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CONAN DOYLE’S TIMES
Whether playing cricket with James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, and Anthony Hope, the author of The Prisoner of Zenda, or golfing in a Vermont field with Rudyard Kipling, or writing plays for the leading actors of his day, or dining with William Waldorf Astor, or Winston Churchill, or Theodore Roosevelt, or the Prince of Wales, it can seem as if Conan Doyle was always at the centre of the great literary and political circles of his era. But this exalted life only came after many years of poverty and hard work, struggling first to make a success of himself as a physician, and then as a writer. His letters provide a rich and compelling chronicle of those times, from such commonplace matters as food parcels from home (‘the duck was in perfect condition after eight days’ travel’) through glamorous poetic descriptions of exotic foreign lands:
I ascended the pyramid this evening and saw the sunset. On one side the green delta of the Nile, still shining with scattered pools from the subsiding rivers, the minarets of Cairo in the distance, many scattered mud-coloured villages, lines of camels slouching from one to the other—on the other side the huge grey plain & rolling hillochs of the Sahara which extends straight from here to the Atlantic, 3000 miles.
His letters deal with a range of subjects that defined the age, including the literary and theatre worlds of both Britain and America, the British struggle for empire in Egypt and the Sudan; his country’s bitterly controversial war in South Africa; bitterly contested politics at home (including his own two campaigns for a seat in the House of Commons); the sunnier world of sports (including the early days of the Olympic Games); the perennial and unsolvable question of Ireland; divorce law reform and women’s suffrage (he was in favour of the first, and against the second); warnings about Germany’s intentions in the days before World War I and reports from the front after the war broke out; the coming of automobiles, motorcycles, airplanes, submarines, radio, and motion pictures; and many insights into famous contemporaries.
The result is both an intimate memoir and a window opening onto a bygone age. In these letters, especially the ones to his mother, Conan Doyle held few things back, from the lofty ambitions of youth—‘We’ll aim high, old lady, and consider the success of a lifetime, rather than the difference of a fifty pound note in an annual screw’—through the critical disappointments of his struggle to free himself from the public’s demand for more and more Sherlock Holmes, and his restless search for ‘some big purpose’ that would define his life and career.
SHERLOCK HOLMES, AND OTHER WORK
As one might expect, these letters hold many revelations about the origins of Sherlock Holmes. Not only does the young author give a vivid account of the great detective’s fitful beginnings, but it is intriguing to note many details from Conan Doyle’s private life that transferred into the stories. The letters from the 1880s spent in Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth on the Channel coast, where the first two Holmes novels were written, offer vivid details of Conan Doyle’s early struggles as an aspiring author. He writes frequently of his difficulties in making ends meet, his problems with tax collectors, and trying to get by selling anonymous stories to the popular magazines of the day. As he makes his first tentative steps into the literary arena, he offers blunt assessments of each new manuscript (‘I have completed a very ghastly Animal Magnetic vampirey sort of a tale’), and details the apparently endless round of rejections that his early work amassed: ‘My dear, I am continually sending things to the Cornhill and they send them back with a perseverance worthy of a better cause.’
The eventual success of Sherlock Holmes (‘Sherlock Holmes seems to have caught on,’ he told his mother in 1891, in one of the great under-statements in literary history), and Conan Doyle’s notorious ambivalence toward his most famous creation, formed a thread throughout his life. The first two Sherlock Holmes novels in 1887 and 1889 were failures, but as the short stories burst onto the pages of the Strand magazine in 1891, Conan Doyle welcomed the sudden rush of wealth and fame. But very soon he became wary of being too closely associated with what he called the ‘humbler plane’ of detective fiction. ‘He takes me from better things,’ he told his mother.
The ‘better things’ included the historical novels he loved so much, after having been raised on the works of Sir Walter Scott. His first breakthrough came with a historical novel called Micah Clarke in 1889, and in 1891 his tale of the Middle Ages, The White Company, helped to convince him that he could give up medicine for writing. In books like these he believed that he was writing enduring literature, and he expected to achieve critical success—particularly with his 1906 novel Sir Nigel, a prequel to The White Company, the two of which, taken together, he believed formed a new and lasting contribution to the national saga.
Yet most critics saw them as merely tales of adventure, and not as entertaining as Sherlock Holmes, or as the picaresque Brigadier Gerard stories about the Napoleonic wars, or as Professor Challenger in pioneering science-fiction tales like The Lost World. It chafed Conan Doyle greatly, but in fact he had been true to a sentiment that he had expressed in an 1894 interview: ‘We talk so much about art that we tend to forget what this art was ever invented for. It was to amuse mankind—to help the sick and the dull and the weary. If Scott and Dickens have done this for millions, they have done well by their art.’
EDITING CONAN DOYLE’S LETTERS
Conan Doyle, like Dr Watson, had a tendency to be careless with dates. Of the many hundreds of letters written to his mother over more than fifty years, only a handful were dated. It was a daunting, at times maddening, task to determine the chronology of the letters based on stationery, return addresses (when present), and internal evidence. ‘The novel goes well,’ he often wrote, but which novel? ‘I have written a fine story’, but which story? ‘Many thanks for the birthday wishes’, but which birthday? Sherlock Holmes himself might have found it a three-pipe problem, and we would not be surprised to find the occasional letter out of place.
Conan Doyle was also careless with spelling and punctuation, a boyhood habit that persisted to some degree his entire life. Except where important for purposes of clarity, we have let spelling and punctuation errors stand as they appear in his letters.
Whenever possible Conan Doyle has been allowed to speak for himself. Many important things in his life occurred outside the compass of these letters. For the most part, the interconnective narrative we have provided tries not to stray from the spirit and content of what Conan Doyle himself chose to convey in his letters, in order to reflect as far as possible the weight and emphasis he gave the matters that he chose to report. But readers should keep in mind that his actual interests and activities and associations were even broader and more numerous than the many referred to here.
Conan Doyle lived at home with his family while attending Edinburgh University in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and therefore had no occasion to write letters describing, among many other striking features of a medical student’s life, his remarkable instructor Dr Joseph Bell, who helped inspire the character of Sherlock Holmes. In this instance, and in others, the void has been filled with other accounts from Conan Doyle’s own pen, so as to extend the fabric of personal narrative wherever possible.
Some liberties have been taken in editing the letters for publication. Shirley Nicholson points out in her book A Victorian Household (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1994) that Victorians were constantly concerned for, indeed vocal about, their health. Conan Doyle, though living an active, robust, in fact athletic life, was no exception. From boyhood he claimed to suffer from neuralgia, and his letters constantly report head colds and sore throats. We have left intact enough variations on ‘I have a cold’ and ‘I have one of my throats’ to give the idea, but have stricken many more for fear of exhausting the reader’s patience. Similarly, Conan Doyle often conveyed tedious financial information to his mother in his letters, with scrupulous attention to the status and outlook of their investments. We have let many such references stand, but only the most single-minded reader would wish for all of them.
Finally, these letters do not solve all the mysteries about Conan Doyle’s life. It seems evident that the eight-year-old boy was not sent away to school in order to protect him from a drunken father—but Charles Doyle still remains a misty figure about whom scholars would wish to know more. The letters provide more information about the turbulent influence of Dr Bryan Charles Waller, who became part of the household in Edinburgh for a time in the 1870s—but nowhere near as much as students of Conan Doyle’s life would wish. And while Conan Doyle’s investigation of psychic phenomena and spiritualism began when he was a struggling doctor in Southsea in the early 1880s, he told his apparently unsympathetic mother next to nothing about it until 1916, when he finally embraced Spiritualism to fill the religious vacuum in his life.
Whatever gaps remain, these letters will allow Conan Doyle’s admirers to come to know him as never before—as a boy and a man, a physician and a writer, a public figure and a private person. For many readers past and present, Sherlock Holmes is a far more vivid presence on the literary landscape than the versatile and intriguing man who created him. Now, perhaps for the first time, Conan Doyle himself emerges whole from the shadows of Baker Street, as distinctive and memorable as any of his literary creations.
Conan Doyle at the age of 6, drawn by his uncle Richard Doyle
*His son Adrian, who exerted a considerable sway over his father’s early biographers, insisted that his grandmother was, very grandly, ‘The Ma’am’. In fact, Conan Doyle seldom addressed letters to his mother as ‘Dearest Ma’am’; the term he used most frequently by far was ‘Mam’—and after that, ‘Mammie’.
*We are indebted to Philip G. Bergem of St Paul, Minnesota, on whose invaluable reference work The Family and Residences of Arthur Conan Doyle (St Paul, MN: Picardy Place Press, 2003) we have relied heavily throughout this book.
1 The Schoolboy (1867-1876)
‘You have talents enough and we have every reason to hope that you mean to make the most of them.’
—FATHER REGINALD COLLEY, STONYHURST COLLEGE, 1876
Arthur Conan Doyle’s literary turn of mind showed itself early. In 1864, not yet five years old, he took up a pencil to craft a thirty-six-word story involving a Bengal tiger and a hunter armed with ‘knife, gun and pistle’. Recalling the story later, he said he had ‘remarked to my mother with precocious wisdom that it was easy to get people into scrapes, but not so easy to get them out again.’ But she was impressed enough with his effort to report it to Michael Conan, Arthur’s great-uncle and godfather. A distinguished journalist in Paris, his surname had been added to theirs at christening to form the compound name Conan Doyle, which Arthur and Annette alone among the seven children bore.
When Arthur met his godfather years later, at the end of his schooling, he found Michael Conan to be ‘an intellectual Irishman of the type which originally founded the Sinn Fein movement,’ he reported in Memories and Adventures: ‘He was as keen on heraldry and genealogy as my mother, and he traced his descent in some circuitous way from the Dukes of Brittany, who were all Conans.’ Upon meeting ‘this dear old volcanic Irishman’ whose sister had been Conan Doyle’s paternal grandmother, the strapping young man discovered that he was ‘built rather on [Michael Conan’s] lines of body and mind than on any of the Doyles.’
Michael Conan had been impressed with the four-year-old Arthur’s literary precocity, and provided advice for his education that Mary Doyle followed—and some later advice for his young godson as well.
Michael Conan to Mary Doyle PARIS, APRIL 11, 1864
With regard to that philosopher, Master Arthur, whose sympathy with the carnivorous tiger is so ultra comical. I shall look to his development with great interest. The question you ask about his schooling can have scarcely yet arisen. Keep him at your apronstrings for two or three years more, at least. You can teach him much of the initiating and more necessary matters. Win him into multiplication, division and the rule of three and make him practically familiar with geography. I would soon familiarize him with maps. His more serious schooling gives rise to a nice question. I perfectly accord with you, in all your expansive geniality of opinion—in all your unexclusive humanity—remembering your friend Burns’ prophetic record—
‘It’s coming yet, for a that that man to man, the world over shall brothers be, for a that.’
and I do not encourage my old acquaintances, the Jesuits, for their devotion to the per-centa creed—but in matters of education—I mean mere secular education, they are, from experience and their employment therein, of the highest order of mind, unmatched. Therefore the question will assume this form—viz, have you any school at Edinburgh where a boy of gentle birth can be thoroughly well instructed on terms as reasonable as those which you would have to disburse in consigning Master Arthur to the Jesuits—and that gives rise to the further query—have you in Edinburgh, as they have in Dublin, a good Jesuit day school? But this question, as I have said, cannot be ripe for decision for two or three years more. In the meantime, keep your attention awake on the subject and be ready for the final move, when made it must perforce be. As to Arthur’s future development, that, apart from Nature’s endowments, will much depend upon the mother who cherishes him and at once secures his love and respect.
Three years later Michael Conan presented his godson, now eight, with a book about French history, feeding a growing interest in pageantry and ancient codes of honour. Already the boy was fascinated with tales of knights and their deeds, and the sweep and glamour of history—‘which,’ he later wrote, ‘I drank in with my mother’s milk.’
Mary Foley at the of her marriage, by Richard Doyle
Michael Conan to Arthur Conan Doyle PARIS, JULY 7, 1867
My dearest Laddie
I am happy to have an opportunity to send you the accompanying book—from which, I hope you will derive not a little pleasure and that, I know, you will value more, instruction. It is a very sketchy little history of France, with coloured illustrations, giving portraits, in their various costumes, of the Kings and Queens of that country, from the earliest up, even to the present time. You will find gratification in studying these attentively—and, I feel sure that, with the instruction of your dearest Mama who is so well acquainted with the French language, you will, at no distant time, become acquainted with it and thus read the text, by which you will be more especially introduced to their Majesties.
Believe me to be
My Dearest Laddie
Your loving Godfather
That autumn Arthur left Edinburgh for England, and a Jesuit education. It was a big change, but in some ways a welcome one. ‘Of my boyhood I need say little,’ he wrote in Memories and Adventures, ‘save that it was Spartan at home and more Spartan at the Edinburgh school [Newington Academy] where a tawse-brandishing schoolmaster of the old type made our young lives miserable. From the age of seven to nine [sic] I suffered under this pock-marked, one-eyed rascal who might have stepped from the pages of Dickens. In the evenings, home and books were my sole consolation, save for week-end holidays. My comrades were rough boys, and I became a rough boy, too.’
He spent the next two academic years at Hodder House, a preparatory school for Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, and another five at Stonyhurst itself, established in 1593 as one of England’s two foremost Roman Catholic schools for boys.* He was only eight years old when he travelled by train to Preston, Lancashire, the nearest station. ‘It was a long journey for a little boy who had never been away from home before,’ he recalled, ‘and I felt very lonesome and wept bitterly upon the way.’ He put on a brave face nonetheless in frequent letters home to his mother, and occasional ones to his father.
to Mary Doyle HODDER HOUSE, OCTOBER 13, 1867
dear mama I am getting on nicely the only thing i find at all difficult is my Latin Exercise but I will soon be accustomed to it I and 2 other boys had a constaio [sic] and I won 1 of them and was equal to another. I am to get a nice little bible picture for winning—my love to everybody except Mrs Russel*—did lottie get the little picture?
I am ever your own boy.
A Conan Doyle
to Mary Doyle HODDER HOUSE, MARCH 28, 1868
I hope you are quite well I send some little french foot soldiers for cony and lottie please write soon, many thanks for the little whale, we are in the midst of the easter holiday. I hope tot is getting on nicely at school I am having the greatest fun cricket is such a jolly game.
When he entered his second year at Hodder he settled into the rigorous academic routine, but to his delight the ‘rough boy’ from Edinburgh also began to excel in sports. ‘I could hold my own both in brain and in strength with my comrades,’ he later recalled. Cricket became a consuming passion for the rest of his life, and he played many other sports also. Although he felt the separation from his family keenly, he was grateful for the encouragement he received from some of his masters. ‘I was fortunate,’ he recalled, ‘to get under the care of a kindly principal, one Father Cassidy, who was more human than Jesuits usually are.’
As Christmas approached at the end of 1868 he was among the boys who remained at school under the staff’s care. Why is not spelled out, though he was not the only boy to spend Christmas holidays at school, and it was most likely due to the expense of travel. He wrote home eagerly anticipating a package of food that would sustain him through the several holiday weeks. His first communion in May was a landmark.
to Mary Doyle HODDER HOUSE, DECEMBER 13, 1868
I did very well this term I was Distinguished and any boy that gets Distinguished 3 times during the year gets what is called the good-day they can do what they like they fish they hunt they bath they go walks they do what they like for a prize I have got these marks 55 for arithmetic I am not sure what I got for the examen but I think I got about 100 For compositions 359 for this term so that im in a pretty fair way for a prize I send you my compositions just to let you see how Im getting on at christmas we get into company’s of 3 or 5 and each boy gives a little of his christmas box to his neighbour and the neighbour gives him a bit of his I have got three in my company Remember mama to send my box to red Lions inn* on the twenty third I hope tots is getting on nicely and has Coney got her first tooth that tooth seems to be asleep because it never comes however I hope it will come by christmas day
