Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930)

Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland, into a very strict Roman Catholic family. He was educated in Jesuit schools in the United Kingdom (Stoney-hurst) and in Austria (Stella Matutina) until he was 17. Although he was apparently attracted by the mystical, sacramental, and eucharistic aspects of Catholicism, he began to doubt his faith during his years at the Jesuit schools.

When Doyle entered the University of Edinburgh at age 17, he was, by his own account, a nonbeliever. "I found that the foundations not only of Roman Catholicism but of the whole Christian faith, as presented to me in nineteenth century theology, were so weak that my mind could not build upon them." These conditions had, according to Doyle, "driven me to agnosticism." It was during his university years that he came under the influence of materialists such as Joseph Bell, his self-proclaimed prototype for Sherlock Holmes, who taught his students the process of deductive reasoning through the observation of material phenomena.

As a result of this training, Doyle became convinced that every mystery of life could be solved through observation and deductive reasoning. Yet despite this training, his previous rejection of Catholicism, and his self-professed agnosticism, he continued to investigate religions, because without a religious foundation he felt a void in his life.

In 1881 Doyle received his medical degree and in 1882 set up a medical practice in Southsea (a suburb of Portsmouth), where he remained until 1890. Even while attending medical school, Doyle had actively investigated "new religions" in an effort to fill the void created when he left the Roman Catholic Church. He attended his first séance in 1880, and many of his short stories published in the 1880s reflect his interest in Spiritualism and his growing acceptance of it. Before the turn of the century Doyle had become interested in Theosophy, the Rosicrucians, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and Mormonism.

In 1887 Doyle published A Study in Scarlet, which was the first of 60 Sherlock Holmes stories he eventually wrote. Holmes proved to be his most popular fictional character. That same year he wrote two letters to the weekly Spiritualist periodical Light, in which he recounted his conversion to Spiritualism. In these letters Doyle wrote that he became convinced that Spiritualism was true after reading books on the subject by John W. Edmonds, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Alfred Drayson.

To put their writings to a test, he formed a circle of six that met at a Southsea residence on nine or ten occasions. This group received messages through table turning and automatic writing, but the significance of these events was inconclusive until an experienced medium with "considerable mediumistic power" was invited to sit with the circle. This medium, writing under control, told Doyle not to read a book by Leigh Hunt that he found convincing because neither the medium nor any of his group knew he was debating whether he should read the book.

Because of this experience, Doyle became convinced that Spiritualism taught the truth:

"[T]he incident which, after many months of inquiry, showed me at last that it was absolutely certain that intelligence could exist apart from the body…. After weighing the evidence, I could no more doubt the existence of the phenomena than I could doubt the existence of lions in Africa, though I have been to that continent and have never chanced to see one…. Let me conclude by exhorting any other searcher never to despair of receiving personal testimony but to persevere through any number of failures until at last conviction comes to him, as, it will."

Several weeks later he wrote another letter to Light, which he wrote "[a]s a Spiritualist" and in which he opined that "Spiritualism in the abstract has no 'weak points' " but admitted that "respectable Spiritualists persist in supporting and employing men who have been proved, as far as anything mundane is capable of proof, to be swindlers of the lowest order." Although he was ready to accept that "they have real but intermittent psychical powers," he was also convinced that such charlatans were "noxious parasites" who were the "greatest bane" of Spiritualism. Doyle had received his "definite demonstration," which he believed was necessary before he could embrace any new religion. Spiritualism provided the evidence that life continues after death and that a form of religion exists that is consistent with primitive Christianity and all its attendant miracles.

From 1887 to 1916 Doyle continued to participate in the Spiritualist movement. He wrote letters concerning religious issues, joined the Society for Psychical Research, and contributed thousands of pounds to the Spiritualist periodical Light. Although he did not proselytize the cause of Spiritualism, as he later would, Doyle did attend séances and studied psychic phenomena as part of his continuing search for truth. Many of his short stories published before 1916 also portray Spiritualist ideas and concepts in a favorable light.

Doyle also wrote three books during this period that his biographers have described as autobiographical: Beyond the City (1893), The Stark Munro Letters (1895), and A Duet With an Occasional Chorus (1899). In the most important of these works, The Stark Munro Letters, Doyle's hero, Stark Munro, reveals that he has only the "vaguest idea as to whence I have come from, whither I am going, or what I am here for. It is not for want of inquiry, or from indifference. I have mastered the principles of several religions. They have all shocked me by the violence which I should have to do to my reason to accept the dogmas of any one of them…. I see so clearly that faith is not a virtue, but a vice. It is a goat which has been headed with the sheep." And yet Doyle, through Munro, also admits that his loss of faith was traumatic: "When first I came out of the faith in which I had been reared, I certainly did feel for a time as if my life-belt had burst. I won't exaggerate and say that I was miserable and plunged in utter spiritual darkness." Munro also reflects Doyle's optimism for the future of religions: "The forms of religion will be abandoned, but the essence will be maintained; so that one universal creed will embrace the whole civilized earth…."

Doyle's most productive period for writing fiction occurred after his conversion to Spiritualism. His best-known Sherlock Holmes stories were The Sign of Four (1890); The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892); The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894); and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). Doyle also "killed off" Sherlock Holmes—to concentrate on more serious literary efforts and his studies of Spiritualism—by drowning him in Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Ironically, Holmes was resurrected, or at least "born again," from the waters of Reichenbach in 1905 in The Return of Sherlock Holmes to help supplement Doyle's income. Later books on Holmes—The Valley of Fear (1915), His Last Bow (1917), and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927)—helped enable Doyle to actively pursue his missionary efforts on behalf of Spiritualism.

Even though Doyle was a believer in Spiritualism beginning in the late 1880s, in 1916 he wrote an article in Light in which he enthusiastically proclaimed a new dedication to it. Subsequently he began to actively proselytize for the Spiritualist cause. World War I had finally convinced him to more fully embrace the movement: "I might have drifted on for my whole life as a psychical Researcher … [b]ut the War came, and … it brought earnestness into all our souls and made us look more closely at our own beliefs and reassess our values."

As a result of this "earnestness," he finally recognized that "this subject with which I had so long dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the rules of science, but that it was really something tremendous, a breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction." Doyle also realized, apparently for the first time, that "the physical phenomena … are really of no account, and that their real value consists in the fact that they … make religion a very real thing, no longer a matter of faith, but a matter of actual experience and fact." As such, he turned with great zeal from the objective study of Spiritualism to proselytism.

Shortly after his second "conversion" he wrote two books, The New Revelation and The Vital Message, in which he proclaimed his personal belief in the movement. In addition, he wrote numerous letters to the press on the subject of Spiritualism in which he summarized the beliefs and practices of Spiritualists and claimed that he could not "recall any miracle in the New Testament which has not been claimed, upon good authority, as having occurred in the experience of spiritualists"; that Spiritualism is nothing more than what one would find "if he goes back nineteen hundred years and studies the Christianity of Christ"; that the date Spiritualism was organized in upstate New York in 1848 "is in truth the greatest date in human history since the great revelation of two thousand years ago;" and that no faith is necessary to realize that Spiritualism is true.

During the last decade of his life Doyle began spending great sums of money and traveled many thousands of miles to proselytize for the Spiritualist cause in Australia and New Zealand (1920-21), the United States and Canada (1922-23), France (1925), South Africa, Rhodesia, Uganda, Tanganyika and Kenya (1928-29), Scandinavia and Holland (1929), and, of course, England (1916-30). He also recorded a famous Movie-tone interview in 1927 that has never before been published in its entirety.

In 1924 Doyle also translated a book, Jeanne D'Arc Medium (Paris: Librairie des Sciences Psychiques, 1910), written by Leon Denis. Denis, like Doyle, was an adherent of Spiritualism. In his introduction to the translation Doyle extols Joan of Arc's virtues:

"[M]y personal conviction [is] that, next to the Christ, the highest spiritual being of whom we have an exact record upon the earth is the girl Joan…. Apart from the question of Christ's divinity, and comparing the two characters upon a purely human plane, there was much analogy between them. Each was sprung from the laboring class. Each proclaimed an inspired commission. Each was martyred while still young. Each was acclaimed by the common people and betrayed or disregarded by the great. Each excited the bitter hatred of the church of their time, the high priests of which in each case conspired for their death."

But Doyle does not stop there. He notes that Denis was a student of psychic matters and that his work is valuable since it gives us "some intelligible reason for the obvious miracle that a girl of nineteen, who could neither read nor write, and knew nothing of military affairs, was able in a few months to turn the tide of a hundred years' war and to save France from becoming a vassal of England."

In 1926, two years after publishing Jeanne D'Arc, Doyle published a two-volume work on the history of Spiritualism in which he attempted to present Spiritualism in a historical and topical perspective. Perhaps the most ironic development in Doyle's quest for a new religion occurred when he began to see himself increasingly as "a prophet of the future of the whole world…." The Doyles were now put in personal contact with the guide to this uncertain future, an Arabian spirit called Pheneas, who communicated through Jean Doyle's [Arthur's wife] automatic writing.

Doyle's belief in the hereafter became increasingly premised on very specific communications from Pheneas through his wife, Jean. Receiving such messages caused him to state his absolute belief in the hereafter: "I have not only received … prophecies [concerning the end of the world] in a very consistent and detailed form, but also so large a number of independent corroborations that it is difficult for me to doubt that there lies some solid truth at the back of these."

Although Doyle remained committed to Spiritualism, he apparently became discouraged when the prophecies and revelations concerning the end of the world that had been communicated through Pheneas were not fulfilled, and he speculated that he and his wife may have become "victims of some extraordinary prank played upon the human race from the other side."

Doyle was still a dedicated Spiritualist at the time of his death in 1930. Until his death Doyle remained convinced that life continued after death, because of ongoing communications from deceased family members who assured him that they lived in the spirit world. These communications remained the "definite demonstration" that he had sought since his days at the University of Edinburgh. He believed that these apparitions and other evidence of Spiritualism provided a factual basis from which he could deduce, in the same manner that Sherlock Holmes would have deduced, that life continues after death. Given his acceptance of these apparitions, it is hardly surprising that Doyle was also convinced that his acceptance of Spiritualism was completely consistent with the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes and Holmes's observation that "there is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion….It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner."

Doyle died in 1930 in Crowborough, Sussex, England.

Sources:

Carr, John Dickson. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. London: John Murray, 1949.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. Letters to the Press. Edited by John M. Gibson and Richard L. Green. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986.

Edwards, Owen Dudley. The Quest for Sherlock Holmes, A Biographical Study of Arthur Conan Doyle. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1983.

Jones, Kelvin I. Conan Doyle and the Spirits: The Spiritualist Career of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Wellingborough, England: Aquarian Press, 1989.

Lellenberg, Jon L. The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

McCearney, James. Arthur Conan Doyle. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1988.

Nordon, Pierre. Conan Doyle. London: John Murray, 1966.

Pearson, Hesketh. Conan Doyle, His Life and Art. London: Methuen, 1943.

Stavert, Geoffrey. A Study in Southsea. Portsmouth, England: Milestone Publications, 1987.

Arthur Conan Doyle

BORN: 1859, Edinburgh, Scotland

DIED: 1930, Crowborough, Sussex, England

NATIONALITY: British

GENRE: Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama

MAJOR WORKS:
A Study in Scarlet (1887)
The Sign of Four (1890)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
The Lost World (1912)

Overview

Although, as critic Ivor Brown has noted, “there was far more in Doyle's literary life than the invention of his fascinating and volatile detective,” it is as the creator of Sherlock Holmes that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is remembered. The volumes of historical analysis for which he was knighted have been virtually forgotten; his extensively researched historical novels have not endured. Likewise, his other stories and novels, including some works of early science fiction, are largely overshadowed by the

exploits of Holmes, the world's first consulting detective and one of the most famous literary creations of all time.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

An Aspiring Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on May 22, 1859, into an Irish Roman Catholic family of noted artistic achievement. After attending Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, he entered Edinburgh University as a medical student in 1876. One of his mentors at Edinburgh was Dr. Joseph Bell, who would later serve Doyle as the model for his detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle received a doctor of medicine degree in 1885. In his spare time, however, he began to write stories.

Doyle grew up in a time known as the Victorian era, during which Queen Victoria ruled England and its territories (including Scotland). Queen Victoria sat on the throne longer than any other British monarch, from 1837 until 1901. This period saw significant changes for both Britain and Europe as a whole, with industrialization leading much of the population to jobs in factories instead of on farms as in the past. The era also saw advances in the sciences and scientific thinking, reflected in Doyle's detective fiction.

Early Writing and the Birth of Holmes After two long sea voyages as a ship's doctor, Doyle practiced medicine at Southsea, England, from 1882 to 1890. In 1885 he married Louise Hawkins and in March 1891 moved his young family to London, where he began to specialize in ophthalmology. His practice remained small, however, and since one of his anonymous stories—a hoax about the real-life “ghost ship” Marie Celeste called “Habakuk Jephson's Statement”—had enjoyed considerable success when it appeared in the Cornhill Magazine in 1884, he began to devote himself seriously to writing.

The result was his first novel, A Study in Scarlet, which introduced the detective Sherlock Holmes to the reading public in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887. This was followed by two historical novels in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott, Micah Clarke in 1889 and The White Company in 1891. The immediate and prolonged success of these works led Doyle to abandon medicine and launch his career as a man of letters.

The second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four (1890), was followed by the first Holmes short story, “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891). The instant popularity of these tales made others like them a regular monthly feature of the Strand Magazine, and the famous Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series was begun. In subsequent stories Doyle developed Holmes into a highly individualized and eccentric character, together with his companion, Dr. Watson, the narrator of the stories, and the pair came to be readily accepted as living persons by readers in England and America. In addition to his

popularity among the reading public, Holmes's use of scientific techniques in solving crimes both echoed and helped popularize forensic science, particularly finger printing which was in its infancy in the nineteenth century. Further, Holmes's use of observation and deduction paralleled some of the important discoveries of nineteenth-century science, such as Charles Darwin published in The Origin of the Species and William Smith in the Geological Map of England and Wales and Scotland.

But Doyle seems to have considered these stories a distraction from his more serious writing, eventually grew tired of them, and in “The Final Problem,” published in December 1893, plunged Holmes and his archenemy, Dr. Moriarty, to their apparent deaths in the falls of Reichenbach. Nine years later, however, he published a third Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, but dated the action before Holmes's “death.” Then, in October 1903, Holmes effected his mysterious resurrection in “The Empty House” and thereafter appeared intermittently until 1927, three years before Doyle's own death. All told, Doyle wrote fifty-six Sherlock Holmes stories and four novels (The Valley of Fear, 1914, was the last).

Other Literary Aspirations Among the other works published early in his career, which Doyle felt were more representative of his true artistry, were Beyond the City (1892), a short novel of contemporary urban life; The Great Shadow (1892), a historical novel of the Napoleonic period; The Refugees (1893), a historical novel about French Huguenots; and The Stark Munro Letters (1894), an autobiographical novel. In 1896 he issued one of his best-known historical novels, Rodney Stone, which was followed by another historical novel, Uncle Bernac (1897); a collection of poems, Songs of Action (1898); and two less popular novels, The Tragedy of Korosko (1898) and A Duet (1899).

Nonfiction Work After the outbreak of the Boer War, Doyle's energy and patriotic zeal led him to serve as chief surgeon of a field hospital at Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1900. His The Great Boer War (1900) was widely read and praised for its fairness to both sides. In 1902 he wrote a long pamphlet, The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, to defend the British action in South Africa against widespread criticism by pacifist groups. In August 1902 Doyle was knighted for his service to England.

After being twice defeated, in 1900 and 1906, in a bid for a seat in Parliament, Sir Arthur published Sir Nigel (1906), a popular historical novel of the Middle Ages. The following year he married his second wife, Jean Leckie (his first wife having died of tuberculosis in 1906). Doyle now took up a number of political and humanitarian causes. In 1909 he wrote Divorce Law Reform, championing equal rights for women in British law, and The Crime of the Congo, attacking the exploitation of that colony by Belgium. In 1911 he published a second collection of poems, Songs of the Road, and in 1912 began a series of science fiction stories with the novel The Lost World, featuring another of his famous characters, Professor Challenger.

After the outbreak of World War I, Doyle organized the Civilian National Reserve against the threat of German invasion. In 1916 he published A Visit to Three Fronts and in 1918 again toured the front lines. These tours, plus extensive correspondence with a number of high-ranking officers, enabled him to write his famous account The British Campaigns in France and Flanders, published in six volumes (1916–1919).

LITERARY AND HISTORICAL CONTEMPORARIES

Doyle's famous contemporaries include:

Queen Victoria (1819–1901): The longest-reigning British monarch (sixty-three years), she gave her name to the age. Her “hands off” approach to rule allowed a succession of dynamic prime ministers to chart an imperialist course for Britain.

Brigham Young (1801–1877): First governor of Utah and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1847 to his death. Called the “American Moses” by his followers for leading them through the desert to the “promised land” near the Great Salt Lake.

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936): English author and poet, remembered chiefly for his stories set in India as well as his pro-Imperialist poems such as “Gunga Din.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928): English novelist whose work explored the psychological depth of characters whose lives were nonetheless determined by societal forces outside their control.

Oliver Wendell Homes (1808–1894): Popular American poet, novelist, doctor, lecturer, and wit, he dominated the intellectual life of New England for much of the nineteenth century.

Spiritualism Doyle had been interested in spiritualism since he rejected his Roman Catholic faith in 1880. In 1915 he apparently experienced a “conversion” to “psychic religion,” so that after the war he devoted the rest of his life and career to propagating his new faith in a series of works: The New Revelation (1918), The Vital Message (1919), The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921), and History of Spiritualism (1926). From 1917 to 1925 he lectured on spiritualism throughout Europe, Australia, the United States, and Canada. The same cause led him to South Africa in 1928 and brought him home from Sweden exhausted, in 1929. He died on July 6, 1930, of a heart attack, at his home in Crow-borough, Sussex.

Works in Literary Context

Detective Fiction Although the Sherlock Holmes stories quickly became the definitive detective stories of their age, they were not the first. That honor is often accorded to Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote several stories featuring the fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin.

Charles Dickens also dipped his quill into detective mysteries with his novel Bleak House, and his protégé Wilkie Collins is often called the “grandfather of detective fiction.” Collins's novel The Moonstone (1868) is considered by some to be the greatest piece of detective fiction ever written.

Detective fiction has often been categorized as pure entertainment. In recent decades, criticism has begun to shift toward a more serious consideration of these tales. Doyle's detective stories are seen as fascinating clues to the culture in which they were written and as explorations of the attitudes characteristic of late-Victorian life.

Influence In addition to the inestimable influence his Holmes stories have had, Doyle's Lost World has spawned several cinematic adaptations, some overt, some, such as King Kong and Jurassic Park, mere homages. His Professor Challenger stories anticipated later magic realist and neo-realist efforts to blend rigorous scientific observation with fantastic events and landscapes.

Works in Critical Context

Most early book reviewers had favorable opinions of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Typical is the judgment voiced by one anonymous critic in a British periodical, The Athenaeum, who said of the collection, “Of its kind it is excellent; there is little literary pretension about it, and there is hardly any waste of time about subtle character-drawing; but incident succeeds incident with the most businesslike rapidity, and the unexpected always occurs with appropriate regularity.” Another reviewer, William Morton Payne, singled out “The Red-Headed League” for particular note in an American journal, The Dial, remarking that the story “is a striking illustration of the author's originality.” Years later, Doyle cited the same reason for ranking “The Red-Headed League” as his second favorite Holmes story (with “The Speckled Band” first). In 1959, a poll among readers of the Baker Street Journal, a magazine for Sherlock Holmes fans, concurred with Doyle.

Sherlockian Opinions The largest body of criticism on the Sherlock Holmes stories comes from groups of enthusiasts who call themselves “Sherlockians” or “Holmesians.” In over fifty journals and newsletters published worldwide, the most prominent being the American Baker Street Journal and British Sherlock Holmes Journal, writers attempt to resolve inconsistencies in the stories or deduce aspects of Holmes's and Watson's lives from clues given in the stories. The central premise shared by these writers, from which much of the fun of their essays arises, is that Holmes was an actual person who solved real mysteries.

Such articles must obviously be read from the same tongue-in-cheek perspective in which they were written. However, they often provide worthwhile information on the historical background of Doyle's stories and testify to the mystique Sherlock Holmes still holds today. One of the best examples of criticism in this “Sherlockian” vein is Gordon L. Iseminger's essay on Holmes as a Victorian archetype, since it demonstrates ways in which Holmes was a product of the culture from which he emerged.

Growing attention to both popular fiction as a category and Doyle as a writer has led critics and readers alike to reexamine Doyle's other writing, such as his science fiction and historical novels. This nearly forgotten body of work is proving to be of interest in its own right, along with its value in illuminating relationships between different types of popular fiction and parallels to the immortal Holmes stories.

COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Conan Doyle's various literary forays, from detective story to historical novel to tales of high adventure, all had established precedents from earlier in the 19th century:

Ivanhoe (1819), a novel by Sir Walter Scott. Considered the first great historical novel, this book, set in twelfth-century England, single-handedly kicked off a medieval revival craze that would influence English art, literature, and architecture for decades to come.

“The Purloined Letter” (1844), a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. This short story is often considered the first detective story, or as Poe called them, “tales of ratiocination.”

King Solomon's Mines (1885), a novel by H. Rider Haggard. This novel set in Africa features the character of Alan Quatermain leading a rescue party into “Darkest Africa.”

Responses to Literature

1. Criminology was a field in its infancy when Doyle wrote his Holmes stories. Using your library and the Internet, research some of the techniques used by police to catch criminals in the nineteenth century, twentieth century, and today. Write a paper covering developments in forensics since the mid-nineteenth century.
2. The characters Sherlock Homes and Dr. Watson came to be accepted as real by many readers at the time they were first published, and contemporary enthusiasts continue to treat the characters as if they were real, using details in the stories to infer further aspects of the personalities of Holmes and Watson. As you read the stories, notice the eccentricities of character and specific details of characterization that have made readers view the detective and his aide as historic figures.
3. Sherlock Holmes was a quintessentially British character, yet he was as popular in America as in England. Research cultural factors in turn-of-the-century America that could account for the popularity. You might also consider other factors that might have made Holmes appeal to Americans that wouldn't necessarily have appealed to British readers.
4. The Sherlock Holmes stories reflected the late Victorian culture in which they were written. The stories present the daily life, social mores, and class concerns of Victorian England. Use your library and the Web to research the social and sexual conventions for which the Victorians were known. How are these conventions different from those of contemporary society?
5. Research the principles of logic known as induction and deduction. Distinguish between them, and identify the elements of each demonstrated by Sherlock Holmes's reasoning in a Holmes story of your choice. You might wish to judge which principle predominates in Holmes's thinking, or which most aids Holmes in solving the mystery. Then write a report calling attention to use of induction and deduction in the Holmes story you have chosen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Cox, Don R. Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Ungar Publishing, 1985.

Orel, Harold, ed. Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: MacMillan, 1992.

Rodin, Alvin E., and Jack D. Key. The Medical Casebook of Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle: From Practitioner to Sherlock Holmes and Beyond. Melbourne, Fla.: Krieger Publishing, 1984.

Periodicals

Anderson, Roger. “What Sherlock Holmes Knew and How He Knew It.” Baker Street Journal 48.2 (1998): 9–18.

Fisher, Benjamin F. “The Hound of the Baskervilles 100 Years After: A Review Essay.” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920. 47.2 (2004): 181.

Web sites

The Official Web Site of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate. Accessed February 15, 2008, from http://www.sherlockholmesonline.org. Last updated in 2000.

Sherman, Michael J. 221bakerstreet.org. Accessed February 15, 2008, from http://www.221bakerstreet.org. Last updated on November 6, 2001.

DOYLE, ARTHUR CONAN

DOYLE, ARTHUR CONAN (1859–1930), British writer.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the most widely known writers in the world, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 22 May 1859. Doyle was a man of three nations: Irish by descent, Scottish by birth, and English by allegiance.

Beginning in 1870, Doyle was educated at the Roman Catholic school Stonyhurst. In 1875, Doyle went to a Jesuit school at Feldkirch in Austria. Having decided to become a doctor, the following year in 1876 Doyle enrolled at Edinburgh University, from which he received his Bachelor of Medicine degree in 1881. In 1882, he announced to his family that he had abandoned Catholicism. An adventurer, Doyle traveled to the Arctic in 1880 and to West Africa in 1881. In 1885 he was awarded his doctoral degree from Edinburgh University, having written his dissertation about syphilis.

During the time he was launching his medical career, Doyle began writing. An early story was published in the prestigious Cornhill Magazine in 1883. By 1891, Doyle had decided to leave medicine and devote himself full time to writing.

Doyle's achievements as a writer are marked by the range of forms in which he wrote. These include detective novels and stories, stories of medical life, histories, poems, historical novels, science fiction novels, writings about spiritualism, tales of terror and horror, and texts about contemporary events. In addition, he published an autobiography, Memories and Adventures, in 1924.

Doyle is renowned for his creation of the detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle modeled Holmes on one of his professors at Edinburgh University, Joseph Bell. Doyle was fascinated by the way Bell exercised logical observation to deduce the illnesses and diseases of his patients. Ultimately, Doyle wrote fifty-six short stories and four novels about the exploits of Sherlock Holmes, most of them narrated by his friend Dr. John H. Watson, with whom he shared rooms at the immortal address 221B Baker Street.

These writings about Sherlock Holmes span the late Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian periods. Holmes first appears in the novel A Study in Scarlet in 1887 in Beeton's Christmas Annual. The three other novels about Holmes are The Sign of Four (1890), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), and The Valley of Fear (1915). The short stories about Holmes begin with "A Scandal in Bohemia" in the Strand Magazine in July 1891. Holmes's decadent qualities, such as his cocaine use, become muted in the middle-class Strand. These Strand short stories were collected in five volumes: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), His Last Bow (1917), and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927).

Although many of these stories focus on crime (murder, theft, blackmail, terrorism, espionage, counterfeiting), not all these narratives do involve overt criminality. Rather, they concern transgressive behavior, which may or may not be strictly illegal or criminal, albeit amoral or immoral. For example, in "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (December 1891), Neville St. Clair impersonates a beggar even though he lives in the suburbs with his family, impelled because he is attracted by the transgression itself.

While engrossing, these tales are not escapist. Through them, Conan Doyle addresses many cultural agendas. Because Holmes is not part of the official police force but rather a private consulting detective, his methods may involve procedures that are illegal. The stories imply that law and justice are not mutually compatible. Holmes bests men such as Lestrade from Scotland Yard, raising the question of the ability of the official force to maintain order.

Multiple cultural situations are probed in these narratives. For example, the issue of gender relations is very prominent. Often, nefarious men as in "The Speckled Band" or "The Copper Beeches" try to cheat women out of their income or property, resorting to imprisoning or murdering women. Doyle questions privileged male authority at a time when women were securing educational, legal, and marital reforms.

Hence, many of these stories police masculinity and male behavior, as in "The Three Students." The damaged male body in many of these stories, such as "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," "The Crooked Man," The Sign of Four, or Watson's own shifting wound, symbolically reveals Doyle's concern with masculinity in crisis. This crisis had repercussions for the British Empire. Although Doyle supported British imperial campaigns such as the Boer War (1899–1902), it is noteworthy that criminality often originates in a colonized region only to devolve to England, as in The Sign of Four.

In many of these narratives, England is menaced by foreign nations and nationals. The threat of international espionage, a major concern as British imperial power waned, appears in many stories, such as "The Naval Treaty," "The Second Stain," or "The Bruce-Partington Plans." Fear of Germany is evident in "The Engineer's Thumb." Organized crime or global terrorist societies are a focus in such tales as "The Five Orange Pips," "The Red Circle," or The Valley of Fear. Despite Doyle's assertions of admiration for America, Americans are deceiving or deadly in several stories, including "The Yellow Face," "The Noble Bachelor," "The Dancing Men," and A Study in Scarlet. As "The Dancing Men" demonstrates, Holmes does not always succeed.

Doyle's other writings comprise a variety of literary forms. He strongly aspired to be an historical novelist in the vein of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Kingsley. Some of these efforts include The White Company (1891), set in the fourteenth century; its prequel Sir Nigel (1906); and Micah Clarke (1889), about the attempt by the Duke of Monmouth to seize the English throne in 1685. Despite Doyle's belief in these novels, they do not endure as do the Sherlock Holmes texts.

In another literary form, Doyle wrote adventure tales verging on science fiction, such as The Lost World (1912), The Poison Belt (1913), and The Land of Mist (1926). Doyle dealt with the Napoleonic era in The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896) and The Adventures of Gerard (1903). He authored dazzling short stories of terror and horror, collected in such volumes as Round the Fire Stories (1908) and Danger! And Other Stories (1918). Doyle's tales about medicine in Round the Red Lamp (1894) are exceptional. The Great Boer War (1900) shows Doyle's engagement with contemporary issues. His Collected Poems appeared in 1922. As a committed spiritualist, Doyle wrote a number of volumes about the movement, such as The New Revelation (1918), The Coming of the Fairies (1922), and The History of Spiritualism (1926).

Doyle was knighted in 1902 for his services as a doctor during the Boer War (not for authoring the Sherlock Holmes stories). Illustrious and rich, Doyle died on 7 July 1930. While he is famous for the Sherlock Holmes narratives, Doyle's achievements in so many different literary forms render him one of the most important writers of his age.

See alsoCrime; Great Britain.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. Uncollected Stories: The Unknown Conan Doyle. Edited by John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green. London, 1982.

——. "Filmed Interview" (c. 1929). Sherlock Holmes: The Great Detective. (A&E Biography). New York, 1985.

——. Memories and Adventures. Edited by Richard Lancelyn Green. London, 1988.

——. Round the Fire Stories. San Francisco, 1991.

——. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Interviews and Recollections. Edited by Harold Orel. New York, 1991.

——. The Horror of the Heights and Other Tales of Suspense. San Francisco, 1992.

——. The Oxford Sherlock Holmes. Edited by Owen Dudley Edwards, Richard Lancelyn Green, W. W. Robson, and Christopher Roden. 9 vols. Oxford, U.K., 1993.

Secondary Sources

Barnes, Alan. Sherlock Holmes on Screen. Richmond, Surrey, U.K., 2002.

Cox, Don Richard. Arthur Conan Doyle. New York, 1985.

Green, Richard Lancelyn, and John M. Gibson. A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle. Oxford, U.K., and New York, 1983.

Jaffe, Jacqueline A. Arthur Conan Doyle. Boston, 1987.

Kestner, Joseph A. Sherlock's Men: Masculinity, Conan Doyle, and Cultural History. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookfield, Vt., 1997.

Stashower, Daniel. Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. New York, 1999.

Joseph A. Kestner

Arthur Conan Doyle

Born: May 22, 1859
Edinburgh, Scotland
Died: July 6, 1930
Crowborough, Sussex, England
Scottish author, surgeon, and ophthalmologist

Arenowned English author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best remembered as the creator of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes.

Doyle's youth, education, and early career

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 22, 1859, into an Irish Roman Catholic family of noted artistic achievement. His mother, Mary Doyle, was a major influence in his life. She taught him to be a gentleman in his youth and as his writing career progressed she would give him ideas for his stories. His father, Charles, was an architect in Edinburgh, as well as an amateur artist. Together they had eight children.

As a boy, Arthur was educated at a Catholic preparatory school. After attending Stonyhurst College, he entered Edinburgh University as a medical student in 1876 and received a doctor of medicine degree in 1885. In his spare time, however, he began to write stories, which were published anonymously (without a name) in various magazines from 1878 to 1880.

After two long sea voyages as a ship's doctor, Doyle practiced medicine at Southsea, England, from 1882 to 1890. In 1885 he married Louise Hawkins and in March 1891 moved his young family to London, where he began to specialize in ophthalmology (the area of medicine involving the eye). His practice remained small, however, and since one of his anonymous stories, "Habakuk Jephson's Statement," had enjoyed considerable success when it appeared in the Cornhill Magazine in 1884, he began to dedicate himself seriously to writing.

Sherlock Holmes is introduced

Doyle's first novel, A Study in Scarlet, introduced Sherlock Holmes to the reading public. This was followed by two historical novels, Micah Clarke in 1889 and The White Company in 1891. The success of these works led Doyle to abandon medicine and launch his career as a writer.

The second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four (1890), was followed by the Holmes short story, "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891). The popularity of these tales made others like them a regular monthly feature of the Strand Magazine, and the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series was begun. Doyle eventually tired of these stories, and in "The Final Problem," published in December 1893, plunged Holmes and his enemy, Moriarty, to their apparent deaths in the falls of Reichenbach. Nine years later, however, he published a third Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, but dated the adventure before Holmes's "death." Then, in October 1903, Holmes achieved his mysterious comeback from death in "The Empty House" and thereafter appeared occasionally until 1927. All told, Doyle wrote fifty-six Sherlock Holmes stories and four novels. The Valley of Fear (1914) was the last.

Other early works

Among other works published early in Doyle's career were Beyond the City (1892), a short novel of modern city life; The Great Shadow (1892), a historical novel of the Napoleonic period; The Refugees (1893), a historical novel about French Huguenots; and The Stark Munro Letters (1894), an autobiographical (having to do with one's life) novel. In 1896 he issued one of his best-known historical novels, Rodney Stone, which was followed by another historical novel, Uncle Bernac (1897); a collection of poems, Songs of Action (1898); and two less popular novels, The Tragedy of Korosko (1898) and A Duet (1899).

Nonfiction and later career

After the outbreak of the Boer War (1899–1902; a war between the British and the northern natives or Boers of South Africa for control of the area, which the British won), Doyle served as chief, or head, surgeon of a field hospital at Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1900. His The Great Boer War (1900) was widely read and praised for its fairness to both sides. In 1902 he wrote a long booklet, The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, to defend the British action in South Africa against widespread criticism by peace-minded groups. In August 1902 Doyle was knighted for his service to England.

Doyle published Sir Nigel (1906), a popular historical novel of the Middle Ages. His wife died this same year of tuberculosis (an infectious disease that affects the lungs); and in 1907 Doyle married Jean Leckie. Doyle now took up a number of political and charitable causes. In 1909 he wrote Divorce Law Reform, supporting equal rights for women in British law, and The Crime of the Congo, attacking the mistreatment of that colony by Belgium. In 1911 he published a second collection of poems, Songs of the Road, and in 1912 began a series of science fiction stories with the novel The Lost World, featuring another of his famous characters, Professor Challenger.

After the outbreak of World War I (1914–18; a war between the German-led Central Powers and the Allies: France, England, Italy, the United States, and other nations), Doyle organized the Civilian National Reserve against the threat of German invasion. In 1916 he published A Visit to Three Fronts and in 1918 again toured the front lines. These tours, plus extensive communication with a number of officers, enabled him to write his famous account The British Campaigns in France and Flanders, published in six volumes (1916–1919).

Later life and spiritualism

Doyle had been interested in spiritualism (the belief in the ability for the living to communicate with the dead) since he rejected his Roman Catholic faith in 1880. In 1915 he experienced a new belief in "psychic religion," or spiritualism, so that after the war he devoted the rest of his life and career to spreading his new faith in a series of works: The New Revelation (1918), The Vital Message (1919), The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921), and History of Spiritualism (1926). After travelling for years to promote this cause, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died on July 6, 1930, of a heart attack, at his home in Crowborough, Sussex.

For More Information

Booth, Martin. The Doctor and the Detective. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2000.

Hardwick, Mollie. The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964.

Pascal, Janet B. Arthur Conan Doyle: Beyond Baker Street. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930)

So great is the influence of Sherlock Holmes, that only the truest of the great detective's fans know that his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, thought far less of Holmes than he did of his other creative efforts. For Doyle was not a stock-in-trade mystery writer, a genre that was still finding its legs. He certainly had not "invented" the genre of detective fiction, a privilege that belonged to Edgar Allan Poe and his own creation, master detective August Dupin. Although Doyle claimed that Holmes had been modeled on his medical school teacher, Dr. Joseph Bell, the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as Emile Gaboriau, Charles Dickens, Eugene Vidocq, and Wilkie Collins, were what provided Doyle with the basic elements for building his mythic detective.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859 in Edinburgh, the eldest son of Charles Altimont Doyle and his wife, Mary Foley. Doyle's father, a builder and designer in the Edinburgh Public Works Office, was from a staunchly Catholic family. In 1869, Doyle was enrolled in Hodder Preparatory, a Jesuit school in Lancashire. Two years later he attended the Jesuit college, Stonyhurst School, also in Lancashire. Upon graduating, he traveled to Austria, where he spent a year studying German in Feldkirch School before entering Edinburgh University in 1876 to study medicine. Despite his Jesuit education, Doyle's year in Austria proved a major turning point, as a crisis of faith led him to abandon his Catholic upbringing for a studied agnosticism. This change in religious perspective, based on his own faith in scientific reasoning, prepared Doyle for the rigors of medical school.

Interestingly, it was Doyle's avowed agnosticism and unwavering commitment to honest dealing that led to his becoming a writer. After he informed his father's well-to-do family of his religious disillusionment, all social and financial help was withdrawn. Barely able to support himself, Doyle turned in his third year in medical school to writing fiction for extra cash, using as material his own adventures serving while in school as a ship's doctor on a whaling vessel to the Antarctic and later on an African freighter. Between the few stories he published, which paid just enough to keep him and his family afloat, Doyle racked up a good number of rejections before achieving steady work as a writer.

In 1882, Doyle established a private practice in Southsea, Portsmouth. Three years later, he married Louise Hawkins, whose own small family income offered him greater freedom to write more. His first novel, The Firm of Girdlestone, written in 1886, was soundly rejected by the British publishing industry and did not see publication until 1890. His next work was his first Sherlock Holmes story, the novella A Study in Scarlet, which after several initial rejections, was published in the 1887 issue of Beeton's Christmas Annual. Despite Doyle's faith in the quality and originality of the story's hero, A Study in Scarlet gained little notice among readers. His next novel, however, Micah Clarke (1889), caused a great stir after its publication—following the usual round of rejections by British publishers—by Andrew Lang, as chief editor at Longmans Publishing Company. Micah Clarke, a story about the dangers of fanaticism, was Doyle's first work of historical fiction and an immediate success, propelling the author into literary stardom in England.

Meanwhile, despite the poor showing Holmes had made in his creator's home country, Doyle's detective fared quite well in the United States, where a request for another story about the master detective was made to Doyle while he was deep in his next historical novel, The White Company (1890). As soon as Doyle had completed The White Company, which was to be his personal favorite, he dashed off The Sign of Four (1890) which was, once again, well received in America. Fortunately for Doyle, Holmes' stock, despite his poor initial showing, was beginning to rise in England by leaps and bounds. In July 1891, Doyle wrote his first of six Sherlock Holmes tales for The Strand, making Doyle England's most popular serialized fiction writer. Doyle continued to write Sherlock Holmes stories over the next two years until he decided to have Holmes killed by his arch-nemesis, Dr. Moriarty, in December 1893, with the story "The Final Problem."

Doyle's decision was a momentous one. Holmes' death was met with howls of outrage and large-scale subscription cancellations of the magazine. The pressure on Doyle was enormous to continue the series, but he was adamant about letting Holmes rest in peace. As it was, the production of a Holmes story for serial publication proved to be an enormous strain on Doyle's creative powers, draining precious energy that he thought better spent on his now little known historical novels, such as Rodney Stone (1896) and Uncle Bernac (1897). In the early 1900s, Doyle added to his output two works of historical nonfiction, The Great Boer War (1900) and The War in South Africa (1902), which sought not only to document the Boer War but to defend the British role in it.

In 1901, Doyle published The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Holmes was reintroduced to solve one of his older cases. By 1903, Doyle had accepted an American offer of $5,000 per story for a series of new tales about the great detective, regardless of how many Doyle wrote or how often. Doyle continued to write stories of Holmes and his companion Watson over the next 20 years, although they tended to appear in short bursts, when they appeared at all. After Holmes' resurrection, Doyle's early passion for historical fiction sought an outlet in other genres, such as the scientific romance, resulting in the writing of The Lost World (1912), The Poison Belt (1913), and The Land of Mist (1926). Concurrent with these began a spate of Spiritualist works that included The New Revelation (1918), The Vital Message (1919), The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921), The Coming of the Fairies (1922), and the two-volume History of Spiritualism (1926).

Many consider Doyle's turn to spiritualism at the end of his life one of the strangest events to occur in the life of a man whose greatest creation was a detective who drew his conclusions from a hard and cold reality that disavowed all things supernatural. Few, however, recognize the important nuances in Doyle's thoughts about spiritualism, as well as the nuances within the spiritualist movement itself, which sought to treat spirits as a scientific reality, a view that Doyle favored. Doyle, after all, was an agnostic, not an atheist, and there is little doubt that notwithstanding his medical training and belief in scientific method, he remained unable to reconcile the loss of his childhood Catholic faith with his belief in a greater good that directed human conduct and morals. Indeed, Holmes' own work as a detective of "setting the world to rights" suggests a moral imperative that is explained more by Doyle's faith—in goodness, in man, and perhaps even in God—than his reason.

—Bennett Lovett-Graff

Further Reading:

Carr, John Dickson. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York, Harper, 1949.

Clausen, Christopher. "Sherlock Holmes, Order, and the Late-Victorian Mind." Georgia Review. Vol. 38, No. 1, Spring 1984, 104-123.

Green, R.L., editor. A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle. London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1983.

Nordon, Pierre. Conan Doyle: A Biography, trans. Frances Partridge.London, John Murray, 1966.