Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle arrived in Portsmouth in June 1882 with less than ten pounds to his name and no patients waiting for him. He set up at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea, and while the waiting room stayed empty he wrote. What came out of those hours was not his best work, by his own account, but it made him the best-paid author of his era. The questions worth following are: how a physician who sailed the Arctic created the most famous detective in literary history while resenting that creation; what drove a rational man to spend his final years championing mediums, fairies, and spirit photographers; and how a writer who invented Sherlock Holmes became a tireless campaigner for two men wrongly convicted of crimes they did not commit.
Doyle was born on the 22nd of May 1859 at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh. By 1864, his father Charles Altamont Doyle's alcoholism had broken the family apart. Arthur lodged with Mary Burton at Liberton Bank House on Gilmerton Road while studying at Newington Academy. The family regrouped in 1867 in squalid tenement flats at 3 Sciennes Place. Charles died in 1893 at the Crichton Royal in Dumfries, after many years of psychiatric illness.
Wealthy uncles sent Doyle south at age nine to the Jesuit school Hodder Place, Stonyhurst in Lancashire. He stayed on at Stonyhurst College until 1875. He had no fond memories of it. The curriculum covered only rudiments, rhetoric, Euclidean geometry, algebra, and the classics, and discipline ran to corporal punishment and ritual humiliation. He later said the approach could be excused only "on the plea that any exercise, however stupid in itself, forms a sort of mental dumbbell by which one can improve one's mind."
From 1875 to 1876, the family sent him to the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria, to perfect his German. One source credits the more relaxed Austrian environment with starting his drift away from the Catholic faith of his upbringing. He became an agnostic in adulthood, and later still a committed spiritualist. From 1876 to 1881 he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, working during that period in Aston, Sheffield, and Ruyton-XI-Towns, Shropshire, and beginning to write fiction alongside his studies.
Before graduating, Doyle served as ship's doctor on the Greenland whaler Hope of Peterhead in 1880. On the 11th of July that year, photographer W. J. A. Grant photographed him aboard the Eira alongside Leigh Smith, the Gray brothers, and ship's surgeon William Neale. On the 18th of August, that Arctic expedition named Cape Flora, Bell Island, Nightingale Sound, and Mabel Island. He graduated with Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery degrees from the University of Edinburgh in 1881, then sailed as ship's surgeon on the SS Mayumba to the West African coast. His Doctor of Medicine degree, with a dissertation on tabes dorsalis, followed in 1885.
In 1882, a partnership with former classmate George Turnavine Budd in a Plymouth medical practice collapsed, and Doyle set up independently at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea. His earliest surviving fiction, "The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe," had already been rejected by Blackwood's Magazine. His first published story, "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley," had appeared in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal on the 6th of September 1879. His first academic paper, on gelsemium as a poison, ran in the British Medical Journal on the 20th of September 1879. With no patients in Southsea, he returned to fiction.
In early 1891, Doyle travelled to Vienna on his friend Vernon Morris's advice to train as an eye surgeon. He found the German medical terms used in his classes impenetrable and abandoned the programme. He spent the rest of those two months ice skating with his wife Louisa and drinking with Brinsley Richards of the London Times, and he wrote The Doings of Raffles Haw. After observing the eye specialist Edmund Landolt in Paris, he returned to London and opened consulting rooms at 2 Upper Wimpole Street. He had no patients, as he later admitted in his autobiography, and his career as an ophthalmologist was a total failure.
Ward Lock and Co. accepted A Study in Scarlet on the 20th of November 1886, paying Doyle twenty-five pounds for all rights. He had written it in three weeks at the age of 27. It appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual the following year and drew positive notices in The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald.
Holmes was partly modelled on Doyle's former university teacher Joseph Bell. In 1892, Doyle wrote to Bell: "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." Robert Louis Stevenson recognised the resemblance from across the Atlantic, writing to Doyle on the 5th of April 1893: "can this be my old friend Joe Bell?" Watson's surname, though none of his personality, came from a Portsmouth medical colleague of Doyle's, Dr. James Watson.
A Study in Scarlet's sequel, The Sign of the Four, appeared in Lippincott's Magazine in February 1890. Doyle felt exploited by Ward Lock and left them. Short stories then ran in the Strand Magazine; the first five were written from his office at 2 Devonshire Place. 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." She wrote back: "You won't! You can't! You mustn't!" He raised his fees hoping to deter publishers. They paid whatever he asked, making him one of the best-paid authors of his time.
In December 1893, Doyle sent Holmes and Professor Moriarty over the Reichenbach Falls in "The Final Problem," intending to clear time for historical fiction. Public outcry led him to resurrect Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901. Then "The Adventure of the Empty House" in 1903 explained that only Moriarty had fallen. Holmes appeared in 56 short stories in total, the last published in 1927, and four novels.
While living in Southsea, Doyle played football as goalkeeper for Portsmouth Association Football Club under the pseudonym A. C. Smith. Between 1899 and 1907 he played 10 first-class cricket matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club. His highest score was 43, against London County in 1902. He bowled one first-class wicket in his career, that of W. G. Grace, and wrote a poem to mark the occasion. Cricket scores were, by his own account, by far the most common entries in his diary during his tenure as captain of the Authors XI from 1899 to 1912. That team included J. M. Barrie, P. G. Wodehouse, and A. A. Milne.
In 1901, Doyle was one of three judges at the world's first major bodybuilding competition, organised by Eugen Sandow at London's Royal Albert Hall. In 1909, he declined an invitation to referee the James Jeffries-Jack Johnson heavyweight championship fight in Reno, Nevada, writing that though he was "much inclined to accept," his friends warned him he would end up "with a revolver at one ear and a razor at the other." He was elected captain of the Crowborough Beacon Golf Club in Sussex for 1910. In 1913 he entered the English Amateur Billiards Championship.
Doyle also sketched designs for buildings. In March 1912, while staying at the Lyndhurst Grand Hotel, he drew plans for a third-storey extension and a facade alteration. Work began later that year, and the finished building closely matched his sketches. In 1903, he founded the Crimes Club, a private discussion society for crime and criminology. Its first members included Bernard Spilsbury, P. G. Wodehouse, and Bertram Fletcher Robinson. The club continues today as "Our Society," capped at 100 members, meeting four times a year at the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square. In December 1894, his article in The Strand Magazine describing skiing in the Swiss Alps is credited with drawing wider attention to the sport in that country.
George Edalji, a shy half-British, half-Indian lawyer, was convicted of sending threatening letters and mutilating animals in Great Wyrley. Doyle took up his case in 1906 after noting that the mutilations had continued after Edalji was jailed, a fact the police had ignored. His work on the case contributed partly to the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907. Julian Barnes fictionalised the story in his 2005 novel Arthur and George, which became a three-part ITV drama in 2015.
The second case centred on Oscar Slater, a man of German-Jewish origin convicted of bludgeoning an 82-year-old woman in Glasgow in 1908. Doyle found inconsistencies in the prosecution that persuaded him Slater was not guilty. He paid most of the costs of Slater's successful appeal in 1928.
Doyle served as a volunteer physician at the Langman Field Hospital in Bloemfontein between March and June 1900, during the Second Boer War. He wrote The Great Boer War and a shorter pamphlet, The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, defending Britain's role. He believed that pamphlet earned him his knighthood. King Edward VII conferred it in person at Buckingham Palace on the 24th of October 1902. Doyle stood for Parliament twice as a Liberal Unionist, in Edinburgh Central in 1900 and in the Hawick Burghs in 1906, losing both times. In 1909, he published The Crime of the Congo, a pamphlet denouncing conditions in that colony. After the Irish Easter Rising, he tried without success to prevent the execution of Roger Casement, arguing that Casement had been driven to madness. In 1914, he was among fifty-three leading British authors, including H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and Thomas Hardy, who signed the "Authors' Declaration" justifying Britain's entry into the First World War.
On the 26th of January 1887, Doyle was initiated as a Freemason at Phoenix Lodge No. 257 in Southsea. That same year, influenced by Major-General Alfred Wilks Drayson of the Portsmouth Literary and Philosophical Society, he attended roughly 20 seances and experiments in telepathy. He resigned from the lodge in 1889, returned in 1902, and resigned again in 1911. By 1889 he had become a founding member of the Hampshire Society for Psychical Research; by 1893 he had joined the Society for Psychical Research in London.
Doyle and the spiritualist William Thomas Stead publicly endorsed Julius and Agnes Zancig as genuine telepaths. In 1924, the Zancigs confessed their mind-reading act had been a trick, publishing their secret code in a London newspaper. Doyle also praised the mediumship of Eusapia Palladino and Mina Crandon; both were later exposed as frauds.
In 1916, Doyle came to believe his children's nanny, Lily Loder Symonds, had genuine psychic abilities. He called spiritualism a "New Revelation" sent by God to comfort people bereaved by war. His son Kingsley died on the 28th of October 1918 from pneumonia contracted during recovery from wounds at the 1916 Battle of the Somme. His brother Brigadier-general Innes Doyle died of pneumonia in February 1919. Two brothers-in-law, including E. W. Hornung, creator of the literary character Raffles, and two nephews also died shortly after the war. His first spiritualist book, The New Revelation, had appeared in 1918.
Harry Houdini demonstrated a trick in Doyle's presence specifically to persuade him that impressive effects could be achieved by purely mechanical means. Doyle refused to accept that it had been a trick. His friend Bernard Ernst recalled Houdini urging Doyle not to endorse phenomena simply because he had no other explanation. The two men fell into a bitter public dispute in the 1920s. In 1922, Doyle defended the spirit photographer William Hope against fraud charges brought by psychical researcher Harry Price. When further evidence of trickery emerged, Doyle threatened Price and led 84 members of the Society for Psychical Research to resign in protest. He laid the foundation stone for a Spiritualist Temple in Camden, London, in 1926, providing five hundred pounds of the building's total six-hundred-pound construction cost.
Continue Browsing
Common questions
What was Arthur Conan Doyle's real surname?
Technically his surname was simply Doyle. Conan was a middle name, derived from his great-uncle Michael Conan, a distinguished journalist. After finishing school, Doyle began using Conan as a sort of informal second surname. When he was knighted, he was gazetted as Doyle, not under the compound form.
Who was the real-life model for Sherlock Holmes?
Holmes was partly modelled on Joseph Bell, Doyle's former teacher at the University of Edinburgh Medical School. In 1892, Doyle wrote to Bell directly crediting him as the source of Holmes's methods of deduction and observation. Robert Louis Stevenson also recognised the resemblance, writing to Doyle on the 5th of April 1893 to ask whether Holmes could be "my old friend Joe Bell."
Did Doyle really try to kill off Sherlock Holmes?
Yes. In December 1893 he sent Holmes and Professor Moriarty over the Reichenbach Falls in "The Final Problem," intending to free his time for historical novels. Public outcry eventually brought Holmes back in The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901, and "The Adventure of the Empty House" in 1903 explained that only Moriarty had actually died.
What real criminal cases did Doyle investigate personally?
Doyle investigated two wrongful conviction cases. In 1906 he took up the cause of George Edalji, a half-British, half-Indian lawyer convicted of animal mutilation, noting that the mutilations continued after Edalji was jailed. His work contributed to the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907. He also campaigned for Oscar Slater, convicted of murder in Glasgow in 1908, and paid most of the costs of Slater's successful 1928 appeal.
Did Doyle believe the Cottingley Fairy photographs were real?
Yes. In The Coming of the Fairies, published in 1922, Doyle reproduced five photographs taken by cousins Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright in Cottingley, England, in July 1917, and argued that those who suspected them of being faked were wrong. Decades later the photographs were definitively shown to be fakes, and both Griffiths and Wright admitted the deception.
How did Doyle's friendship with Harry Houdini end?
It ended in a bitter public falling-out in the 1920s. Houdini staged a trick in Doyle's presence specifically to demonstrate that impressive effects could be pure illusion. Doyle refused to accept the explanation, insisting in The Edge of the Unknown that Houdini possessed genuine supernatural powers. Houdini became a prominent public opponent of the spiritualist movement, which made their positions irreconcilable.