Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle
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Arthur Conan Doyle
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Doyle in 1914
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| Born | Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle 22 May 1859 Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Died | 7 July 1930 (aged 71) Crowborough, East Sussex, England |
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| Nationality | British |
| Education | University of Edinburgh |
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| Children | 5 |
| Signature |  |
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Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ DL (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer, who created the character Sherlock Holmes. Originally a physician, in 1887 he published A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and more than fifty short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction.
Doyle was a prolific writer; other than Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and historical novels. One of Doyle's early short stories, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement", helped to popularise the mystery of the Mary Celeste.
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Name[edit]
Doyle is often referred to as "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" or "Conan Doyle", implying that "Conan" is part of a compound surname rather than a middle name. His baptism entry in the register of St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, gives "Arthur Ignatius Conan" as his given names and "Doyle" as his surname. It also names Michael Conan as his godfather.[1] The cataloguers of the British Library and the Library of Congress treat "Doyle" alone as his surname.[2]
Steven Doyle, editor of The Baker Street Journal, wrote, "Conan was Arthur's middle name. Shortly after he graduated from high school he began using Conan as a sort of surname. But technically his last name is simply 'Doyle'."[3] When knighted, he was gazetted as Doyle, not under the compound Conan Doyle.[4]
Early life[edit]
Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland.[5][6] His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was born in England, of Irish Catholic descent, and his mother, Mary (née Foley), was Irish Catholic. His parents married in 1855.[7] In 1864 the family dispersed because of Charles's growing alcoholism, and the children were temporarily housed across Edinburgh. In 1867, the family came together again and lived in squalid tenement flats at 3 Sciennes Place.[8] Doyle's father would die in 1893, in the Crichton Royal, Dumfries, after many years of psychiatric illness.[9][10] From his early ages throughout his life Doyle wrote letters to his mother, many of them remained.[11]
Supported by wealthy uncles, Doyle was sent to England, at the Jesuit preparatory school Hodder Place, Stonyhurst in Lancashire at the age of nine (1868–70). He then went on to Stonyhurst College until 1875. While Doyle was not unhappy at Stonyhurst, he did not have any fond memories since the school was run on medieval principles, with subjects covering rudiments, rhetoric, Euclidean geometry, algebra and the classics.[12] Doyle commented later in his life that the academic system could only be excused "on the plea that any exercise, however stupid in itself, forms a sort of mental dumbbell by which one can improve one's mind."[12] He also found it harsh, citing that instead of compassion and warmth, it favoured the threat of corporal punishment and ritual humiliation.[13]
From 1875 to 1876, he was educated at the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria.[8] His family decided that he would spend a year there with the objective of perfecting his German and broadening his academic horizons.[14] He later rejected the Catholic faith and became an agnostic.[15] A source attributed his drift away from religion to the time spent in the less strict Austrian school.[13] He also later became a spiritualist mystic.[16]
Medical career[edit]
From 1876 to 1881, Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, including periods working in Aston (then a town in Warwickshire, now part of Birmingham), Sheffield and Ruyton-XI-Towns, Shropshire.[17] During that time, he studied practical botany at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh.[18] While studying, Doyle began writing short stories. His earliest extant fiction, "The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe", was unsuccessfully submitted to Blackwood's Magazine.[8] His first published piece, "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley", a story set in South Africa, was printed in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal on 6 September 1879.[8][19] On 20 September 1879, he published his first academic article, "Gelsemium as a Poison" in the British Medical Journal,[8][20][21] a study which The Daily Telegraph regarded as potentially useful in a 21st-century murder investigation.[22]
Doyle was the doctor on the Greenland whaler Hope of Peterhead in 1880.[23] On 11 July 1880 John Gray's Hope and David Gray's Eclipse met up with the Eira and Leigh Smith. Photographer W.J.A. Grant took a photograph aboard the Eira of Doyle along with Smith, the Gray brothers, and ships surgeon William Neale. This was the Smith exploration of Franz Josef Land that on 18 August resulted in the naming of Cape Flora, Bell Island, Nightingale Sound, Gratton ("Uncle Joe") Island, and Mabel Island.[24]
As M.B., C.M. after his graduation from university in 1881, he was ship's surgeon on the SS Mayumba during a voyage to the West African coast.[8] He completed his Doctor of Medicine degree (an advanced degree in Scotland beyond the usual medical degrees) on the subject of tabes dorsalis in 1885.[25]
In 1882, Doyle joined former classmate George Turnavine Budd as his partner at a medical practice in Plymouth, but their relationship proved difficult, and Doyle soon left to set up an independent practice.[8][26] Arriving in Portsmouth in June 1882, with less than £10 (£1000 today[27]) to his name, he set up a medical practice at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea.[28] The practice was not successful. While waiting for patients, Doyle returned to writing fiction.
Doyle was a staunch supporter of compulsory vaccination and wrote several articles advocating for the practice and denouncing the views of anti-vaccinators.[29][30]
In early 1891, Doyle attempted the study of ophthalmology in Vienna. He had previously studied at the Portsmouth Eye Hospital to qualify to perform eye tests and prescribe glasses. Vienna was suggested by his friend Vernon Morris as a place to spend six months and train to be an eye surgeon. Doyle found it too difficult to understand the German medical terms at the classes in Vienna and quickly quit his studies there. For the rest of his two-month stay in Vienna, he pursued other activities, such as ice skating with his wife Louisa and drinking with Brinsley Richards of the London Times. He also wrote The Doings of Raffles Haw.
After visiting Venice and Milan, he spent a few days in Paris observing Edmund Landolt, an expert on diseases of the eye. Within three months of his departure for Vienna, Doyle returned to London. He opened a small office and consulting room at 2 Upper Wimpole Street, or 2 Devonshire Place as it was then. A Westminster City Council commemorative plaque is over the front door. He had no patients according to his autobiography and his efforts as an ophthalmologist were a failure.[31][32][33]
Literary career[edit]
Sherlock Holmes[edit]
Doyle struggled to find a publisher for his work. His first work featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, A Study in Scarlet, was written in 3 weeks when he was 27 and taken by Ward Lock & Co on 20 November 1886, giving Doyle £25 (£2700 today) for all rights to the story. The piece appeared one year later in the Beeton's Christmas Annual and received good reviews in The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald.[8]
Holmes was partially modelled on his former university teacher Joseph Bell. In 1892, in a letter to Bell, Doyle wrote, "It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes ... round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man",[34] and in his 1924 autobiography he remarked, "It is no wonder that after the study of such a character [viz., Bell] I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal."[35] Robert Louis Stevenson was able, even in faraway Samoa, to recognise the strong similarity between Joseph Bell and Sherlock Holmes: "My compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes. ... can this be my old friend Joe Bell?"[36] Other authors sometimes suggest additional influences—for instance, the famous Edgar Allan Poe character C. Auguste Dupin.[37] Dr. (John) Watson owes his surname, but not any other obvious characteristic, to a Portsmouth medical colleague of Doyle's, Dr James Watson.[38]
A sequel to A Study in Scarlet was commissioned, and The Sign of the Four appeared in Lippincott's Magazine in February 1890, under agreement with the Ward Lock company. Doyle felt grievously exploited by Ward Lock as an author new to the publishing world and he left them.[8] Short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes were published in the Strand Magazine. Doyle wrote the first five Holmes short stories from his office at 2 Upper Wimpole Street (then known as Devonshire Place), which is now marked by a memorial plaque.[39]
Doyle's attitude towards his most famous creation was ambivalent.[38] In November 1891 he wrote to his mother: "I think of slaying Holmes, ... and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things." His mother responded, "You won't! You can't! You mustn't!"[40] In an attempt to deflect publishers' demands for more Holmes stories, he raised his price to a level intended to discourage them, but found they were willing to pay even the large sums he asked.[38] As a result, he became one of the best-paid authors of his time.
In December 1893, to dedicate more of his time to his historical novels, Doyle had Holmes and Professor Moriarty plunge to their deaths together down the Reichenbach Falls in the story "The Final Problem". Public outcry, however, led him to feature Holmes in 1901 in the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. Holmes' fictional connection with the Reichenbach Falls is celebrated in the nearby town of Meiringen.
In 1903, Doyle published his first Holmes short story in ten years, "The Adventure of the Empty House", in which it was explained that only Moriarty had fallen, but since Holmes had other dangerous enemies—especially Colonel Sebastian Moran—he had arranged to also be perceived as dead. Holmes was ultimately featured in a total of 56 short stories—the last published in 1927—and four novels by Doyle, and has since appeared in many novels and stories by other authors.
Jane Stanford compares some of Moriarty's characteristics to those of the Fenian John O'Connor Power. "The Final Problem" was published the year the Second Home Rule Bill passed through the House of Commons. "The Valley of Fear" was serialised in 1914, the year Home Rule, the Government of Ireland Act (18 September) was placed on the Statute Book.[41]
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