Micah Clarke is a historical adventure novel by British author Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1889 and set during the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 in England.
The book is a bildungsroman whose protagonist, Micah Clarke, begins as a boy seeking adventure in a rather romantic and naive way, falls under the influence of an older and vastly experienced, world-weary soldier of fortune, and becomes a grown up after numerous experiences, some of them very harrowing.
Micah also witnesses the bloodletting and indiscriminate hangings in the aftermath, is prosecuted along with many others in the Bloody Assizes of the notorious Judge Jeffreys, is condemned to be sold to slavery in Barbados and is at the last moment saved from the very hold of the slave ship.
In 1889, shortly after the publication of Micah Clarke, Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde were both invited for a dinner party in London with Joseph Marshall Stoddart of the American Lippincott's Monthly Magazine.
Jeffreys, the notorious bully of the law courts of his day, was shown as a handsome, brilliant man with a flaw in his character – a fallen angel type, such as figured in some of Wilde's writing.
His expression was lofty and noble, but his temper was so easily aflame that the slightest cross or annoyance would set him raving like a madman, with blazing eyes and foaming mouth.
He was, I believe, a man who had great powers either for good or for evil, but by pandering to the darker side of his nature and neglecting the other, he brought himself to be as near a fiend as it is possible for a man to be.Claire Deftstone remarked that "Whether or not Doyle's characterization fits with the kind of the person that the historical Judge Jeffreys really was, it is not completely implausible that it had some influence or bearing on how Wilde shaped the main character of 'Dorian Grey'".