(circa 1905), one possible model for Moriarty "
Moriarty" is an ancient
Irish name as is
Moran, the surname of Moriarty's henchman,
Sebastian Moran. Doyle himself was of Irish Catholic descent, educated at
Stonyhurst College, although he abandoned his family's religious tradition, neither marrying nor raising his children in the Catholic faith, nor cleaving to any politics that his ethnic background might presuppose. Doyle is known to have used his experiences at Stonyhurst as inspiration for details of the Holmes series; among his contemporaries at the school were two boys surnamed Moriarty. ln addition to the master criminal
Adam Worth, there has been speculation among
astronomers and Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts that Doyle based his fictional character Moriarty on the Canadian-American astronomer
Simon Newcomb. Newcomb was revered as a multitalented genius, with a special mastery of mathematics, and he had become internationally famous in the years before Doyle began writing his stories. More to the point, Newcomb had earned a reputation for spite and malice, apparently seeking to destroy the careers and reputations of rival scientists. (circa 1860), another possible model for Moriarty Moriarty may have been inspired in part by two real-world mathematicians. If the characterisations of Moriarty's academic papers are reversed, they describe real mathematical events.
Carl Friedrich Gauss wrote a famous paper on the dynamics of an asteroid in his early 20s, and was appointed to a chair partly on the strength of this result.
Srinivasa Ramanujan wrote about generalisations of the binomial theorem, and earned a reputation as a genius by writing articles that confounded the best extant mathematicians. Gauss's story was well known in Doyle's time, and Ramanujan's story unfolded at Cambridge from early 1913 to mid 1914;
The Valley of Fear, which contains the comment about maths so abstruse that no one could criticise it, was published in September 1914. Irish mathematician
Des MacHale has suggested
George Boole may have been a model for Moriarty. Jane Stanford, in
That Irishman, suggests that Doyle borrowed some of the traits and background of the
Fenian John O'Connor Power for his portrayal of Moriarty. In
Moriarty Unmasked: Conan Doyle and an Anglo-Irish Quarrel, 2017, Stanford explores Doyle's relationship with the Irish literary and political community in London. She suggests that Moriarty, Ireland's Napoleon, represents the Fenian threat at the heart of the British Empire. O'Connor Power studied at St Jarlath's Diocesan College in Tuam, County Galway. In his third and last year he was Professor of Humanities. As an ex-professor, the Fenian leader successfully made a bid for a Westminster seat in County Mayo. It is averred that surviving
Jesuit priests at the
preparatory school Hodder Place,
Stonyhurst, instantly recognised the physical description of Moriarty as that of the Rev. Thomas Kay, SJ, Prefect of Discipline, under whose authority Doyle fell as a wayward pupil. According to this hypothesis, Doyle as a private joke has Inspector MacDonald describe Moriarty: "He'd have made a grand meenister with his thin face and grey hair and his solemn-like way of talking." The model which Doyle himself cited (through Sherlock Holmes) in
The Valley of Fear is the London arch-criminal of the 18th century,
Jonathan Wild. He mentions this when seeking to compare Moriarty to a real-world character that Inspector Alec MacDonald might know, but it is in vain as MacDonald is not so well read as Holmes. ==Legacy==