This post gives away the solution to one Sherlock Holmes story.
Neville St Clair lives in a large villa at Lee, in Kent, with a wife and two children, and takes the train into the City every morning. One afternoon his wife, on an errand in a rough street near the river, looks up and sees him at an upper window of an opium den, apparently in distress. By the time the police force their way upstairs he has vanished. The only occupant of the room is a disfigured beggar called Hugh Boone, well known on the pavements of Threadneedle Street, and St Clair's coat is found in the river at low tide, its pockets weighted with pennies. Sherlock Holmes sits up all night on a heap of cushions over the problem, and in the morning he goes to the police cells at Bow Street with a wet sponge and washes the beggar's face.
Underneath it is the gentleman from Kent. Years earlier, as a young journalist, St Clair had begged in disguise for an article, discovered that begging paid better than writing, and kept doing it. His wife never knew where the villa came from.
"The Man with the Twisted Lip" appeared in 1891, and it belongs to a very large family. The double life is the Victorian century's central literary figure, the one its best writers reached for when they were trying to describe what kind of life the century was producing. It is not in every Victorian novel. Where it does appear, it is usually doing the most important structural work in the book.
The family is easy to assemble:
Dorian Gray keeps his portrait locked in the old schoolroom at the top of the house.
Henry Jekyll lets another man out at night.
Lady Audley, the governess who marries a baronet, has exactly the kind of past the title promises.
Augustus Melmotte, in The Way We Live Now, is a financier whose fortune is credit and whose past is a rumour.
Jack Worthing, in The Importance of Being Earnest, explains the arrangement with perfect economy: he is "Ernest in town and Jack in the country".
Wilde's comedy runs on the same machinery as his novel, with the difference that nobody in the play gets hurt.
The figure recurs because the Victorian century was the first in which a double life was a practical possibility for large numbers of ordinary people, and the conditions for it were specific. London grew large enough that strangers were the rule rather than the exception. The railways could carry a man between two lives in an hour, which is how St Clair gets from Lee to his pitch in the City, and how Jack Worthing, who was found as a baby in a handbag at Victoria Station, keeps a house in the country and a name in town. The post connected places without introducing them to one another. The middle class was mobile enough to hold several positions at once and bound by conventions strict enough to make those positions incompatible. Respectability made public conformity the price of admission, and the private means to make the conformity partial were close to hand: the rented room, the assumed name, the letter collected from a shop rather than delivered to the house.
What the Victorian writers understood, and what anyone using the figure now has to understand, is where the interest lies. A double life on its own is only a premise, and the interest lies in its upkeep. Wilde's subject is what the portrait does to its owner across nearly twenty years, and the book is long because the damage takes time to accumulate. Dorian cannot leave London for long without fearing that someone has found the key, and he comes back early from the country to climb the stairs and look. Stevenson follows Jekyll's arrangement from convenience to dependence, until the morning he wakes in his own bed, looks at the hand lying on the sheet and sees that it is Hyde's. Braddon's heroine is driven, one step at a time, from concealment to violence and arson, all in defence of the life she has made. In each book the second life demands more of the first than anyone had agreed to, and the demands grow.
That is why the figure belongs to the novel more than to the short story. Doyle's story ends soon after the sponge, at the point where the novelists begin to be interested.
The conditions have since intensified.
The cities are larger and the transport faster, and the ideology of respectability has been replaced by the ideology of the personal brand, which performs the same conformity in a different idiom. What has changed is the private means. The rented room and the assumed name have given way to a searchable record in which almost nothing stays separate for long, so the pressure to keep two lives has risen at the same moment as the difficulty of keeping them apart.
Almost everyone now keeps some version of it: a professional self that does not match the private one, an account shown to one audience and a different one shown to another, opinions voiced in public and other opinions voiced among friends. What Wilde could only render as a Faustian bargain, strange and Gothic and faintly unhealthy, has become an ordinary condition of social life, and a reader does not need to imagine it. They need only look at their own phone.
This is why The Picture of Dorian Gray reads as more contemporary than it did a generation ago. A reader in 1990, the novel's centenary, had to imagine their way into Dorian's position, which was available to the imagination and not to recognition. A reader with a phone in their pocket recognises it at once. The locked schoolroom at the top of the house is the message history, the second account, the folder nobody has opened yet.
The difficulty for a writer using the figure now is that it has lost its strangeness, and Wilde, Stevenson and Braddon could rely on strangeness to do a great deal of the work. In 1862 or 1886 or 1890 the mere appearance of a second life was enough to hold a reader. A contemporary reader has met the figure too often, and has usually met it in the mirror, so the writer has to find the interest somewhere else. In my own retelling of Wilde the bargain is a contract Dorian had read and understood, which is the phrase printed above the box everyone ticks. The instrument is ordinary on purpose. Wilde could make the bargain Gothic because it was rare. A modern version has to make it banal, because nearly everyone reading has signed something like it.
Two objections follow, and both are worth answering. The first is that the double life is a tired subject, worked over thoroughly in the fiction of the past two decades. It has been worked over, but mostly at the level of apparatus: the technology, the platforms, the particular machinery by which a contemporary self is presented. The question Wilde was asking lies underneath the apparatus, and few recent novels have gone down that far.
The second objection is sharper. The Victorian double life, it runs, was a matter of concealing particular facts from a small circle: a previous marriage, a class background, a private life the law would punish. The contemporary presented self is a matter of managing an impression before a vast and largely indifferent audience. The objects differ, the stakes differ, and yoking the two together makes for a tidy essay and bad literary history.
The objection is partly right. St Clair hiding a begging bowl from his wife is a different thing from anyone's professional profile. The two share the gap between the self shown and the self lived, and the work of keeping that gap open over years. The technologies and the audiences have changed, but what the upkeep demands of a person seems to me recognisably the same. The Victorian writers were describing it, and a contemporary writer who treats their description as a period curiosity is throwing away a tool the tradition has handed on.
The Victorian books are often read as warnings, and read closely they withhold judgement far more often than they pass it. Wilde gives Dorian's worst acts as rumour and summary and his fear in close detail. Stevenson hands the last word of his book to Jekyll, whose own statement of the case closes it. Braddon gives Lady Audley a long hearing near the end of the book, and it is the most sympathetic passage in the novel.
The books record what the conditions of their century produced. The conditions made the bargain available, the bargain made the people, and in the best of these books the people are rendered with a care that has nothing to do with punishment. The contemporary version of the figure has the same claim on a reader. A reader who recognises the bargain in their own life is being asked to see what their circumstances are doing to them, and whatever they feel after that is their own affair.
Holmes, having washed the beggar's face, does not hand St Clair over to anyone. The police agree to let the matter drop on one condition, which is that Hugh Boone is never seen again, and St Clair goes home to Kent with one life instead of two. Doyle could close his story there because his man had a real face under the paint. The novels that took the figure seriously were written about people for whom the washing would not have been so simple, and who would not have been sure, by the end, which of their faces was the one underneath.