The man who introduced the immortal Sherlock Holmes to a waiting public.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of Charles Altamont Doyle, and Mary Foley Doyle. The Doyle’s were a prosperous Irish-Catholic family, who had a prominent position in the world of Art, but Charles was a chronic alcoholic so there was little money and even less harmony in the home because of his excessive drinking and erratic behavior. Mary however, was an avid reader and early instilled in her son a love of literature. Not only did she have a passion for books but was also a master storyteller. Years later her now famous son would write of his mother’s gift of “sinking her voice to a horror-stricken whisper” when she reached the culminating point of a story.
Arthur’s education was left to the generosity of wealthier family members and at the age of nine he was sent to a Jesuit boarding school, where he remained for seven years. Arthur abhorred the intolerance surrounding his studies and rebelled at corporal punishment, which was widespread and extremely brutal in most English schools of the day. It was during these difficult years at boarding school however, that Arthur realized he had inherited his mother’s talent for storytelling, and could often be found, surrounded by a crowd of totally enraptured younger students, listening to the amazing stories he would concoct for their amusement.
In 1876 Arthur graduated and returned home to find his father so seriously demented that he had to be placed in a Lunatic asylum. Greatly influenced by a young doctor, Bryan Charles Waller, who his mother had taken-in as a lodger, Arthur made up his mind to follow a medical career, and shortly thereafter found himself in residence at the University of Edinburgh. It was here that young Doyle met such future authors as Robert Louis Stevenson and James Barrie. Here too, Arthur came under the influence of Dr. Joseph Bell, a man possessed of observation, logic, deduction and diagnosis to the extent that years later Doyle would incorporate the same qualities into the persona of his fictional but widely celebrated detective, Sherlock Holmes.
It wasn’t until some two years after beginning his medical studies, that Arthur decided to try his hand at writing and subsequently The Mystery of Sasassa Valley, was published in an Edinburgh magazine called Chamber’s Journal. That same year, Conan Doyle’s second story The American Tale was published in London Society.
When Arthur Conan Doyle was twenty years old and in his third year of medical studies, he was offered the post of ship’s surgeon on the Hope, a whaling boat, about to leave for the Arctic Circle. Doyle greatly enjoyed the trip and the camaraderie on board the ship. The subsequent whale hunt fascinated him and many years later the adventure found its way into his first story about the sea, a chilling tale called Captain of the Pole-Star.
Conan Doyle returned to his studies in the autumn of 1880 and a year later, he obtained his “Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery degree. Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle’s first employment after his graduation was as a medical officer on the steamer Mayumba, navigating between Liverpool and the west coast of Africa. Unfortunately he found Africa as detestable as he had found the Arctic seductive, so he gave-up that position as soon as the boat landed back in England. This was followed by a short but quite dramatic stint with an unscrupulous doctor in Plymouth after which he left for Portsmouth, to open his first practice. These were difficult times but by the end of his third year of practice, it could be said that he was making a comfortable income. In 1885, Doyle met and married his first wife, Louisa Hawkins. The couple moved to Upper Wimpole Street and had two children, a daughter and a son.
In March 1886, Conan Doyle started writing the novel which was to catapult him to fame. It was two years in the making, but when A Study in Scarlet was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, it introduced to the world, the immortal Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Though immensely popular and profitably, Doyle did not consider it his best work and hoped that future works would get him recognized as a serious author. Sherlock Holmes however was soon world famous, with an addicted public now clamouring for more. Instead Doyle’s next novel was a very strange and confusing tale about the afterlife of three vengeful Buddhist monks called The Mystery of Cloomber. It showed a different side to its author who was obviously fascinated by, and inexorably drawn to the paranormal and Spiritualism.
Conan Doyle was now better known as a writer in the United States of America than in England and in August of 1889, Joseph Marshall Stoddart, who published the Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in Philadelphia, came to London to organize a British edition of his magazine and as a result Lippincott’s commissioned the young doctor to write a short novel, which would be published in England and the US in February of 1890. Conan Doyle agreed, although he had to put another of his novels on hold for a time. The Sign of Four however, established Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle once and for all in the annals of literature. By 1891, Conan Doyle was represented by A. P. Watt who soon made a deal with The Strand magazine to publish the Sherlock Holmes stories. The “image” of Holmes was created by Sidney Paget a very talented illustrator who took his strikingly handsome brother Walter as a model for the great detective. This collaboration lasted for many decades and was instrumental in making the author, the magazine and the artist, world famous.
In 1891 too, Conan Doyle made the decision to abandon his medical career for a literary one. Clearly he felt that he could not do both successfully. The following year Louisa gave birth to a son they named Kingsley, which the proud father called “the chief event” of their life. A year later however, in spite of pleas from everyone around him, the amazingly prolific but very impulsive Arthur Conan Doyle, decided to get rid of Sherlock Holmes. In The Final Problem, published in December 1893, Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty plunged to their deaths at The Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. As a result, twenty thousand readers cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand Magazine!
Around this time too, Conan Doyle became aware of just how sick his wife was. Louisa was diagnosed with Tuberculosis but although she was given only a few months to live, her husband’s belated ministrations kept her alive well into the twentieth Century. Writing incessantly, looking after Louisa, no longer a wife, but a patient, then, losing his father, deeply troubled Conan Doyle. It may well have been his resulting depression which caused him to become more and more fascinated by “life beyond the veil”. He had long been attracted to Spiritualism, but when he joined the Society for Psychical Research, it was considered to be a public declaration of his interest and belief in the occult.
When the Boer War broke out, Arthur decided to volunteer but not surprisingly, because of his age, and the fact that he was overweight, he was deemed unfit to enlist. Determined not to be stopped however, he volunteered as a medical doctor and sailed to Africa in February of 1900. There, instead of fighting bullets, Conan Doyle had to wage a fierce battle against microbes. During the few months he spent there, he saw more soldiers and medical staff die of typhoid fever, than of war wounds. Upon his return to Britain, he published The Great Boer War, a five hundred-page chronicle, and a masterpiece of military scholarship.
Restless and disappointed, Doyle now decided to try politics, making two attempts, but never managing to get elected. He returned to London and to his writing. The first chapter of The Hound of the Baskervilles published in The Strand Magazine in August of 1901, delighted his fans and to this day, the book is considered a classic in English literature.
A year later, King Edward VII knighted Conan Doyle for services rendered to the Crown during the Boer War. It was reported at the time that the King was such an avid Sherlock Holmes fan, that he had put the author’s name on his Honours List to encourage him to write new stories. Whether that was true or not, the monarch and hundreds of thousands of his subjects must have been very pleased when in 1903 The Strand Magazine started serializing The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
When Louisa died in his arms on the 4th of July 1906, Conan Doyle slipped into a debilitating state of depression which lasted many months. Eventually he recovered and started writing again, and on September 18, 1907, he remarried in front of 250 guests. His new bride was Jean Leckie with whom he’d carried on a clandestine courtship for several years. The couple had three children, Denis in 1909 and Adrian in 1910 – one last child, their daughter Jean, was born in 1912.
The First World War which broke out in 1914 was cruel on Conan Doyle. He lost his son Kingsley, his brother, his two brothers-in-law and his two nephews.
After such an amazingly full life, it is hard to imagine that such a man would retreat into an imaginary world of Science Fiction and Spiritualism but Conan Doyle was not a man to be satisfied by dreams and wishes; he needed to make them come true. He was compulsive and did this with the same dogged energy he had shown in all his endeavors when he was younger. As a result, the Press mocked him, the Clergy disapproved of him. But nothing deterred him.
After 1918, because of his deepening involvement into the occult, Conan Doyle wrote very little fiction, writing about Spiritualism instead.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died on Monday, July 7, 1930 surrounded by his family.
