Arthur Conan Doyle

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Born22 May, 1859
Edinburgh, Scotland
Died7 July, 1930
OccupationNovelist, short story writer, poet, doctor
GenreDetective fiction, historical novels, non-fiction

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, DL (22 May, 1859 – 7 July, 1930) was a Scottish author most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered a major innovation in the field of crime fiction, and the adventures of Professor Challenger. He was a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, historical novels, plays and romances, poetry, and non-fiction.

Conan was originally a given name, but Doyle used it as part of his surname in his later years.

Life

Arthur Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Irish parents Charles Altamont Doyle and Mary Doyle. He was sent to the Roman Catholic Jesuit preparatory school, St Marys Hall, Stonyhurst at the age of nine years old. He then went on to Stonyhurst College, but by the time he left the school in 1875, he had rejected Christianity to become an agnostic.

From 1876 to 1881 he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, including a period working in the town of Aston (now a district of Birmingham). Following his term at university he served as a ship's doctor on a voyage to the West African coast, and then in 1882 he set up a practice in Plymouth. He achieved his doctorate concerning Tabes Dorsalis in 1885.[1]

His medical practice was not very successful; while waiting for patients, he began writing stories. His first literary experience came in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal before he was 20.

It was only after he moved his practice to Portsmouth that Doyle began to indulge more extensively in literature. His first significant work was A Study in Scarlet, which appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887 and featured the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, who was partially modelled after Conan Doyle's former university professor, Joseph Bell. Interestingly, Rudyard Kipling congratulated Conan Doyle on his success, asking "Could this be my old friend, Dr. Joe?". Sherlock Holmes, however, was even more closely modelled after the famous Edgar Allan Poe character, C. Auguste Dupin. While living in Southsea he helped form Portsmouth AFC, the city's first football club. Common myth holds that Conan Doyle played as Portsmouth F.C.'s first goalkeeper; however, Conan Doyle played for an amateur side that disbanded in 1894 and had no connection to the Portsmouth F.C. of today which was not formed until 1898 (the first goalkeeper of the professional team was Matt Reilly).

In 1885 he married Louisa (or Louise) Hawkins, known as "Touie", who suffered from tuberculosis and eventually died in 1906.[2] He married Jean Leckie in 1907, whom he had first met and fallen in love with in 1897 but had maintained a platonic relationship with her out of loyalty to his first wife. Conan Doyle had five children, two with his first wife (Mary and Kingsley), and three with his second wife (Jean, Denis, and Adrian).

File:PortraitOfACD.jpg
Portrait of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Sidney Paget, 1897.

In 1890 Conan Doyle studied the eye in Vienna; he moved to London in 1891 to set up a practice as an ophthalmologist. He wrote in his autobiography that not a single patient crossed his door. This gave him more time for writing, and 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 saying "You may do what you deem fit, but the crowds will not take this lightheartedly." In December 1893, he did so in order to dedicate more of his time to more "important" works (namely his historical novels).

Holmes and Moriarty apparently plunged to their deaths together down a waterfall in the story "The Final Problem". Public outcry led him to bring the character back; Conan Doyle returned to the story in "The Adventure of the Empty House", with the explanation that only Moriarty had fallen, but, since Holmes had other dangerous enemies, he had arranged to be temporarily "dead" also. Holmes eventually appears in a total of 56 short stories and four Conan Doyle novels (he has since appeared in many novels and stories by other authors).

Following the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of the 20th century and the condemnation from around the world over the United Kingdom's conduct, Conan Doyle wrote a short pamphlet titled The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct which justified the UK's role in the Boer war, and was widely translated.

Conan Doyle believed that it was this pamphlet that resulted in his being knighted and appointed as Deputy-Lieutenant of Surrey in 1902. He also wrote the longer book The Great Boer War in 1900. During the early years of the 20th century Sir Arthur twice ran for Parliament as a Liberal Unionist, once in Edinburgh and once in the Hawick Burghs, but although he received a respectable vote he was not elected.

Arthur Conan Doyle statue in Crowborough

Conan Doyle was involved in the campaign for the reform of the Congo Free State, led by the journalist E. D. Morel and the diplomat Roger Casement. He wrote The Crime of the Congo in 1909, a long pamphlet in which he denounced the horrors in Congo. He become acquainted with Morel and Casement, taking inspiration from them for two of the main characters of the novel The Lost World (1912).

He broke with both when Morel (who was rather left-wing) became one of the leaders of the pacifist movement during the First World War, and when Casement committed treason against the UK during the Easter Rising out of conviction for his Irish nationalist views. Conan Doyle tried, unsuccessfully, to save Casement from the death penalty, arguing that he had been driven mad and was not responsible for his actions.

Conan Doyle was also a fervent advocate of justice, and personally investigated two closed cases, which led to two imprisoned men being released. The first case, in 1906, involved a shy half-British, half-Indian lawyer named George Edalji, who had allegedly penned threatening letters and mutilated animals. Police were set on Edalji's conviction, even though the mutilations continued after their suspect was jailed.

It was partially as a result of this case that the Court of Criminal Appeal was established in 1907, so not only did Conan Doyle help George Edalji, his work helped to establish a way to correct other miscarriages of justice. The story of Conan Doyle and Edalji is told in fictional form in Julian Barnes's 2005 novel, Arthur & George.

The second case, that of Oscar Slater, a German Jew and gambling-den operator convicted of bludgeoning an 82-year-old woman in Glasgow in 1908, excited Conan Doyle's curiosity because of inconsistencies in the prosecution case and a general sense that Slater was framed.

After the death of his wife Louisa in 1906, and the deaths of his son Kingsley, his brother, his two brothers-in-law, and his two nephews in World War I, Conan Doyle sank into depression. He found solace supporting Spiritualism and its alleged scientific proof of existence beyond the grave.

According to the Hitory Channel program Houdini: Unlocking the Mystery (which briefly explored the friendship between the two), Conan Doyle became involved with Spiritualism after the death of his own son during the First World War. Kingsley Doyle died from pneumonia in October 1917, which he contracted during his year plus convalescence after being seriously wounded during the disasterous 1916 Battle of the Somme. The elder Doyle became involved with Spiritualism to the extent that he wrote a Professor Challenger novel on the subject, The Land of Mist. One of the odder aspects of this period of his life was his book The Coming of the Fairies (1921). He was apparently totally convinced of the veracity of the Cottingley fairy photographs, which he reproduced in the book, together with theories about the nature and existence of fairies and spirits. In his The History of Spiritualism (1926) Conan Doyle highly praised the psychic phenomena and spirit materialisations produced by Eusapia Palladino and Mina "Margery" Crandon, based on the investigations of duped scientists and conjurers who deeply desired to encounter psychic phenomena and refused to listen to sceptical and well-informed scientists and conjurers.[3]

His work on this topic was one of the reasons that one of his short story collections, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, was banned in the Soviet Union in 1929 for supposed occultism. This ban was later lifted. Russian actor Vasily Livanov later received an Order of the British Empire for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes.

Conan Doyle was friends for a time with the American magician Harry Houdini, who himself became a prominent opponent of the Spiritualist movement in the 1920's following the death of his own beloved mother. Although Houdini insisted that Spiritualist mediums employed trickery (and consistently attempted to expose them as frauds), Conan Doyle became convinced that Houdini himself possessed supernatural powers, a view expressed in Conan Doyle's The Edge of the Unknown. Houdini was apparently unable to convince Conan Doyle that his feats were simply magic tricks, leading to a bitter, public, falling-out between the two. Doyle was totally stunned when Houdini pulled off his thumb and then replaced it.[3]

Richard Milner, an American historian of science, has presented a case that Conan Doyle may have been the perpetrator of the Piltdown man hoax of 1912, creating the counterfeit hominid fossil that fooled the scientific world for over 40 years. Milner says that Conan Doyle had a motive, namely revenge on the scientific establishment for debunking one of his favourite psychics, and that The Lost World contains several encrypted clues regarding his involvement in the hoax.[4]

Samuel Rosenberg's 1974 book Naked is the Best Disguise purports to explain how Conan Doyle left, throughout his writings, open clues that related to hidden and suppressed aspects of his mentality.

Conan Doyle was found clutching his chest in the family garden on July 7, 1930. He soon died of his heart attack, aged 71, and is buried in the Church Yard at Minstead in the New Forest, Hampshire, England. His last words were directed toward his wife: "You are wonderful."

Undershaw, the home Conan Doyle had built near Hindhead, south of London, and lived in for at least a decade, was a hotel and restaurant from 1924 until 2004. It was then bought by a developer, and has sat empty since then while conservationists and Conan Doyle fans fight to preserve it.[2]

A statue has been erected in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's honour at Crowborough Cross in Crowborough, East Sussex, England, where Sir Arthur lived for 23 years. There is also a statue of Sherlock Holmes in Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland—close to the house where Conan Doyle was born.

Selected bibliography

Sherlock Holmes books

List of additional Sherlock Holmes literature

Professor Challenger stories

Historical novels

Other works

Notes and references

  1. ^ available at the Edinburgh Research Archive
  2. ^ a b Leeman, Sue. Sherlock Holmes fans hope to save Conan Doyle's house from developers, Associated Press, 28 July 2006.]
  3. ^ a b The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero by William Kalush and Larry Sloman, Atria books, 2006
  4. ^ Highfield, Roger. Thursday 20 March 1997. The mysterious case of Conan Doyle and Piltdown Man. The Daily Telegraph
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Bibliographic information from:Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers. p. 102.

See also

  • The Toronto Public Library has an extensive collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's works.
  • William Gillette Personal friend. Performed the most famous stage-version of Sherlock Holmes.
  • American horror writers Christopher Golden and Thomas E. Sniegoski feature Arthur Conan Doyle as a protagonist in their fictional “The Menagerie” series.
  • Henry Irving's "Waterloo": Theatrical Engagements with Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, Ellen Terry, Edward Gordon Craig, Late-Victorian Culture, Old Men, War, and History by W. D. King (University of California Press, 1993).

External links

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Biographical

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