The Picture of Dorian Gray August 1889, Stoddart dined with Oscar Wilde, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and T. P. Gill at the Langham Hotel, and commissioned novellas from each writer. Conan Doyle promptly submitted "The Sign of the Four" (1890) to Stoddart, but Wilde was more dilatory; Conan Doyle's second Sherlock Holmes novel was published in the February 1890 edition of "Lippincott's Monthly Magazine", yet Stoddart did not receive Wilde's manuscript for "The Picture of Dorian Gray" until 7 April 1890, nine months after having commissioned the novel from him. The literary merits of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" impressed Stoddart, but, as an editor,
The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein that while he argues that Mary Shelley was not well educated enough to have written "Frankenstein", his argument fails because "it is not a good, let alone a great novel and hardly merits the attention it has been given." Lauritsen replied that "Frankenstein" "is a radical and disturbing work, containing some of the most beautiful prose in the English language ... a profound and moving masterpiece, fully worthy of its author, Percy Bysshe Shelley." "The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein" received positive reviews from Jim Herrick in "Gay Humanist Quarterly", Hubert Kennedy in "The Guide", and Douglas Sadownick in "The Gay