Okay, so I wanted to find more information on Doyle’s friendship with Wilde, and I didn’t end up needing to look very far, because I’ve been listening to Stephen Fry’s Sherlock Holmes collection and he brings it up it in the foreword to The Sign of Four.
Doyle and Wilde met at a dinner hosted by an American businessman who wanted them both to write books for his magazine. Wilde immediately won Doyle’s heart by complimenting one of his historical novels, which was especially thrilling for Doyle as Wilde was already famous and he (Doyle) hadn’t expected Wilde to have even heard of him.
They did both end up agreeing to write for the magazine. Doyle wrote The Sign of Four and Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The most interesting part of this whole thing is that Doyle would later go on to gush about Wilde in a memoir written after Wilde’s trial for gross indecency, and in this memoir describes Dorian Gray as “a book that is surely upon a high moral plane.” Which was an incredibly bold stance, given that Dorian Gray was famously cited as evidence against Wilde in his trial.
Fry speculates that some of Holmes’ eccentricities in later books, such as his “murmured elegance of phrasing, dressing gown-lounging bohemian habits, and range of intellectual and artistic reference” may have been inspired by Wilde. He also notes that Langham Hotel, which is was the venue where Wilde and Doyle first met, is name checked in The Sign of Four.
In conclusion, we do NOT ask Holmes and Watson why they left London in 1895.
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