Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ,
DL (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician, most noted for his fictional stories about the detective
Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered milestones in the field of
crime fiction.
He is also known for writing the fictional adventures of a second character he invented,
Professor Challenger, and for popularising the mystery of the
Mary Celeste. He was a prolific writer whose other works include fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and historical novels.
Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland.
[6][7] His father,
Charles Altamont Doyle, was English, of Irish Catholic descent, and his mother, Mary (née Foley), was Irish Catholic. His parents married in 1855.
[8] In 1864 the family dispersed due to 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.
[9] Doyle's father died in 1893, in the
Crichton Royal,
Dumfries, after many years of psychiatric illness.
[10][11]
From 1876 to 1881 he studied medicine at the
University of Edinburgh Medical School, including periods working in
Aston,
Sheffield and
Ruyton-XI-Towns,
Shropshire.
[14] While studying, Doyle began writing short stories. His earliest extant fiction, "The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe", was unsuccessfully submitted to
Blackwood's Magazine.
[9] 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.
[9][15] On 20 September 1879, he published his first academic article, "
Gelsemium as a Poison" in the
British Medical Journal,
[9][16][17] a study which the Daily Telegraph regarded as potentially useful in a 21st-century alleged murder investigation.
[18]
Doyle was employed as a doctor on the Greenland whaler
Hope of Peterhead in 1880
[19] and, after his graduation from university in 1881 as M.B., C.M., as a ship's surgeon on the SS
Mayumba during a voyage to the West African coast.
[9] He completed his
M.D. degree (an advanced degree in Scotland beyond the usual medical degrees) on the subject of
tabes dorsalis in 1885.
[20]
In 1882 he 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.
[9][21] Arriving in
Portsmouth in June 1882 with less than £10 (£900 today
[22]) to his name, he set up a medical practice at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove,
Southsea.
[23] The practice was initially not very successful. While waiting for patients, Doyle again began writing fiction.
In 1890 Doyle studied ophthalmology in
Vienna, and moved to London, first living in Montague Place and then in South Norwood. He set up a practice as an
ophthalmologist at No. 2 Upper Wimpole St, London W1 (then known as 2 Devonshire Place).
[24] (A Westminster Council plaque in place over the front door can be seen today.)
Sherlock Holmes
Portrait of Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget, 1904
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."
[25] 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.
[26] 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?"
[27] Other authors sometimes suggest additional influences—for instance, the famous
Edgar Allan Poe character
C. Auguste Dupin.
[28] Dr. (John) Watson owes his surname, but not any other obvious characteristic, to a Portsmouth medical colleague of Doyle's, Dr James Watson.
[29]
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.
[9] 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.
[30]
Sherlock Holmes statue in Edinburgh, erected opposite the birthplace of Doyle which was demolished c.1970
Doyle's attitude towards his most famous creation was ambivalent.
[29] 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!".
[31] 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.
[29] As a result, he became one of the best-paid authors of his time.
Other works
Doyle's first novels were
The Mystery of Cloomber, not published until 1888, and the unfinished
Narrative of John Smith, published only in 2011.
[33] He amassed a portfolio of short stories including "The Captain of the Pole-Star" and "
J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement", both inspired by Doyle's time at sea, the latter of which popularised the mystery of the
Mary Celeste[34] and added fictional details such as the perfect condition of the ship (which had actually taken on water by the time it was discovered) and its boats remaining on board (the one boat was in fact missing) that have come to dominate popular accounts of the incident.
[9][34]
Between 1888 and 1906, Doyle wrote seven historical novels, which he and many critics regarded as his best work.
[29] He also authored nine other novels, and later in his career (1912-1929) five stories, two of novella length, featuring the irascible scientist
Professor Challenger. The Challenger stories include what is probably his best-known work after the Holmes oeuvre,
The Lost World. He was a prolific author of short stories, including two collections set in
Napoleonic times featuring the French character
Brigadier Gerard.
Doyle's stage works include
Waterloo, the reminiscences of an English veteran of the
Napoleonic Wars, the character of Gregory Brewster being written for
Henry Irving;
The House of Temperley, the plot of which reflects his abiding interest of boxing;
The Speckled Band, after the
short story of that name; and the 1893 collaboration with
J.M. Barrie on the
libretto of
Jane Annie.
[35]
Sporting caree
His highest score, in 1902 against
London County, was 43. He was an occasional bowler who took just one first-class wicket (although one of the highest pedigree—it was
W. G. Grace).
[38] Also a keen golfer, Doyle was elected captain of the Crowborough Beacon Golf Club in
Sussex for 1910. (He had moved to Little Windlesham house in
Crowborough with his second wife, Jean Leckie, living there with his family from 1907 until his death in July 1930.
[39])
Personal life[edit]
In 1885 Doyle married Mary Louise (sometimes called "Louisa") Hawkins, the youngest daughter of J. Hawkins, of
Minsterworth,
Gloucestershire, and sister of one of Doyle's patients. She suffered from
tuberculosis and died on 4 July 1906.
[40] The following year he married Jean Elizabeth Leckie, whom he had first met and fallen in love with in 1897. He had maintained a platonic relationship with Jean while his first wife was still alive, out of loyalty to her.
[41] Jean died in London on 27 June 1940.
[42]
Doyle fathered five children. He had two with his first wife: Mary Louise (28 January 1889 – 12 June 1976) and Arthur Alleyne Kingsley, known as Kingsley (15 November 1892 – 28 October 1918). He also had three with his second wife: Denis Percy Stewart (17 March 1909 – 9 March 1955), second husband of
Georgian Princess
Nina Mdivani;
Adrian Malcolm (19 November 1910 – 3 June 1970); and
Jean Lena Annette (21 December 1912 – 18 November 1997).
[43]
Political campaigning[edit]
Following the
Boer War in South Africa at the turn of the 20th century and the condemnation from some quarters over the United Kingdom's role, Doyle wrote a short work titled
The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, which justified the UK's role in the Boer War and was widely translated. Doyle had served as a volunteer doctor in the Langman Field Hospital at
Bloemfontein between March and June 1900.
[44] Doyle believed that this publication was responsible for his being
knighted as a
Knight Bachelor by
King Edward VII in 1902
[4] and for his appointment as a Deputy-Lieutenant of
Surrey.
[45] Also in 1900 he wrote a book,
The Great Boer War.
Doyle was a supporter of the campaign for the reform of the
Congo Free State, led by the journalist
E. D. Morel and diplomat
Roger Casement. During 1909 he wrote
The Crime of the Congo, a long pamphlet in which he denounced the horrors of that colony. He became acquainted with Morel and Casement, and it is possible that, together with
Bertram Fletcher Robinson, they inspired several characters in the 1912 novel
The Lost World.
[48] Doyle broke with both Morel and Casement when Morel became one of the leaders of the
pacifist movement during the
First World War. When Casement was found guilty of
treason against
the Crown during the
Easter Rising, Doyle tried unsuccessfully to save him from facing the death penalty, arguing that Casement had been driven mad and could not be held responsible for his actions.
[49]
Justice advocate[edit]
Doyle was also a fervent advocate of justice and personally investigated two closed cases, which led to two men being exonerated of the crimes of which they were accused. 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 in
Great Wyrley. Police were set on Edalji's conviction, even though the mutilations continued after their suspect was jailed.
[50] Apart from helping George Edalji, Doyle's work helped establish a way to correct other miscarriages of justice, as it was partially as a result of this case that the
Court of Criminal Appeal was established in 1907.
[51]
The story of Doyle and Edalji was dramatised in an episode of the 1972 BBC television series,
The Edwardians. In Nicholas Meyer's pastiche
The West End Horror (1976), Holmes manages to help clear the name of a shy
Parsi Indian character wronged by the English justice system. Edalji was of Parsi heritage on his father's side. The story was fictionalised in
Julian Barnes's 2005 novel
Arthur and George, which was adapted into a three-part drama by ITV in 2015.
The second case, that of
Oscar Slater, a
Yekke and gambling-den operator convicted of bludgeoning an 82-year-old woman in
Glasgow in 1908, excited Doyle's curiosity because of inconsistencies in the prosecution case and a general sense that Slater was not guilty. He ended up paying most of the costs for Slater's successful appeal in 1928.
[52]
Spiritualism, Freemasonry
One of the five photographs of Frances Griffiths with the
alleged fairies, taken by Elsie Wright in July 1917
Doyle had a longstanding interest in
mystical subjects. In 1887 he joined the
Society for Psychical Research and was also initiated as a
Freemason (26 January 1887) at the Phoenix Lodge No. 257 in Southsea. He resigned from the Lodge in 1889, but returned to it in 1902, only to resign again in 1911.
[53]
Doyle with his family in New York City, 1922
On 28 October 1918, Kingsley Doyle died from pneumonia, which he contracted during his convalescence after being seriously wounded during the 1916
Battle of the Somme. Brigadier-General Innes Doyle died, also from pneumonia, in February 1919. Sir Arthur became involved with Spiritualism to the extent that he wrote a novella on the subject,
The Land of Mist, featuring the character Professor Challenger.
The Coming of the Fairies (1922)
[56] appears to show that Conan Doyle was convinced of the veracity of the five
Cottingley Fairies photographs (which decades later were exposed as a hoax). He reproduced them in the book, together with theories about the nature and existence of fairies and spirits.
In 1920, Doyle debated the claims of
Spiritualism with the notable sceptic
Joseph McCabe at Queen's Hall in London. McCabe later published his evidence against the claims of Doyle and Spiritualism in a booklet entitled
Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud? which claimed Doyle had been duped into believing Spiritualism by
mediumship trickery.
[57]
Doyle was friends for a time with
Harry Houdini, the American magician who himself became a prominent opponent of the Spiritualist movement in the 1920s following the death of his beloved mother. Although Houdini insisted that Spiritualist mediums employed trickery (and consistently exposed them as frauds), Doyle became convinced that Houdini himself possessed supernatural powers—a view expressed in Doyle's
The Edge of the Unknown. Houdini was apparently unable to convince Doyle that his feats were simply illusions, leading to a bitter public falling out between the two.
[58] A specific incident is recounted in memoirs by Houdini's friend Bernard M.L. Ernst, in which Houdini performed an impressive trick at his home in the presence of Conan Doyle. Houdini assured Conan Doyle the trick was pure illusion and that he was attempting to prove a point about Doyle not "endorsing phenomena" simply because he had no explanation. According to Ernst, Conan Doyle refused to believe it was a trick.
[59]
In 1922, the psychical researcher
Harry Price accused the spirit photographer
William Hope of fraud. Doyle defended Hope, but further evidence of trickery was obtained from other researchers.
[60] Doyle threatened to have Price evicted from the
National Laboratory of Psychical Research and claimed if he persisted to write "sewage" about spiritualists, he would meet the same fate as Harry Houdini.
[61] Price wrote "Arthur Conan Doyle and his friends abused me for years for exposing Hope."
[62] Because of the exposure of Hope and other fraudulent spiritualists, Doyle led a mass resignation of eighty-four members of the
Society for Psychical Research, as they believed the Society was opposed to spiritualism.
[63]
Doyle and spiritualist
William Thomas Stead were duped into believing
Julius and Agnes Zancig had genuine psychic powers, both claiming that the Zancigs used
telepathy. In 1924 Julius and Agnes Zancig confessed that that their
mind reading act was a trick and published the secret code and all the details of the trick method they had used, under the title
Our Secrets!! in a London newspaper.
[64] In his book
The History of Spiritualism (1926), Doyle praised the
psychic phenomena and spirit
materializationsproduced by
Eusapia Palladino and
Mina Crandon, who were both exposed as frauds.
[65] In 1927, Doyle spoke in a filmed interview about Sherlock Holmes and spiritualism.
[66]
Doyle in 1930, the year of his death, with his son
Adrian
Richard Milner, an American historian of science, has presented a case that 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 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.
[67][68] Samuel Rosenberg's 1974 book
Naked is the Best Disguise purports to explain how, throughout his writings, Doyle left open clues that related to hidden and suppressed aspects of his mentality.
[69]
Death
Doyle was found clutching his chest in the hall of Windlesham Manor, his house in
Crowborough, East Sussex, on 7 July 1930. He died of a heart attack at the age of 71. His last words were directed toward his wife: "You are wonderful."
[70] At the time of his death, there was some controversy concerning his burial place, as he was avowedly not a Christian, considering himself a Spiritualist. He was first buried on 11 July 1930 in Windlesham rose garden.
He was later reinterred together with his wife in
Minstead churchyard in the
New Forest, Hampshire.
[9]Carved wooden tablets to his memory and to the memory of his wife are held privately and are inaccessible to the public. That inscription reads, "Blade straight/Steel true/Arthur Conan Doyle/Born May 22nd 1859/Passed on 7th July 1930."
The epitaph on his gravestone in the churchyard reads, in part: "Steel true/Blade straight/Arthur Conan Doyle/Knight/Patriot, Physician, and man of letters".
[71]
Undershaw, the home near
Hindhead,
Haslemere, which Doyle had built and lived in between October 1897 and September 1907,
[72] was a hotel and restaurant from 1924 until 2004. It was then bought by a developer and stood empty while conservationists and Doyle fans fought to preserve it.
[40] In 2012 the High Court ruled the redevelopment permission be quashed because proper procedure had not been followed.
[73]
A statue honours Doyle at Crowborough Cross in Crowborough, where he lived for 23 years.
[74] There is a statue of Sherlock Holmes in Picardy Place,
Edinburgh, close to the house where Doyle was born
Bell was a great-grandson of
Benjamin Bell, a forensic surgeon. In his instruction, Joseph Bell emphasized the importance of close observation in making a diagnosis. To illustrate this, he would often pick a stranger and, by observing him, deduce his occupation and recent activities. These skills caused him to be considered a pioneer in
forensic science (
forensic pathology in particular) at a time when science was not yet widely used in criminal investigations.
Bell wrote the book
Manual of the Operations of Surgery which was published in 1866.
[2]
Joseph Bell died on 4 October 1911. He was buried at the
Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh alongside his wife, Edith Katherine Erskine Murray, and their son Benjamin, and next to his father's and brother's plots. The grave is midway along the north wall of the northern section to the original cemetery.
Arthur Conan Doyle met Bell in 1877, and served as his clerk at the
Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Doyle later went on to write a series of popular stories featuring the fictional character Sherlock Holmes, who Doyle stated was loosely based on Bell and his observant ways.
[3] Bell was aware of this inspiration and took some pride in it. According to
Irving Wallace (in an essay originally in his book
The Fabulous Originals but later republished and updated in his collection
The Sunday Gentleman) Bell was involved in several police investigations, mostly in Scotland, such as the
Ardlamont Mystery of 1893, usually with forensic expert Professor
Henry Littlejohn.
1. Doyle was one of the earliest motorists in Britain
He reportedly bought a car without ever having driven one before. In 1911, he took part in the Prince Henry Tour, an international road competition organised by Prince Henry of Prussia to pit British cars against German ones. Doyle paired up with his second wife, Jean, as one of the British driving teams.
2. Conan is not part of his surname
It is, in fact, only one of his two middle names. He is Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle. Shortly after he graduated from high school he began using Conan as part of his surname
3. He wasn't knighted for his fiction
4. Doyle was on the same cricket team as Peter Pan writer JM Barrie
They also worked together on a comic opera, Jane Annie, which Barrie begged his friend to revise and finish for him.
5. He could have discussed Dracula and Treasure Island with their authors
Doyle was also friends with Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson was a fellow classmate at the University of Edinburgh.
6. He helped to popularise skiing
He not only liked cricket and football, but Doyle helped to popularise the winter sport. Following a move to Davros, Switzerland in 1893 (the mountain air was prescribe to aid his wife’s health), he mastered the basics with the help of the Brangger brothers, two locals who had taken to practising the sport after dark to avoid being teased by the townsfolk. Together, they were the first people to make the 8,000ft pass through the Maienfelder Furka, which separated Davos from the neighbouring town of Arosa. Doyle was also the first Englishman to document the thrill of skiing: “You let yourself go,” he said. “Getting as near to flying as any earthbound man can. In that glorious air it is a delightful experience.” Doyle correctly predicted that in the future hundreds of Englishmen would come to Switzerland for the “skiing season”.
Conan Doyle was the first to bring skiing from Scandinavia to Switzerland
7. He was a goalie
Under the pseudonym AC Smith, the writer played as a goalkeeper for amateur side Portsmouth Association Football Club, a precursor of the modern Portsmouth FC.
8. Doyle ran for parliament... twice!
Doyle ran for parliament (representing the Unionist Party) once in Edinburgh (in 1900) and once in the Border Burghs (in 1906). Although he received a respectable vote both times he was not elected. In the 1900 general election, Doyle was defeated by CM Brown of the Liberal Party, who received 3,028 votes against 2,459 cast for Doyle.
9. He was too fat to fight
The reason why he couldn’t become a soldier in the Boer War was because he was overweight. Instead, he volunteered as a ship's doctor and sailed to Africa.
10. Ophthalmology's loss was literature's gain
Arthur Conan Doyle set up an ophthalmology practice in London. Doyle wrote in his autobiography that not a single patient ever crossed his door. Although, the silver lining was that he could dedicate his time to writing.
11. He believed in fairies
Sherlock might have been a sceptic but Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies. Well, he was convinced by the Cottingley Fairy photographs, the famous 1917 hoax. He even spent a million dollars promoting them and wrote a book, The Coming of the Fairies (1921), on their authenticity.
One of the Cottingley Fairies photographs, taken by Elsie Wright (15) and her cousin Frances Griffiths, which caused a storm in 1917
12. And also believed in a number of mediums
But this came at the cost of his friendship with Harry Houdini, who at the same time was trying to disprove the claims of the Spiritualist movement.
13. Why he killed off his most famous creation?
Sherlock Holmes was far from being Doyle’s own favourite character and was killed off in 1893, only to be resurrected 10 years later after public demand and monetary persuasion. He had earlier told a friend: "I couldn't revive him if I would, at least not for years, for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day." However, there may have been other reasons for the writer killing off his famous creation, as it happened in the same year that Doyle’s alcoholic father died in an asylum.
14. He shares his birthday with Wagner
As well as composer Richard Wagner, Doyle also shares his birthday (22 May) with actor Laurence Olivier, singer Morrissey, model Naomi Campbell and tennis player Novak Djokovic.
15. Doyle and George Bernard Shaw had a spat about the Titanic
After the Titanic sank in 1912, Doyle and George Bernard Shaw had a very public disagreement about the disaster. Doyle was outraged by the dismissive and bitter comments made by the playwright regarding the many acts of heroics that took place aboard the ship as it went down.
16. There's a square in Switzerland named after him
The town of Meiringen in Switzerland was the location of The Adventure of the Final Problem, the novel in which the author killed the detective off. In 1988, a statue of Sherlock Holmes was placed in the village square, now named Conan Doyle Place.
A sign marking the Conan Doyle Square in the town of Meiringen
17. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn't just write mysteries, he actually solved a few
One of particular interest to him was The Curious Case of Oscar Slater - for the murder of Marion Gilchrist, a wealthy 82-year-old woman from Glasgow. Doyle applied the “Holmes method”, in which he uncovered new evidence, recalled witnesses and questioned the prosecution's evidence. His findings were published as a plea for Slater's pardon. It caused a sensation and there were calls for a retrial, but all this was promptly ignored by the Scottish authorities. The desperate and incarcerated Slater later smuggled messages out of prison and Doyle's interest in the case was reignited. He wrote to politicians and used his own money to fund Slater's legal fees. One politician, Ramsay McDonald - Britain's first Labour prime minister - informed the Scottish Secretary that the police and the legal authorities had colluded to withhold evidence and influence witnesses. Slater was subsequently released from prison with £6,000 compensation but never shared it with Doyle.
18. Doyle died holding a flower
Doyle died on July 7, 1930. He collapsed in his garden, clutching his heart with one hand and holding a flower in the other. His last words were to his wife. He whispered to her: “You are wonderful.”
19. A séance was organised for him to make an appearance from beyond the grave
Following his death, a séance was conducted at the Royal Albert Hall. Thousands attended, including his wife and children. A row of chairs were arranged on the stage for the family, with one left empty for Sir Arthur. Even though he did not appear, there were many people in the audience who claimed they had felt his presence among them.
