookshop. Books were his passion, and he possessed none. In the shop-window one stood open, with two pages of reading exposed. One day Ben rose a few minutes earlier, so that he might read the pages, without being late at work, and, entranced, entered the world of Fouqué's Undine. The following day, he found the leaf had been turned; the next two pages were exposed, and he devoured them. The third day the same thing happened. While he was glued to the window, the old man who kept the shop came to the door. 

“You're fond of books, my boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

"Come inside whenever you like, and read what you please from the shelves."

Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre: some 'coincidences' revisited

The 'coincidence' of Charlotte Brontë's childhood obsession with Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and the subsequent appearance in her life of Arthur Bell Nichols was first mentioned in an article about being careful what you dwell on and again in an article featuring Jean Rhys.  

Another 'coincidence' in Charlotte Brontë's life that is worth highlighting and was also mentioned earlier is her accident involving a horse that echoes something that happened in Jane Eyre, which was published seven years before the event. 

Other people have noticed these connections. While they may assume that they are just interesting, but not particularly significant, coincidences, I thought at the time that certain unseen influences were at work, and I still think so.

Many years have passed since I first mentioned these two 'coincidences'. Since then, I have come across other examples of such coincidences and accidents. 

Something I recently read in Carole Angier's biography of Jean Rhys inspired me to take another look at the two incidents involving horses in the light of some of the later discoveries and produce an updated and enhanced version of events and my ideas about them.

Jane Eyre and the horse incident
The incident involving Jane Eyre and a horse occurs when she first encounters Mr Rochester. 

On the way to post a letter on a freezing winter's day, she sits on a stile for a while. She hears the sound of approaching hooves, then Mr Rochester comes into view on his black horse. Just as they are passing her, the horse slips on the ice and comes crashing down. Mr Rochester is hurt, so he asks Jane to catch the horse for him. This is not an easy task:

“I...went up to the tall steed; I endeavoured to catch the bridle, but it was a spirited thing, and would not let me come near its head; I made effort on effort, though in vain: meantime, I was mortally afraid of its trampling fore-feet.”

From Jane Eyre

Diana Wynne Jones and two more coincidences

A previous article gives details of two occasions when something that Diana Wynne Jones had just written about manifested in her life. 

Diana Wynne Jones’s book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing contains two more examples of this phenomenon.

The first ‘coincidence’ happened at a time when she was working on her book Fire and Hemlock, for which the plot was, she thought, her own invention. An acquaintance railroaded her into a visiting a place where people started discussing a local legend - which strongly resembled her plot.

The second incident happened while she was working on Archer’s Goon. One of the characters discovers a newborn baby in the snow. The same acquaintance went out for a walk and found an abandoned baby!

The two incidents in Diana Wynne Jones’s own words:

The Fire and Hemlock incident 
“Sometimes, however, the book comes true while I am actually writing it, and this can be quite upsetting. 

Fire and Hemlock was one of those. One of the many things that happened while I was writing it was that an eccentric bachelor friend from Sussex University, who stayed with us while he was lecturing in Bristol, insisted on my driving him to some stone circles in our neighborhood. There, he began having mystic experiences, while I kept getting hung up astride the electric fences that crisscrossed the site. My outcries, he said, were disturbing the vibes, so he sent me to the local pub to wait for him. 

As soon as I got there, the landlady and the other customers began talking about these same stone circles and related the local story about their origins. This story is called “The Wicked Wedding”: the bride, who is an evil woman, chooses a young man to marry, but at the wedding, the devil comes, kills the young bridegroom, and marries the lady himself. 

This is the story behind Fire and Hemlock and, believe it or not, I had never heard it before - I thought I'd made it up. Well, after various other strange experiences, my eccentric friend went back to Sussex and I finished the book.”

Paris inferno synchronicity

As can be seen from the posting dates, since March 21st I have been producing articles about August Strindberg, his bizarre autobiographical novel Inferno and his life in Paris.

I first heard about the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral from an online news headline on Monday:

Notre Dame fire: Paris cathedral destroyed by inferno | Daily Mail Online

This is far from being the first time that something like this has happened to me, although it is almost the first time with this kind of public record.

It is alarming, but it is probably just a coincidence.

A tale of two foxes

I described some amazing coincidences and synchronous events in my life a while back in this article.

One incident involved a magazine with a picture of a fox cub; now I can add an anecdote involving two adult foxes.

I have only ever seen live foxes on two occasions, and in both cases unseen influences appear to have been at work.

The first encounter happened many years ago, shortly after I saw a beautiful fox in a TV advertisement - for whisky if I remember correctly - and realised that I had never seen a fox in real life, apart from a dead one by the side of the road which was probably left there by a motorist who had hit and killed it.

I used to take my washing to a launderette on a busy main road and go for local walkabouts while the wash was in progress. I favoured a circular route for which the timing was perfect. It took in a public garden and some interesting buildings and back streets.

Ayn Rand: chance events, lucky breaks and unseen influences

After reading through Barbara Branden’s biography The Passion of Ayn Rand yet again, I noticed that she had some lucky breaks in her life. Although she knew what she wanted and was very pro-active in preparing herself for and going about getting it, her life might have been very different and we might never have heard of her without some fortuitous incidents that helped her along her way and got her through some key stages in her life.

Reprieve from university expulsion

When Ayn Rand was studying at university in Russia, there was a plan to expel some socially undesirables. Ayn was on the list; she would not be permitted to attend any other college ever again; being without a degree would have been a death warrant for her future plans. Luckily, a delegation of foreign visitors heard about the proposed purge and they were very indignant about it. In an attempt to make a good impression on the prominent visitors, the expulsions were cancelled for some of the students, including Ayn. A reversal of this kind was a unique occurrence.

Getting a visa to enter the USA

Ayn Rand knew that she just had to go to America. It seemed like her only chance to make something of her life. She could never live under the oppressive Communist regime.

She had a difficult interview with an American consul; she needed to convince him that she planned to return to Russia after her trip to the US. (She actually intended to leave for ever.) She happened to notice a card on his desk. It said that she was going to marry an American. This gave her an idea: she said that it was a mistake and that she was going to marry a Russian man on her return. She was thinking of her still-beloved Leo. The consul realised that her details had been confused with someone else’s; he had been about to refuse her a visa, but her quick thinking made him revise his decision.

She was doubly lucky: she got out before the doors were closed and Russian citizens were prohibited from leaving their country.

Recent small synchronicities

I have a few more curious coincidences to report. 

Best one first:

I came across a hard-line sect called the Exclusive Brethren one day while doing some research for a client. I had heard of the very similar Plymouth Brethren but not these people. I spent some time reading up on them. 

I decided to take a break from work and have a look at a consumer forum that I am a member of. 

Someone had just started a new thread – about the Exclusive Brethren! 

I searched for other references to the EB on the site, but although the forum has more than 10 million signed-up members and huge numbers of posts and has been running since 2003 this was the very first time these Brethren had been mentioned. 

The synchronicity here is scary.

I arranged to meet someone at an outside event.

I had recently bought two boxes of very good quality flavoured teas, and as a present I took three bags of each for her to try. When we met, she pulled out a present for me: two boxes of the same brand of teas, although different flavours from the ones I had brought for her. This would not be worth mentioning, except that the - unusual - name of one of flavours was the same as that of a charity that I was researching for a client. 

As we were coming away, a young, Middle Eastern looking man coming into the park asked us where the main events were being held. His looks immediately reminded me of an unusual poet whose works this friend had recently introduced me to: Yahya Hassan, a controversial young Danish poet and politician of Palestinian descent. I had never heard of him before she told me that she was reading his poems. I had been thinking about him a lot, then someone who looked very like him, only even better looking, approached us! 

Two more small synchronicities

The tiny coincidences continue.

I was reading a thread on a consumer forum where people were discussing an episode of Dragons’ Den in which a would-be businessman was applying for funding for a parking scheme that he had devised to extort money from people. 

A poster said, “Not watched it but I can imagine it's a horse face looking ‘entrepreneur’ looking to milk that cow, the motorist. I hope he didn't get a penny.”

At that exact moment, an advertisement for an asset management company came on the radio, and I heard someone use the expression ‘carthorse to cash cow’.

I was watching a film on TV called The Eagle, a drama set in Roman Britain; I started reading forum posts when it got too gruesome for me. I heard someone say, “Get your thumbs up” (during a gladiatorial fight scene) just as I was reading the words ‘thumbs up’.

I can’t see anything significant in these expressions, but they are good examples of very minor synchronicities.

Two recent fires in Central London: areas with masonic connections

There have been two fires in Central London recently that are of great interest to people who study unseen influences: one was an underground electric cable fire in Kingsway, the other was in the lift motor room on the roof of a building in Great Portland Street. 

The second fire broke out this afternoon. Both fires caused black smoke to rise into the air over Central London.

Both areas have masonic connections: Freemasons’ Hall, the headquarters of the United Grand Lodge of England, is in Great Queen Street, just off Kingsway; Great Portland Street is close to Portland Place, where No. 33 has some interesting associations:

"The Holroyds were a very well connected family and often had influential guests to stay. For a period after 1835, for instance, Lord Charles Townsend, an immensely wealthy gentleman and Grand Master of the Freemasonic Lodges, inhabited the premises. Many residents have since chanced a glimpse of Lord Charles’ ghost drifting down the main staircase clad in Templar robes!"

Read more about No. 33 Portland Place here.

Small synchronicities

I have a few further coincidences to report. They are nothing like so spectacular as the ones in the article about the green men, but even small synchronicities seem worth recording.

Red Dwarf
I was sitting on a bus recently thinking about the many outside errands I had planned for the day, when I suddenly remembered that this was the day that all of the episodes from one of the later series of the TV science fiction programme Red Dwarf were being shown. 

I didn’t want to miss anything – I had seen this particular series only once before - so I decided to go straight home after visiting the first shop on my list and save the other tasks for another day. 

Just as I made this decision, someone in the seat behind me started whistling the Red Dwarf theme song:

“It's cold outside
There's no kind of atmosphere
I'm all alone, more or less
Let me fly far away from here…”

I didn’t like to turn round and see what sort of person might have picked up and reacted to what I was thinking about, so now I will never know who it was who read my mind!

Reading and thinking in synch with the TV
I wish that I had made notes of the numerous occasions many years ago when I was reading or thinking about something only to hear the same word or phrase synchronously being spoken on the TV.

It happened so often that I came to think of it as normal.

It is still happening.

For the first time in many years, I started to think about someone I used to work with. He once made a ‘T’ sign with his hands and told me that it was a way to ask for time in baseball. 

Just as I remembered this, someone on the TV made that same sign. 

I was just reading “Open your eyes” in a book when I heard this expression on the TV. 

I have started to record recent occurrences of this phenomenon. Any more really good ones will be reported on here.

Diana Wynne Jones: two alarming coincidences

I have written about some connections I made between certain scenes in Charlotte Brontë’s writings and events in her life. 

I doubt whether she ever realised that incidents she had created and dwelt on in her imagination had manifested in the real world. 

Diana Wynne Jones is another matter. She did notice a connection between what she was writing about and unexpected, unwelcome incidents in her life. This example comes from Diana Wynne Jones’s book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing:

“… And my books have developed an uncanny way of coming true. The most startling example of this was last year, when I was writing the end of A Tale of Time City. At the very moment when I was writing about all the buildings in Time City falling down, the roof of my study fell in, leaving most of it open to the sky.”

The second golden rule: be very careful what you dwell on

I have written about the possible link between Charlotte Brontë’s youthful obsession with Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and her eventual marriage to a dark man called Arthur. I also mentioned the possible connection I noticed between Mr Rochester’s fall from his horse in Jane Eyre and Charlotte’s fall the first time she ever got up on a horse.

An incident in the life of the Spanish Surrealist artist Remedios Varo, whose strange and wonderful pictures deserve to be more widely known, provides another example of such possible connections. I found it in Unexpected Journeys, The Art and Life of Remedios Varo by Janet A. Kaplan. 

It happened in Paris in 1938, when she was with a group of other members of the inner circle of Surrealists. They had been drinking, when one man, Esteban Francés, made a remark criticising her personal life. 

An artist called Oscar Dominguez rose to defend Varo’s honour. An ugly fight broke out; people tried to separate the two men but Dominguez managed to free one arm and hurl a glass at Francés. Unfortunately, it completely missed and hit someone else, an artist called Victor Brauner. It tore one of his eyes out.

The strange coincidence here is that Brauner had painted many one-eyed creatures earlier, including a self-portrait of himself with one eye missing in 1931.  Another picture, painted in 1932, shows a man with his eye being punctured by a shaft with the letter D attached to it. 

Did Brauner have a premonition that this loss would happen? 

Did he subconsciously will it to happen? 

Did he get caught in his own psychic trap?


Could this be yet another example of something manifesting in the life of a creative person just because he had been dwelling on it? 

A coincidence involving Levelers and Huguenots

A good example of a ‘coincidence’ happened to me this week. 

It all began when I saw a TV programme about the New Forest. I started to think about The Children of the New Forest, a children’s classic written by Captain Frederick Marryat in 1847; it was one of the first historical novels written for young people. 

Such books never gripped me the way that fantasy and science fiction did, but I learned a lot of history from reading them. I had not read, seen or even thought about this book since I was at school, but suddenly some fragments of dialogue popped up in my mind:

“Levelers, to horse!” and, “What’s a Leveler?” (Levelers or Levellers were radical supporters of the Parliamentarian cause at the time of the Civil War). I tried to remember what I had learned about them from this book at the time.

I had also decided recently to learn more about the Huguenots, persecuted French Protestants many of whom took refuge in England. 

I went out for the day to a town of great historic interest but decided to cut my losses and come back early as it was a bit of a disappointment. 

There were some people on the train on the way home whose conversation was very loud and very boring. 

Unseen influences: synchronicity, coincidences and timing

Many of the strange incidents described in other articles were very unpleasant and painful to experience. There is another side to the story: I experienced some interesting and amusing unusual incidents too, many of them during a phase in my life when I had started to wake up, defend myself and investigate the metaphysical world. 

This article contains a miscellaneous assortment of such incidents. I am not sure of their significance, although they do provide supporting evidence for the theory that our thoughts may influence reality. 

Some of these incidents gave me an opportunity to take a closer look at something that I had seen on TV or read about, reacted to and spontaneously wished that I could see more of; other things that I had just been thinking about and dwelling on without wishing that I could see them also manifested in my life. 

The milkman, the archbishop and the Liverpool Spinners
One fine summer’s day many years ago, I decided to go to the Harrods sale. I wanted to get there early to avoid the crowds, but needed to stay at home until my milk was delivered: it would turn sour very quickly if I left it standing outside my door in the heat. I did not expect to wait long, as the milkman always came very early on Saturdays in the summer. I did not know that my regular milkman was on holiday; the temporary man was late because he was not familiar with the route. 

Strange coincidences: three green men and some MacLeans

There was a phase in my life during which incredible coincidences and synchronicity were the norm. Most of these events were interesting, amusing and beneficial. I am glad now that I was able to enjoy them while they happened; I did not know that a very bad time was ahead of me. 

I remember one sequence of coincidences that is unusual by any standards. 

A new young colleague came to work in my group. His last name began with Green, and they put him next to someone whose – different - last name also began with Green. The third man in the small, partitioned off area had Verde in his last name. I was very interested in anagrams and the meaning of names at the time, and thought that it was quite a coincidence that three green men should be sitting close together. 

I told one colleague, who said that four was his threshold: he wanted another green man before he would believe that it was anything more than coincidence. There was someone else who might have been interested, but I did not tell him because he was frantically checking his notes for an imminent major software upgrade at the weekend. 

I decided to wait until after the system had gone live so as to get his full attention, but he suddenly looked up from his papers and - out of the blue, to no one in particular - said that he would be going to the video shop (this was before DVDs became the norm) to get The Third Man – a very good film. 

I think that it is a great film, but the coincidence is that the third man is Harry Lime, and the screenplay was taken from a story written by Graham Greene. I told the first colleague that his fourth and fifth men had appeared. 

This was just the start of it: there was much more to come.