Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters

My present funds are 6/. I have not drawn a penny from Reg yet. I want very much to let it accumulate and have something substantial at the end, when once you break into a sum it soon flies away. If you can possibly do without my assistance therefore, do so, if however it is absolutely necessary write by return, and I shall ask the boss. I think it behooves me whenever I see a chance now to try and store away a little nucleus in the bank—my bank of course shall be yours too, but a pound laid by now & ready to hand when I want it, may breed ten in a few years. There is no mistake I must get a house surgeonship, and if possible in a large town. I am beginning to see that I have certain advantages which if properly directed & given a fair chance might lead to great success, but which it would be a thousand pities to nullify aboard ship or in a country practice. Let me once get my footing in a good hospital and my game is clear—observe cases minutely, improve in my profession, write to the Lancet, supplement my income by literature, make friends and conciliate everyone I meet, wait ten years if need be, and then when my chance comes be prompt and decisive in stepping into an honorary surgeonship. 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.

Ever your loving

Arthur ‘Cowan’

His question about Dr Waller glosses over the discord that broke out about this time. Biographers have speculated about tensions between the young man and the senior, but not so much older, man, some of them believing that Conan Doyle, now reaching his majority, must surely have felt that Dr Waller was usurping his father’s position, and his own. So it may have been, for in April he wrote to Lottie that he had ‘put the finishing touch upon Waller. I nearly frightened his immortal soul out of him; he utterly refused to fight. I made such a mess of him that he did not leave the house for 23 days. I fancy it will make him a better fellow. We have had a sort of nominal reconciliation since then but I don’t think we love each other very much yet.’

It is hard to know exactly what to make of these comments. If there had been actual physical violence—even without the sort of incapacitation that the young Conan Doyle seems to be boasting of—it seems unlikely that his mother would have left Edinburgh two years later to rent a cottage on a Yorkshire estate that Waller had inherited, raising her youngest daughters Ida and Dodo there; or that Conan Doyle, when he married in 1885, would have had his wedding at Masongill Cottage with Dr Waller as his best man.

For now he bragged, ‘Waller has cleared out of Edinburgh and I don’t think we shall look upon the light of his countenance any more.’ But his own future was still uncertain. He admitted to Lottie that he had ‘been “begging to offer myself” for every vacancy’ (one of them as far away as Buenos Aires) ‘while the vacancies have been “begging to refuse me” with a perseverance worthy of a better cause.’

To make things worse, his on-again off-again romance with Elmore Weldon was off once more, seemingly for good this time, and not at his but at the young lady’s initiative. ‘She chucked me up as coolly as if it was the most usual thing in the world,’ he told Lottie: ‘It will be some time before I fall in love again I can tell you.’

He was now primed to take a desperate step.

* (#ulink_5e9b7b95-7587-51fc-a939-de2dd21560dd)Nothing more is known of his tutor, Mr Walker, whose advice and help has been unsuspected through many years of Conan Doyle biography, or whether he was recommended by Dr Waller, who had influenced Conan Doyle’s decision to pursue medicine as a career.

* (#ulink_1d57bc56-2a05-507f-a716-2d681aca2ce6)The brutal villain of Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist.

* (#ulink_88fcdfe2-ba3f-5123-849f-8ffc01682659)Playing on the homily by Isaac Watts (1674-1748): ‘How doth the little busy bee / Improve each shining hour, / And gather honey all the day / From every opening Flower!…In works of labour or of skill / I would be busy too: / For Satan finds some mischief still / For idle hands to do.’

* (#ulink_4a055ac1-88c6-5bce-a28b-c7595eb37f56)An Edinburgh medical celebrity under whom Conan Doyle would later serve a stint as his outpatient clerk—and, from Bell’s powers as a diagnostician, still later derive the Sherlock Holmes method.

* (#ulink_bedc5e4e-d635-548e-801c-d3f079b02682)The Scotsman, Sept. 12, 1877: ‘those on board Lord Glasgow’s steam yacht Valetta observed a strange sea monster about half a mile distant. The Valetta was steered for the monster, and ran close alongside it, whereupon it dived… The fish was again seen about an hour and a half afterwards, near the same spot, just off the Sannox Rock, on the north-east side of Arran.’

* (#ulink_e8111489-0870-55fb-879a-8e05dde6d60f)Paraphrasing from Byron’s poem ‘The Sea’.

; (#ulink_1707d8c9-391c-5ab2-b4b5-af698cfd9251)Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, commander in chief of the British Army for some forty years, would review Conan Doyle in 1900 before the latter’s departure for the Boer War.

; (#ulink_1707d8c9-391c-5ab2-b4b5-af698cfd9251)A man named Max Hoedel had attempted to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm I in Berlin only two weeks before. The crown prince was the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, Britain’s foe in World War I.

* (#ulink_988ce21b-4887-5e69-a3d9-b31323b064d7)It is not clear who Dr Quin is. Frederick F. H. Quin, an Edinburgh graduate who died in 1878, pioneered homoeopathic medicine in Britain.

* (#ulink_31b55802-df91-56c0-a67b-e9649e425b7d)Conan Doyle’s copy of The Essentials of Materia Medica and Therapeutics by Alfred Baring Garrod (London: Longmans, 1877), now at the Humanities Research Center in Texas, contains marginalia in his handwriting about the effects of various drugs—making use again of his father’s trick of composing verses about things he needed to remember; e.g., for quinine: ‘In ears a sound, in eyes a flash, / Vomit, headache, nausea, rash, / Thirst, no hunger, heart goes slower, / Then if he goes and swallows more, / He’ll die from cardiac paralysis, / Shown by a post mortem analysis.’ See ‘Doyle’s Drug Doggerel’ by Donald C. Black, M.D., Baker Street Journal, June 1981.

; (#ulink_51168d33-ab41-58b9-b5f8-529d65d1b096)Evocative names like Grimesthorpe, and their permutations, appealed to Conan Doyle. In the case of this one, he titled one of his earliest stories ‘The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe’; in the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’, the murderous villain is Dr Grimesby Roylott.

* (#ulink_8c4aa33e-899a-518e-9ffd-240e3518ff67)Major (later Major General Sir William) Butler was already a distinguished soldier at this time, and his wife, Elizabeth Thompson, a celebrated painter of battle scenes.

* (#ulink_a82f6ba3-be67-589d-accc-063dc48ca6c6)The reference is to the fictive play The Murder of Gonzago performed in Hamlet.

* (#ulink_d632ac10-71de-5934-88ba-b3ed80107cf2)Author of Scripture Testimony Against Intoxicating Wine, notorious for insisting that the wine that Christ made in the miracle at Cana was nonalcoholic.

* (#ulink_6372e7bb-30b9-5600-8c04-cfa1fecdd5c8)A slang term for money.

* (#ulink_9852dc0a-77fe-5959-a052-b65913a5e3da)Licentiate of the King’s and Queen’s College of Ireland, a degree which Conan Doyle would have regarded as inferior to the one he was earning at Edinburgh. Bourchier had certainly fallen out of favour by now.

; (#ulink_74511551-16d5-5d17-a519-5036eb121d85)A joke on the name of Dr Sampson Gamgee, a well-known Birmingham surgeon, and, with Dr Joseph Lister in Edinburgh, a pioneer in aseptic surgery.

(#ulink_bf8a2fc5-fd0f-5f4f-8d14-512cc1609aa1)‘A goose weighs seven pounds and one-half its own weight.’

* (#ulink_957aa2d6-bd24-5c74-9655-a32db61230c8)The British Medical Journal published ‘Gelsemium as a Poison’ in its issue of September 20, 1879. Tincture of gelsemium, distilled from jasmine, was used at the time to treat neuralgia, a complaint from which Conan Doyle frequently suffered.

; (#ulink_f5f640ab-a57d-5048-9d5a-c255b42a5084)The Lancet for June 28, 1879, noted receipt of a letter from a Mr Hughes, but did not print it. Given what medical students are like, the editors were probably old hands at spotting hoax letters.

; (#ulink_7e1a5d57-9b44-58b8-ac79-ecc4be402fa9)Meaning the solution to the mathematical puzzle that he posed to thirteen-year-old Lottie in his earlier letter; ‘the calculation is a simple one,’ as Sherlock Holmes said of another problem in the story ‘Silver Blaze’.

* (#ulink_2090c812-9924-53b4-998e-55ac6059deef)Joseph Cook was a well-known American divine whose ‘Boston Monday Lectures’ included, among other subjects, harmony between religion and science, and which were now being heard by enormous audiences in an around-the-world tour.

* (#ulink_2ea09a68-8c06-5421-aa6c-cb2bb01a3a44)The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe was neither published nor returned by Blackwood’s Magazine, and the manuscript is now in the magazine’s archives at the National Library of Scotland. The story was finally published by the Arthur Conan Doyle Society in 2000.

* (#ulink_3459f705-8868-5e88-a303-b0f4d770d14b)This photograph was previously believed to have been taken aboard the Hope. ‘As I was smoking a cigar,’ Conan Doyle’s diary for July 18th says, ‘I am afraid I’ll be rather misty,’ and the cigar is visible in the picture. Leigh Smith, an English explorer of the Arctic, lost the Eira (though not his life, nor his crew’s) on the second of two voyages to Franz Josef Land that year.

; (#ulink_aef849a5-a15c-5924-9f00-22fdb6b42635)Intriguing, but unknown.

; (#ulink_aef849a5-a15c-5924-9f00-22fdb6b42635)Porter’s identity is unknown, but belies a joke that Conan Doyle liked to make about himself, after giving up medicine for literature, that no living patient of his had ever been seen.

* (#ulink_b4f2104f-6745-5ebc-8e8b-02a472afb588)See Georgina Doyle, Out of the Shadows, op. cit., pages 42-44.

; (#ulink_d5446eb2-3d89-50d9-a78a-1dca4d0f5236)The Land League, founded with nationalist overtones by Charles Parnell in 1879, took the side of tenants against landlords in Ireland’s Land War of the early 1880s. The Foleys were among the landlords, hence Conan Doyle’s sympathies in the mutual exchange of acts of intimidation.

* (#ulink_5b8b4f99-3869-5c25-b377-efcbbb0390c7)Presumably the Irish assistant, Bourchier, who had been with Dr Hoare when Conan Doyle came to Birmingham for the first time. The ‘old CB [Companion of the Bath] of an uncle’ was Henry Doyle, founding director of the National Gallery of Ireland.

* (#ulink_e520fa22-093e-5677-a951-d17ef61553bb)Memories and Adventures says: ‘Whether it is the Ivory Coast or the Gold Coast, or the Liberian Shore, it always presents the same features—burning sunshine, a long swell breaking into a white line of surf, a margin of golden sand, and then the low green bush, with an occasional palm tree rising above it. If you have seen a mile, you have seen a thousand.’

* (#ulink_0b21c1f6-7e17-567b-a055-aaade97330d0)A satellite station of Hoare’s practice, outside Birmingham a distance, run by a Dr Aspinal.

; (#ulink_ac9d9f69-ece9-51ed-ad03-dc6af1c4c9bc)James Hogg, the editor of the monthly London Society (‘Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation’), was the first of several magazine editors to take an interest in the fledgling writer, and to encourage his work.

* (#ulink_77b1f7f7-fe1e-5a8d-ae76-1face1c752b1)Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, in England.

* (#ulink_192e8370-3b6c-5175-886f-3c2cedcb76d9)First of several references in his letters to a hitherto unsuspected dispute over money with the Doyles in London (‘Mrs James’ presumably his Aunt Jane, Mrs James Doyle).

; (#ulink_192e8370-3b6c-5175-886f-3c2cedcb76d9)Rhoda Broughton (a niece of Sheridan Le Fanu) was popular for her strongly psychological stories with female protagonists.

* (#ulink_3d703a87-f530-578b-8091-a28417c0a945)The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow.

3 The Struggling Doctor (1882-1884) (#ulink_7ba1c85f-ec6f-5f57-bc9c-13589666ffd1)

It is a wonderful thing to have a house of your ownfor the first time, however humble it may be.

—A. CONAN DOYLE, MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES

George Budd, a year ahead of Conan Doyle at Edinburgh, and from a medical family, was a fierce player on the rugby field. Calling Budd ‘Cullingworth’ in Memories and Adventures (and in The Stark Munro Letters), Conan Doyle noted his ‘bulldog jaw, bloodshot deep-set eyes, over-hanging brows, and yellowish hair as stiff as wire which spurted up above his brows’.

‘He was born for trouble and adventure,’ Conan Doyle continued, but ‘for some reason he took a fancy to me.’ Budd had a paranoid streak, was given to brawls, ran off with and married an underaged ward of Chancery, and in his initial practice in Bristol, lived beyond his means. He ran out on his debts there and set up a new practice in Plymouth. And after Conan Doyle returned from Africa, Budd wired him to join what he described as a colossal success.

‘A second even more explosive telegram upbraided me for delay and guaranteed me £300 the first year,’ said Conan Doyle. ‘This looked like business, so off I went’—against his mother’s advice. In Plymouth he discovered that Budd, ‘half genius and half quack, had founded a practice worth several thousand pounds’. That it conformed little to the ethics of medicine did not escape his notice, though; Memories and Adventures and The Stark Munro Letters describe Budd’s methods vividly. Writing to Dr Hoare, who also doubted Budd, Conan Doyle assured him of the practice’s success in glowing terms.