Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters

‘Then I returned home,’ he said, ‘conscious that real life was about to begin.’

* (#ulink_878a1361-17ef-5f08-b16b-f51901a4c038)Biographers have believed, based on Conan Doyle’s testimony and surviving school records, that he began in 1868, but his letters home indicate that he started in 1867 instead.

* (#ulink_f6572c3a-0404-5ced-8af2-dd9593f54c6f)Who Mrs Russel was, and why she had fallen out of young Arthur’s favour, is unknown.

Ÿ (#ulink_7e6f478a-96ca-5446-9afa-a1a916175e3d)His younger sisters Lottie and Connie. Connie had been born only that month, on the 4th.

Ÿ (#ulink_7e6f478a-96ca-5446-9afa-a1a916175e3d)His older sister Annette.

* (#ulink_05de993d-479b-5248-9f60-9427f5067491)The Red Lion Inn in Preston served as a staging point for boys travelling back and forth from the school, and as a clearing house for deliveries from home.

* (#ulink_8e09a6e2-b440-5873-b9b7-5c585f0f74d5)Perhaps ‘The Golden Goose’ by the Brothers Grimm, which begins with a grey-haired man in a forest, asking each of three brothers in turn to share his cakes and wine.

* (#ulink_8dff130f-05d8-5a50-8e75-34f8c34b305f)Ann Standish was a member of the school staff catering to the boys’ needs, judging from references to her in Conan Doyle’s letters. (Perhaps a nurse, considering the time young Arthur appears to have spent in the infirmary?)

* (#ulink_9c4861fb-6e40-58b5-911e-54a923c33b5f)The Cloister and the Hearth, by Charles Reade, 1861; one of Conan Doyle’s favourite historical novels for its treatment of a fifteenth-century man’s loyalties divided between family and Church.

* (#ulink_6957a916-a9d6-5860-9ceb-76788c3e40dd)‘Pinned’: apparently Stonyhurst slang for ‘enjoyed’ or ‘liked’. While Conan Doyle uses it repeatedly in letters from Stonyhurst, he did not after leaving it.

Ÿ (#ulink_6957a916-a9d6-5860-9ceb-76788c3e40dd)A concerned marginal note by his mother—to whom is not apparent—on the letter reads: ‘Don’t suppose he meant regular big bottles. Mine were all small.’ The sanctioned amount of alcoholic beverages, not to mention tobacco, is in stark contrast to today’s standards.

* (#ulink_e5a95935-ddd5-5cbc-ba1d-43ecfda6fdc9)No wonder Conan Doyle suffered injuries: in his day Stonyhurst played an especially rugged version of football with origins in Elizabethan times. The rules, obscure and only lightly enforced, allowed each side to field as many as seventy players. The result was often a general melee, especially during a ‘Squash’—an enormous pileup of players designed to knock opponents to the ground or force the ball between the goalposts. Sometimes losing teams put a second ball into play surreptitiously, causing further confusion and hotly contested goals. When the dust finally settled the winners were feted with pancakes and lemonade.

* (#ulink_028e008b-b556-5b96-bdc9-1710dc51b109)Years later, during rehearsals of a play based on his Brigadier Gerard stories about Napoleon’s wars, he was incensed when a group of soldiers, ostensibly returning from battle, marched onstage in pristine uniforms. ‘These men are warriors, not ballet dancers!’ he exclaimed, and at his insistence, their expensive costumes were taken outside to be ripped and dragged through the dirt, to give them a properly authentic appearance.

* (#ulink_3f67ae9a-ce00-51b7-8068-94109ed462de)Mary Burton, a family friend whose surname was bestowed on Lottie, had rented the Doyles her house at Liberton Bank, on the southern side of Edinburgh, at the time young Arthur attended the dreaded Newington Academy. Her brother was the Scottish historian John Hill Burton, whose son William Kinnimond Burton, three years older than Arthur, became one of his best friends until his early death in 1899 in Japan, while a professor of engineering at Imperial University there. As young men they shared an interest in photography, and ‘Willie’ Burton (sometimes WKB in these letters) may have introduced Conan Doyle to the British Journal of Photography, which published articles by him in the late 1870s and 1880s. Conan Doyle dedicated his 1890 novel The Firm of Girdlestone to Burton.

Ÿ (#ulink_3f67ae9a-ce00-51b7-8068-94109ed462de)He reported his father’s exploit to his uncle James in London, who replied September 5th in a way that speaks to the hazy view that the London Doyles had of their brother Charles by now: ‘That same papa may think it nothing to kill only one snipe,’ James wrote, ‘but I should be long enough out before achieving so much. Give him my compliments when you see him, and ask him if he remembers such an individual as me? And say that a note in this direction would not be thrown away.’

* (#ulink_cf34ac18-4c1a-5f7f-b08d-4944a28f3b43)‘Pepper’s Ghost’ was an elaborate stage illusion of the time involving an angled mirror to create the appearance of ghosts on stage. Presumably Stonyhurst staged a simplified version.

* (#ulink_a51dfce9-6a1e-5c58-a8c0-c4ad2b10809b)See Out of the Shadows: The Untold Story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s First Family, by Georgina Doyle (Ashcroft, B.C.: Calabash Press, 2004), pages 19-20.

* (#ulink_1fc94943-7900-5d66-b8b7-51df4ce578e5)Ann Standish had been part of the Stonyhurst community far back enough to be called as a witness, for Arthur reported in a letter in July, ‘She appears to have nothing to say, and to have said it. She was in a dreadful fright before going. She had a vague idea that the Judge suspected she was Arthur Orton in disguise. She could scarcely be persuaded to get into the cab to drive off. She pinned her journey, putting up at the best hotels, at the expense of government, and receiving 10/ a day for nothing.’

* (#ulink_5e0714f8-aabd-5e33-bd8f-a0d49efe39dc)We do not know the precise nature of the accident. James Ryan, ‘an extraordinary boy who grew to be an extraordinary man’, was the one lifelong friend Conan Doyle made at Stonyhurst.

* (#ulink_eeeb5021-e490-56e2-a061-30b77467566f)‘The first thing I did when I first came to London was to go and see [Macauley’s] tomb at Westminster Abbey,’ he said at an Authors Club dinner in 1896. He revisited the event in an 1899 novel, A Duet. Macauley ‘was the object of my hero worship when I was a boy,’ he said—first for Macauley’s essays, and then his verse.

* (#ulink_17f6dd20-dd77-5759-9a87-05fb830fead9)But if he wrote some letters home from Feldkirch in French, they have not survived.

* (#ulink_b28b4521-70c7-591c-aadb-0b27fab808c5)A bursary was a stipend or scholarship won by competitive examination, and, because of the family’s limited financial means, of great importance to Conan Doyle when he reached medical school at Edinburgh University.

* (#ulink_8d6b21c7-9f3a-5eb1-9b65-3e3e9e90f960)‘Baa’, actual name unknown, is clearly, from this reference and others, a servant. While money was short in the Doyle household, labour was also cheap, and the Doyles, even in their straitened circumstances, often had domestic help. They were gentlefolk, even if poor.

2 The Medical Student (1876-1882) (#ulink_893c7865-0e80-5444-8a3f-05c92058c7eb)

THE MEDICAL LOVE SONG

My heart at each systole swellingStill murmurs its passion for you—The Venous side, dear, is thy dwelling,A temple untainted and trueAnd there by the fossa ovalisWhere the mitral your chamber shall screenThere ’mid reduced hæmoglobinOh that is your palace, my queen

—A. CONAN DOYLE, MB CM

Conan Doyle was ‘wild, full-blooded, and a trifle reckless’ when he entered Edinburgh University in October 1876. Edinburgh was famous for literature as well as medicine, and also there at the time were friends of later years, like Robert Louis Stevenson and James Barrie. ‘Strange to think that I probably brushed elbows with them,’

Conan Doyle mused later on; but he found medical school one ‘long weary grind at botany, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, and a whole list of compulsory subjects, many of which have a very indirect bearing upon the art of curing.’

Attending Edinburgh University meant living at home for him—an economy that meant no letters to his mother about the experience. Nor have letters to others about his medical school life been found.

He did look back at Edinburgh in his novel The Firm of Girdlestone, written in the 1880s. She ‘may call herself with grim jocoseness the “alma mater” of her students,’ its narrator muses, but she

conceals her maternal affection with remarkable success… There is symbolism in the very look of her, square and massive, grim and grey, with never a pillar or carving to break the dead monotony of the great stone walls. She is learned, she is practical, and she is useful. There is little sentiment or romance in her composition, however.

A lad coming up to an English University finds himself in an enlarged and enlightened public school… [H]is University takes a keen interest in him. She pats him on the back if he succeeds. Prizes and scholarships, and fine fat fellowships are thrown plentifully in his way if he will gird up his loins and aspire to them.

There is nothing of this in a Scotch University… [Edinburgh] is a great unsympathetic machine, taking in a stream of raw-boned cartilaginous youths at one end, and turning them out at the other as learned divines, astute lawyers, and skilful medical men. Of every thousand of the raw material about six hundred emerge at the other side. The remainder are broken in the process.

In later years, after giving up medicine for literature, he took a more measured view of the experience, and of the value he felt he had derived from it. ‘There are few phases of medical life, from the sixpenny dispensary to the two-guinea prescription, of which I have not had personal experience,’ he told the students at St Mary’s Hospital, London, in a 1910 talk entitled The Romance of Medicine, assuring them that medicine

tinges the whole philosophy of life and furnishes the whole basis of thought. The healthy skepticism which medical training induces, the desire to prove every fact, and only to reason from such proved facts—these are the finest foundations for all thought. And then the moral training to keep a confidence inviolate, to act promptly on a sudden call, to keep your head in critical moments, to be kind and yet strong—where can you, outside medicine, get such a training as that?…And then there is another way in which it acts. It sets a very high standard of strenuous work. You may not consider this altogether an advantage while you do it, but it remains a precious heritage for life. To the man who has mastered Grey’s Anatomy, life holds no further terrors… All work seems easy after the work of a medical education.

What exists in letters are the interstices of his medical studies, from his attempt to win the bursary, through assistantships to several doctors, one of whom became a second father to him, to taking the plunge finally into medical practice of his own, as junior partner to someone he had known at Edinburgh—Dr George Budd, whose methods of practising medicine were controversial, and whose personality was volcanically paranoid. Conan Doyle not only entered Edinburgh at age seventeen, but, in the custom of the day, started studying medicine without further academic ado. During the two months at home after returning from Feldkirch, though, while his mother was away on a visit, he prepared himself to compete for the bursary whose £40 would mean much to him and his family.

to Mary Doyle 2 ARGYLE PARK TERRACE, EDINBURGH, SEPTEMBER 1876

It seems very strange and quite an inversion of our usual states that I should be writing from home, and you the absentee. We are all jogging along very comfortably; you need not be afraid of my feeling lonely, for I am closeted in my room nearly the whole day, and would be if you were here, so it comes to the same in the end. My chief relaxation is sometimes at evening when I go out into the kitchen and read ‘Midshipman Easy’ to Baa and Lottie; but I am beginning to consider it cruel to do it, as I am every evening in expectation of Baa’s breaking a blood vessel with laughing.

I went to Mr Walker on the Monday. His terms are 2 guineas a month but he lends me plenty of books. I was compelled to get 2 books from Livingstone, one second hand a Greek dictionary, the other new (a very small book) Blackie’s Greek conversations. Mr Walker has dispirited me awfully. He says that very often as many as 50 candidates go in for it, and that the high school curriculum leads, as it were, up to the bursary, and they generally secure it. Mr Walker is a young man and helps me very much; he did not get this identical bursary but one of £20.

Baby is pretty good considering, Innes behaves wonderfully well. Lottie is, as she always is, a brick. Baa is cooking very well, and seems to enjoy acting as keeper of the house. Arthur is behaving so so. Papa is very quiet and nice; I don’t know about the Graphics money. I gave him your letter to read this morning, and when he came to that part I think he looked uncomfortable. However he is all that could be desired. Much as we all desire you back, pray make the best of the chance, and get a good mouthful of English air which is better than this stuff here.

You must thank the Dr heartily for his kindness in giving [me] the flute. I don’t deserve it unless I win this bursary, in spite of all high schools and bugbears.

to Dr Bryan Charles Waller 2 ARGYLE PARK TERRACE, SEPTEMBER 9, 1876

Many thanks for your kind letter, which went far towards restoring my equanimity, which was rather shaken by Mr Walkers statements. I had no idea there would be so many competitions, but I suppose three quarters of them go in without a vestige of a chance. Mr Walker is a very jolly fellow; he is very good at mathematics, though I don’t think his classical knowledge is very brilliant, and we are continually having long arguments over some disputed sense or word.* (#ulink_804fb834-28b3-5f77-ab75-a9aaf45224ab) I do a Latin & Greek exercise every day, learn a chapter of Livy and Xenophon’s ‘Cyropaedia’, and a certain quantity of Euclid and Algebra. In fact I seldom emerge from my cell except for meals and sometimes in the evening when I petrify our small family circle by reading Poe’s Tales. I hope you will excuse the liberty I have taken in making use of the ‘university calendars’ from your room. The bursary examen is in them, and I have done last year’s for practise. I found it easy enough, my only fear is that others may find it easier still. It is indeed, as you say, a very great consolation to know that I will never more need mathematics. Classics I like, and I shall always try to keep up my knowledge of them, but mathematics of every sort I detest and abhor.

So when the time came to create an arch villain for Sherlock Holmes, he made Professor James Moriarty a mathematician.

‘He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem, which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the Mathematical Chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearance, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind.’

—‘The Final Problem’

Conan Doyle might never have created Sherlock Holmes at all were it not for discovering Edgar Allan Poe at an impressionable age—forming a lasting appreciation of his contributions to the short-story form, and particularly the tale of detection that the American writer had invented. Thirty years later in Through the Magic Door, his book about literature and writers, he called Poe, ‘[T]he supreme original short story writer of all time’, from whom had come

nearly all our modern types of story. Just think of what he did in his offhand, prodigal fashion, seldom troubling to repeat a success, but pushing on to some new achievement. To him must be ascribed the monstrous progeny of writers on the detection of crime… Each may find some little development of his own, but his main art must trace back to those admirable stories of Monsieur Dupin, so wonderful in their masterful force, their reticence, their quick dramatic point.

In the first Sherlock Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet, Holmes scoffs at Poe’s detective Dupin, but that did not reflect its author’s view. Throughout his life he acknowledged his debt, insisting, ‘If every man who receives a cheque for a story which owes its springs to Poe were to pay tithe to a monument for the master, he would have a pyramid as big as that of Cheops.’