biography about sir arthur conan doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle

(1859-1930)

Who Was Arthur Conan Doyle?

In 1890, Arthur Conan Doyle's novel, A Study in Scarlet introduced the character of Detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle would go on to write 60 stories about Sherlock Holmes. He also strove to spread his Spiritualism faith through a series of books that were written from 1918 to 1926. Doyle died of a heart attack in Crowborough, England on July 7, 1930.

On May 22, 1859, Arthur Conan Doyle was born to an affluent, strict Irish-Catholic family in Edinburgh, Scotland. Although Doyle's family was well-respected in the art world, his father, Charles, who was a life-long alcoholic, had few accomplishments to speak of. Doyle's mother, Mary, was a lively and well-educated woman who loved to read. She particularly delighted in telling her young son outlandish stories. Her great enthusiasm and animation while spinning wild tales sparked the child's imagination. As Doyle would later recall in his biography, "In my early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life."

At the age of 9, Doyle bid a tearful goodbye to his parents and was shipped off to England, where he would attend Hodder Place, Stonyhurst — a Jesuit preparatory school — from 1868 to 1870. Doyle then went on to study at Stonyhurst College for the next five years. For Doyle, the boarding-school experience was brutal: many of his classmates bullied him, and the school practiced ruthless corporal punishment against its students. Over time, Doyle found solace in his flair for storytelling and developed an eager audience of younger students.

Medical Education and Career

When Doyle graduated from Stonyhurst College in 1876, his parents expected that he would follow in his family's footsteps and study art, so they were surprised when he decided to pursue a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh instead. At med school, Doyle met his mentor, Professor Dr. Joseph Bell, whose keen powers of observation would later inspire Doyle to create his famed fictional detective character, Sherlock Holmes. At the University of Edinburgh, Doyle also had the good fortune to meet classmates and future fellow authors James Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson. While a medical student, Doyle took his own first stab at writing, with a short story called The Mystery of Sasassa Valley . That was followed by a second story, The American Tale , which was published in London Society .

During Doyle's third year of medical school, he took a ship surgeon's post on a whaling ship sailing for the Arctic Circle. The voyage awakened Doyle's sense of adventure, a feeling that he incorporated into a story, Captain of the Pole Star .

In 1880, Doyle returned to medical school. Back at the University of Edinburgh, Doyle became increasingly invested in Spiritualism or "Psychic religion," a belief system that he would later attempt to spread through a series of his written works. By the time he received his Bachelor of Medicine degree in 1881, Doyle had denounced his Roman Catholic faith.

Doyle's first paying job as a doctor took the form of a medical officer's position aboard the steamship Mayumba, traveling from Liverpool to Africa. After his stint on the Mayumba, Doyle settled in Plymouth, England for a time. When his funds were nearly tapped out, he relocated to Portsmouth and opened his first practice. He spent the next few years struggling to balance his burgeoning medical career with his efforts to gain recognition as an author. Doyle would later give up medicine altogether, in order to devote all of his attention to his writing and his faith.

Personal Life

In 1885, while still struggling to make it as a writer, Doyle met and married his first wife, Louisa Hawkins. The couple moved to Upper Wimpole Street and had two children, a daughter and a son. In 1893, Louisa was diagnosed with tuberculosis. While Louisa was ailing, Doyle developed an affection for a young woman named Jean Leckie. Louisa ultimately died of tuberculosis in Doyle's arms, in 1906. The following year, Doyle would remarry to Jean Leckie, with whom he would have two sons and a daughter.

Books: Sherlock Holmes

In 1886, newly married and still struggling to make it as an author, Doyle started writing the mystery novel A Tangled Skein . Two years later, the novel was renamed A Study in Scarlet and published in Beeton's Christmas Annual . A Study in Scarlet , which first introduced the wildly popular characters Detective Sherlock Holmes and his assistant, Watson, finally earned Doyle the recognition he had so desired. It was the first of 60 stories that Doyle would pen about Sherlock Holmes over the course of his writing career. Also, in 1887, Doyle submitted two letters about his conversion to Spiritualism to a weekly periodical called Light .

Doyle continued to actively participate in the Spiritualist movement from 1887 to 1916, during which time he wrote three books that experts consider largely autobiographical. These include Beyond the City (1893), The Stark Munro Letters (1895) and A Duet with an Occasional Chorus (1899). Upon achieving success as a writer, Doyle decided to retire from medicine. Throughout this period, he additionally produced a handful of historical novels including one about the Napoleonic Era called The Great Shadow in 1892, and his most famous historical novel, Rodney Stone , in 1896.

The prolific author also composed four of his most popular Sherlock Holmes books during the 1890s and early 1900s: The Sign of Four (1890), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894) and The Hound of Baskervilles , published in 1901. In 1893, to Doyle's readers' disdain, he had attempted to kill off his Sherlock Holmes character in order to focus more on writing about Spiritualism. In 1901, however, Doyle reintroduced Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of Baskervilles and later brought him back to life in The Adventure of the Empty House so the lucrative character could earn Doyle the money to fund his missionary work. Doyle also strove to spread his faith through a series of written works, consisting of The New Revolution (1918), The Vital Message (1919), The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921) and History of Spiritualism (1926).

In 1928, Doyle's final twelve stories about Sherlock Holmes were published in a compilation entitled The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes .

Having recently been diagnosed with Angina Pectoris, Doyle stubbornly ignored his doctor's warnings, and in the fall of 1929, embarked on a spiritualism tour through the Netherlands. He returned home with chest pains so severe that he needed to be carried on shore and was thereafter almost entirely bedridden at his home in Crowborough, England. Rising one last time on July 7, 1930, Doyle collapsed and died in his garden while clutching his heart with one hand and holding a flower in the other.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Arthur Conan Doyle
• Birth Year: 1859
• Birth date: May 22, 1859
• Birth City: Edinburgh
• Birth Country: Scotland
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Author Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 60 mystery stories featuring the wildly popular detective character Sherlock Holmes and his loyal assistant Watson.
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Gemini
• Hodder Place, Stonyhurst
• Stonyhurst College
• University of Edinburgh
• Nacionalities
• Scot (Scotland)
• Death Year: 1930
• Death date: July 7, 1930
• Death City: Crowborough
• Death Country: United Kingdom

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Arthur Conan Doyle Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/arthur-conan-doyle
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: June 17, 2020
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

Watch Next .css-smpm16:after{background-color:#323232;color:#fff;margin-left:1.8rem;margin-top:1.25rem;width:1.5rem;height:0.063rem;content:'';display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;}

Famous British People

Mick Jagger

Agatha Christie

Alexander McQueen

The Real Royal Scheme Depicted in ‘Mary & George’

William Shakespeare

Anya Taylor-Joy

Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales

Kensington Palace Shares an Update on Kate

Amy Winehouse

Prince William

Where in the World Is Kate Middleton?

Biography Online

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Biography

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) – Scottish writer, physician and spiritualist – best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories.

After his father’s death, the burden of supporting a large family fell on Arthur Conan Doyle. To supplement his income he began writing short stories. His first story of note was A Study in Scarlet published in the Beeton’s Christmas Annual 1887 (featuring the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes. This later led to a contract writing more Sherlock Holmes stories for the Strand magazine. It was in these early stories that he developed the character of Sherlock Holmes. It was a character that fascinated the reading public and he soon became one of the best-loved fictional characters. Sherlock Holmes always had an element of mystery – the sharpest mind and his unbelievable powers of observation.

“…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth…”

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, (Sherlock Holmes)

Sherlock Holmes also had his share of human weaknesses such as smoking and drug addiction. His partner, the sensible, loyal Watson proved the ideal counterbalance to the highly strung genius of Holmes.

The success of Sherlock Holmes enabled Conan Doyle to retire from his medical profession and become a full-time writer. But, it was not the popular Sherlock Holmes stories which inspired him the most. He was more interested in writing serious historical novels and becoming known as a famous writer in this genre. However, his historical novels never brought him the same financial remuneration or fame as his Sherlock Holmes stories did.

After a while, Doyle became increasingly frustrated with the public’s obsession with Holmes, at a time when he was growing weary of the stories. Therefore, he decided to retire Holmes in 1893 by having him plunge into a ravine with his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty. Holmes hoped this would give him more time to write his ‘serious novels’ – but, much to his frustration, he struggled to escape the public’s perception of him as the creator of Holmes. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for members of the public to equate Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes – much to his annoyance.

In 1900, Conan Doyle served in a field hospital in the Boer war. He also later published a pamphlet The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct , which sought to justify British actions in the unpopular Boer war. For his services in the war, he was knighted, though undoubtedly his fame as the creator of Sherlock Holmes was also a factor.

In, 1906, his first wife, Louisa Hawkins, died after a long battle with Tuberculosis. It was a big blow to Conan Doyle who had moved to Switzerland to help her health.

After getting married to his second wife, Denise Steward a year later, he again was in the need for more money to finance a lavish new family home. Again, Doyle turned to his ever-profitable Holmes, securing a great deal with an American publisher for more Holmes stories. Thus, Holmes was resurrected, Conan Doyle cleverly wrote that Holmes had never died in the fall but cunningly escaped Moriarty and had gone into hiding from his enemies.

Conan Doyle’s most famous character was a man of great reason and science, so it was perhaps ironical that Conan Doyle was to become greatly interested in the new religion of spiritualism. A large part of spiritualism was the contacting of deceased relatives through seances. For many years, Conan Doyle had toyed with the ideas, but the traumatic years of the First World War (where he lost a brother and son) changed his outlook to that of a fervent believer. Conan Doyle became one of the chief proponents and public faces for spiritualism. Conan Doyle felt that this proof of life beyond death could give fresh impetus to religion.

“Religions are mostly petrified and decayed, overgrown with forms and choked with mysteries. We can prove that there is no need for this. All that is essential is both very simple and very sure.” ( The New Revelation 1918)

The success of Conan Doyle’s Holmes enabled him to pursue many different interests. As well, as researching spiritualism, Conan Doyle found time to fight miscarriages of justice such as the George Edalji case.

“I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage, we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one’s weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can’t all strike very big blows, and even the little ones count for something.”

Arthur Conan Doyle, Stark Munro Letters (1894)

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net.  Published 25th June 2009. Last updated 15 February 2018.

The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at Amazon

The Complete Sherlock Holmes

The Complete Sherlock Holmes at Amazon

Related pages

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle biography

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859. Doyle's family (Conan was his middle name, and it was only later in life that he began to use it as his surname) sent him to Jesuit boarding schools to be educated, and he later entered the University of Edinburgh Medical School in 1881.

One of his professors at the university was Dr Joseph Bell, who became the model for Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. It was Bell who drummed into Doyle's head the importance of using his innate powers of observation to help him deduce the nature of a patient's affliction.

While in school, Conan Doyle began writing to earn a little extra money. His first story, The Mystery of the Sasassa Valley was published in the Chambers' Journal in 1879.

Shortly after, his father fell ill, and Doyle was forced to become the breadwinner for the family. He worked for a time as a ship's doctor, then opened his own medical practice near Portsmouth. In his spare time, he did more writing.

In 1885 Conan Doyle married Louise Hawkins, and had two children with her before she died following a protracted illness in 1900. In 1907 he remarried, to Jeanne Leckie, and had three more children with her.

His third attempt at a novel was A Study in Scarlet , the story which introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world. Study was published in Mrs. Beeton's Christmas annual, in 1887. Encouraged by publishers to keep writing, Conan Doyle wrote his second Holmes mystery, The Sign of the Four , in 1890.

So successful were these novels, and the stories which followed, that Conan Doyle could afford to give up his medical practice and devote himself to writing full time.

The first Sherlock Holmes short story, A Scandal in Bohemia , appeared in The Strand Magazine in 1891, to be followed by two dozen more stories over the next several years.

The stories proved enormously successful, but Conan Doyle tired of his own creation, and in 1894 he killed Holmes off in The Final Problem .

He underestimated the popularity of his creation. So great was the hold that the character of Sherlock Holmes had taken on the public imagination that Conan Doyle found himself at the centre of a storm of controversy.

He was inundated with letters of protest, including one from a female reader who addressed him simply as "You Brute!". He bowed to the inevitable, and revived the character of Holmes, who appeared in numerous short stories over the next 23 years.

But Conan Doyle did not confine himself to Sherlock Holmes; he wrote several popular works of historic fiction, including Micah Clarke (1888), The White Company (1890), Rodney Stone (1896), and Sir Nigel (1906).

Conan Doyle served as a doctor in the Boer War, and on his return he wrote two books defending England's participation in that conflict. It was for these books that he received his knighthood in 1902.

After the death of his son in World War I, Conan Doyle became interested in spiritualism. He was convinced that it was possible to communicate with the dead, and his views led to a certain amount of ridicule from more mainstream society.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died on July 7, 1930, and is buried in the churchyard at Minstead, Hampshire. He can rightly be credited with helping create the literary genre of the detective story. Though Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin predates Sherlock Holmes, it was the Holmes' stories that solidified in the public mind what a good detective should be.

To Visit in Britain: 221B Baker Street, London - Sherlock Holmes Museum

Sherlock Holmes novels

A Study in Scarlet: 1887 The Sign of the Four: 1890 The Hound of the Baskervilles: 1902 The Valley of Fear: 1915

Sherlock Holmes short story collections

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: 1892 The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes: 1894 The Return of Sherlock Holmes: 1905 His Last Bow: 1917 The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: 1927

Other mystery novels

The Surgeon of Gaster Fell: 1885 The Mystery of Cloomber: 1889 The Doings of Raffles Haw: 1892

Other selected works

The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896) Rodney Stone (1896) Uncle Bernac (1897) The Tragedy of the Korosko / A Desert Drama (1898) The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport (1900) Adventures of Gerard (1903) Sir Nigel (1906) The Croxley Master (1907) Waterloo (1907) Round the Fire Stories (1908) Songs of the Road (1911) The Last Galley (1911) The Speckled Band (Play) (1912) The Lost World (1912) The Poison Belt (1913) Danger! and Other Stories (1918) The Land of Mist (1926)

History of England

• Prehistoric Britain
• Roman Britain
• Anglo-Saxon Era
• The Middle Ages
• The Tudor Era
• Stuart Britain
• Georgian Britain
• The Victorian Age
• English Monarchs

History of Wales

History of scotland, london history.

• Medieval Life
• British Battles
• British Biography
• English Architecture
• Royal Family
• English Culture
• History of Britain book
• Historic Churches in Britain
• Illustrated Dictionary of Church History & Architecture

Stately Homes

Monasteries, prehistoric sites.

English Heritage membership

Free entry to English Heritage properties throughout England, plus discounted admission to Historic Scotland and Cadw properties in Scotland and Wales.

Membership details

About English Heritage

Name the Historic attraction

British History Quiz

This 13th century Franciscan monk and scholar taught at Oxford and Paris, and is famous for his research into optics

He also studied alchemy and languages

He was censured and finally imprisoned by his own order for his scientific teachings

This Day in British History

11 May, 878

Battle of Eddington

King Alfred of Wessex, later to become known as Alfred the Great, defeated a Danish force led by Guthrum, at Eddington, in Wiltshire. Alfred was aided by men from Somerset, Hampshire, and Wiltshire. According to peace terms drawn up at Wedmore, Guthrum agreed to be baptised and withdraw his forces to the East, forming The Danelaw, where Danish rule held sway, while Alfred controlled the west of England.

Monarch Mayhem

This monarch took the throne when his brother Edward abdicated

He ruled from 1936-1952

He was the father of Elizabeth II

Arthur's parents, Mary Foley Doyle and Charles Altamont Doyle, had moved to Scotland from London, hoping that Charles could advance his career in architecture. Having inherited some measure of his family's artistic talent, Charles began with every hope of success, but never realized his dreams. Plagued by depression and alcoholism, Charles was a distant father and husband, becoming so detached from reality that he ended life in an asylum. With considerable charity, his son Arthur later said of him, "My father's life was full of the tragedy of unfulfilled powers and of underdeveloped gifts."

By this time, Charles Doyle had lost his job, and the family had difficulty paying the school fees. A lodger named Bryan Charles Waller became the family's protector, eventually supporting Mary, Charles, and their children completely.

Once at university, Conan Doyle found the work difficult and boring. He gained more amusement from playing sports, at which he excelled, than in listening to lectures in large, crowded lecture halls. More interesting than studying was describing his instructors' eccentric personalities. Among his teachers was the man Conan Doyle later acknowledged as his inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Joseph Bell. Dr. Bell taught his students the importance of observation, using all the senses to obtain an accurate diagnosis. He enjoyed impressing students by guessing a person's profession from a few indications, through a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning, like Holmes. Although Bell's methods fascinated Conan Doyle, his cold indifference towards his patients repelled the young medical student. Some of this coldness found its way into Sherlock Holmes's character, especially in the early stories.

In 1886, Doyle finished the first Sherlock Holmes novella, A Study in Scarlet . After several rejections, he was forced to sell it outright for £25 for inclusion in the 1887 Beeton's Christmas Annual, a holiday collection that often sold out, but did not usually attract much attention in the national press. The work was reprinted in 1889 and many more times, but Conan Doyle never earned another penny from it. Sign of the Four , the second work to feature Holmes and Watson, also achieved a small, but by no means brilliant, success.

While writing the early Holmes stories, Doyle also began what he considered his most important work: chivalric, historical novels based on British history, primarily, Micah Clark, Sir Nigel, and The White Company . Although these novels were widely admired, none of them created the stir caused by the first series of short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes and John Watson that appeared in The Strand Magazine , starting in 1891. Despite their overwhelming success, Conan Doyle never suspected that these stories would be the foundation of his literary legacy.

After writing three series of twelve Holmes stories, receiving the unheard-of sum of £1000 for the last dozen, Conan Doyle was sick to death of the popular detective and decided to kill him off in the 1893 story, "The Final Problem." Conan Doyle considered the Holmes stories light fiction, good for earning money, but destined to be quickly forgotten, the literary equivalent of junk food. "I couldn't revive him if I would, at least not for years," he wrote to a friend who urged Holmes's resurrection, "for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras , of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day." The vehement public reaction to Holmes's death must have shocked Conan Doyle. People wore black armbands and wrote him pleading--or threatening--letters. Still, it was nine years before he capitulated to public opinion and brought Holmes back. The third Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles , appeared in nine parts in The Strand Magazine during 1901-2, but it was presented as an old case from Watson's records, completed before Holmes's death. Conan Doyle did not make up his mind to resurrect Holmes until 1903, when he wrote "The Empty House." He continued, reluctantly, to produce Holmes stories until 1927, three years before his own death. Conan Doyle became an important public figure, twice standing (unsuccessfully) for Parliament. He was knighted for his efforts on behalf of the Boer War, both as the author of a persuasive, pro-war book and as a volunteer, caring for wounded British soldiers in the field. He even took on several real-life mysteries, using Holmes's methods and his own status as a famous author to free two unjustly imprisoned men. The First World War tore apart Conan Doyle's familiar world. Like so many others, he lost close family members to the conflict. Conan Doyle's brother-in-law and nephew died in combat, while the influenza pandemic took his brother Innes and his eldest son Kingsley, weakened by war wounds. During the war, he managed to have himself appointed as an observer for the Foreign Office, but he was kept away from the horrors of the western front for fear that he might reveal to the public things that the military would rather have kept quiet. Even Sherlock Holmes served England in the war. In the story that Conan Doyle intended to be the last Holmes outing, His Last Bow , published in 1916, Holmes outwits a German spy. Conan Doyle found a refuge from the horrors of the war, and he clung to it tenaciously. Starting in 1916, he publicly declared himself a spiritualist, and over the next few years he made spiritualism the center of his life, writing on the subject and traveling all over the world to advocate his beliefs. Never afraid to take an unpopular stand, Conan Doyle wrote a book in 1922 called The Coming of the Fairies , in which he defended the veracity of two young girls who claimed to have photographed each other playing with actual fairies and goblins.

Towards the end of their lives, long after Conan Doyle's death, the aged "girls" admitted to having used paper cutouts as stand-ins for the fairies. Interestingly, Conan Doyle's own Uncle Richard had invented, in his book illustrations, the typical representation of a fairy as a little girl with dragonfly wings and a gossamer gown. No matter how many times Conan Doyle was tricked by mediums later proven to be dishonest, he continued to believe in spiritualism. The famous American magician Harry Houdini made a project of trying to convince Conan Doyle of his error, but all he managed to do was ruin their friendship. Houdini saw spiritualism as cruel because it gave people false hope; Conan Doyle, who was already suffering from serious heart disease, wanted to believe that death was a grand new adventure. He fought his infirmity, trying to continue writing and traveling as before. He died at the age of 71, secure in his spiritualist beliefs.

Doctor, writer, believer in the supernatural--Conan Doyle's personality encompassed all these traits that contributed to the Sherlock Holmes stories we love to read today. Conan Doyle's fanciful imagination, combined with his scientific training, created ideas that have helped to shape the modern mystery and science fiction genres. One of the first to anticipate the dangers of submarines in warfare, he wrote a Sherlock Holmes story on the subject. His novel The Lost World is the ancestor of Jurassic Park and countless other films. Another of his stories, "The Ring of Thoth," was probably the plot source of the 1932 film The Mummy with Boris Karloff. An 1883 medical article called "Life and Death in the Blood," outlining the imaginary voyage of a microscopic observer through the human body, anticipated the main idea behind the film Fantastic Voyage . Conan Doyle's most long-lived idea, however, was Sherlock Holmes himself, who has continued to evolve in our time through the works of other writers and filmmakers, taking forms even his creator could never have imagined.

Conan Doyle wrote the Holmes stories quickly, never imagining that they would receive much scrutiny. If he forgot a date or fact from a previous story, he forged ahead without looking it up. This bad habit has resulted in some startling discrepancies. Was Watson wounded in the leg or the arm? How could Watson's deceased wife be on a visit to her mother's? Is Watson's given name "James" or "John"? To correct these and other inconsistencies, Sherlockians comb the "canon," or "sacred writings," for clues, seek secondary sources (inventing some themselves when all else fails), and write "scholarly" articles, using Holmes's methods to solve contradictions in the works or following clues to add new "facts" to Holmes's and Watson's biographies.

One favorite Sherlockian controversy centers on the "original" location of 221b Baker Street, a non-existent address in Conan Doyle's time. When Baker Street was renumbered during the 1920s, 221b was created on the block formerly called Upper Baker Street. Many faithful representations of the sitting room at 221b Baker Street have been constructed throughout the world. All contain the violin, the tobacco-holding Persian slipper, and other Holmesian accouterments mentioned in the stories.

Not logged in

Page actions.

• View source

Arthur Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 - 7 July 1930). M.D., Kt, KStJ, D.L., LL.D. , Writer, Sportsman, Artist, Poet, Politician, Business man, Justicer, Inventor, Patriot, Spiritualist...

The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia is an online repository of all works written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ( fictions , essays , articles , poems , plays , lectures , letters , manuscripts ...), but also any materials related to him ( newspaper articles , interviews , photos , movies ...).

Adaptations

Conan Doyle: Mystery and Adventure

New Book: My Own Story, by George Edalji

Doings of Doyle: Podcast

A Chronology of the Life of Arthur Conan Doyle: New Edition

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• A Life in Pictures
• A Life in Movies
• Sherlock Holmes
• Brigadier Gerard
• Sir Nigel Loring
• Captain Sharkey
• All fictions
• Search Fictions
• Essays, Articles
• His Handwriting
• Manuscripts
• Drawings & Paintings
• Illustrators
• Periodicals

Contact/Support

• Special pages
• Cite this page

User page tools

• What links here
• Related changes
• Printable version
• Permanent link
• Page information

• This page was last modified on 9 April 2024, at 23:52.
• Privacy policy
• About The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia
• Disclaimers

• Inventors and Inventions
• Philosophers
• Film, TV, Theatre - Actors and Originators
• Playwrights
• Advertising
• Military History
• Politicians
• Publications
• Visual Arts

Arthur Conan Doyle - Creator of Sherlock Holmes

***TOO LONG***Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The brilliant Sherlock Holmes is one of the great detectives of crime fiction and has inspired a cult following as well as many film and television interpretations. But he shone all the brighter when shedding light on a case for the benefit of the lower-wattage Watson.

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ DL (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction.

Doyle was a prolific writer; other than Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. One of Doyle's early short stories, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" (1884), helped to popularise the mystery of the Mary Celeste.

Doyle is often referred to as "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" or "Conan Doyle", implying that "Conan" is part of a compound surname rather than a middle name. His baptism entry in the register of St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, gives "Arthur Ignatius Conan" as his given names and "Doyle" as his surname. It also names Michael Conan as his godfather. The catalogues of the British Library and the Library of Congress treat "Doyle" alone as his surname.

Steven Doyle, publisher of The Baker Street Journal, wrote: "Conan was Arthur's middle name. Shortly after he graduated from high school he began using Conan as a sort of surname. But technically his last name is simply 'Doyle'." When knighted, he was gazetted as Doyle, not under the compound Conan Doyle.

Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland. His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was born in England, of Irish Catholic descent, and his mother, Mary (née Foley), was Irish Catholic. His parents married in 1855. In 1864 the family scattered because of Charles's growing alcoholism, and the children were temporarily housed across Edinburgh. Arthur lodged with Mary Burton, the aunt of a friend, at Liberton Bank House on Gilmerton Road, while studying at Newington Academy.

In 1867, the family came together again and lived in squalid tenement flats at 3 Sciennes Place. Doyle's father died in 1893, in the Crichton Royal, Dumfries, after many years of psychiatric illness. Beginning at an early age, throughout his life Doyle wrote letters to his mother, and many of them were preserved.

Supported by wealthy uncles, Doyle was sent to England, to the Jesuit preparatory school Hodder Place, Stonyhurst in Lancashire at the age of nine (1868–70). He then went on to Stonyhurst College, which he attended until 1875. While Doyle was not unhappy at Stonyhurst, he said he did not have any fond memories of it because the school was run on medieval principles: the only subjects covered were rudiments, rhetoric, Euclidean geometry, algebra and the classics. Doyle commented later in his life that this academic system could only be excused "on the plea that any exercise, however stupid in itself, forms a sort of mental dumbbell by which one can improve one's mind." He also found the school harsh, noting that, instead of compassion and warmth, it favoured the threat of corporal punishment and ritual humiliation.

From 1875 to 1876, he was educated at the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria. His family decided that he would spend a year there in order to perfect his German and broaden his academic horizons. He later rejected the Catholic faith and became an agnostic. One source attributed his drift away from religion to the time he spent in the less strict Austrian school. He also later became a spiritualist mystic.

Medical career

From 1876 to 1881, Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School; during this period he spent time working in Aston (then a town in Warwickshire, now part of Birmingham), Sheffield and Ruyton-XI-Towns, Shropshire. Also during this period, he studied practical botany at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. While studying, Doyle began writing short stories. His earliest extant fiction, "The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe", was unsuccessfully submitted to Blackwood's Magazine. His first published piece, "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley", a story set in South Africa, was printed in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal on 6 September 1879. On 20 September 1879, he published his first academic article, "Gelsemium as a Poison" in the British Medical Journal, a study which The Daily Telegraph regarded as potentially useful in a 21st-century murder investigation.

Doyle was the doctor on the Greenland whaler Hope of Peterhead in 1880. On 11 July 1880, John Gray's Hope and David Gray's Eclipse met up with the Eira and Leigh Smith. The photographer W.J.A. Grant took a photograph aboard the Eira of Doyle along with Smith, the Gray brothers, and ship's surgeon William Neale, who were members of the Smith expedition. That expedition explored Franz Josef Land, and led to the naming, on 18 August, of Cape Flora, Bell Island, Nightingale Sound, Gratton ("Uncle Joe") Island, and Mabel Island.

After graduating with Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery (M.B. C.M.) degrees from the University of Edinburgh in 1881, he was ship's surgeon on the SS Mayumba during a voyage to the West African coast. He completed his Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) degree (an advanced degree beyond the basic medical qualification in the UK) with a dissertation on tabes dorsalis in 1885.

In 1882, Doyle partnered with his former classmate George Turnavine Budd in a medical practice in Plymouth, but their relationship proved difficult, and Doyle soon left to set up an independent practice. Arriving in Portsmouth in June 1882, with less than £10 (£1100 in 2019) to his name, he set up a medical practice at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea. The practice was not successful. While waiting for patients, Doyle returned to writing fiction.

Doyle was a staunch supporter of compulsory vaccination and wrote several articles advocating the practice and denouncing the views of anti-vaccinators.

In early 1891, Doyle embarked on the study of ophthalmology in Vienna. He had previously studied at the Portsmouth Eye Hospital in order to qualify to perform eye tests and prescribe glasses. Vienna had been suggested by his friend Vernon Morris as a place to spend six months and train to be an eye surgeon. But Doyle found it too difficult to understand the German medical terms being used in his classes in Vienna, and soon quit his studies there. For the rest of his two-month stay in Vienna, he pursued other activities, such as ice skating with his wife Louisa and drinking with Brinsley Richards of the London Times. He also wrote The Doings of Raffles Haw.

After visiting Venice and Milan, he spent a few days in Paris observing Edmund Landolt, an expert on diseases of the eye. Within three months of his departure for Vienna, Doyle returned to London. He opened a small office and consulting room at 2 Upper Wimpole Street, or 2 Devonshire Place as it was then. (There is today a Westminster City Council commemorative plaque over the front door.) He had no patients, according to his autobiography, and his efforts as an ophthalmologist were a failure.

Doyle struggled to find a publisher. His first work featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, A Study in Scarlet, was written in three weeks when he was 27 and was accepted for publication by Ward Lock & Co on 20 November 1886, which gave Doyle £25 (equivalent to £2,900 in 2019) in exchange for all rights to the story. The piece appeared a year later in the Beeton's Christmas Annual and received good reviews in The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald.

Holmes was partially modelled on Doyle's former university teacher Joseph Bell. In 1892, in a letter to Bell, Doyle wrote, "It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes ... round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man", and in his 1924 autobiography, he remarked, "It is no wonder that after the study of such a character [viz., Bell] I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal."Robert Louis Stevenson was able to recognise the strong similarity between Joseph Bell and Sherlock Holmes: "My compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes. ... can this be my old friend Joe Bell?" Other authors sometimes suggest additional influences—for instance, Edgar Allan Poe's character C. Auguste Dupin, who is mentioned, disparagingly, by Holmes in A Study in Scarlet. Dr. (John) Watson owes his surname, but not any other obvious characteristic, to a Portsmouth medical colleague of Doyle's, Dr. James Watson.

A sequel to A Study in Scarlet was commissioned, and The Sign of the Four appeared in Lippincott's Magazine in February 1890, under agreement with the Ward Lock company. Doyle felt grievously exploited by Ward Lock as an author new to the publishing world, and so, after this, he left them. Short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes were published in the Strand Magazine. Doyle wrote the first five Holmes short stories from his office at 2 Upper Wimpole Street (then known as Devonshire Place), which is now marked by a memorial plaque.

Doyle's attitude towards his most famous creation was ambivalent. In November 1891, he wrote to his mother: "I think of slaying Holmes, ... and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things." His mother responded, "You won't! You can't! You mustn't!" In an attempt to deflect publishers' demands for more Holmes stories, he raised his price to a level intended to discourage them, but found they were willing to pay even the large sums he asked. As a result, he became one of the best-paid authors of his time.

In December 1893, to dedicate more of his time to his historical novels, Doyle had Holmes and Professor Moriarty plunge to their deaths together down the Reichenbach Falls in the story "The Final Problem". Public outcry, however, led him to feature Holmes in 1901 in the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. Holmes' fictional connection with the Reichenbach Falls is celebrated in the nearby town of Meiringen.

In 1903, Doyle published his first Holmes short story in ten years, "The Adventure of the Empty House", in which it was explained that only Moriarty had fallen, but since Holmes had other dangerous enemies—especially Colonel Sebastian Moran—he had arranged to make it look as if he too were dead. Holmes was ultimately featured in a total of 56 short stories—the last published in 1927—and four novels by Doyle, and has since appeared in many novels and stories by other authors.

Doyle's first novels were The Mystery of Cloomber, not published until 1888, and the unfinished Narrative of John Smith, published only posthumously, in 2011. He amassed a portfolio of short stories, including "The Captain of the Pole-Star" and "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement", both inspired by Doyle's time at sea. The latter popularised the mystery of the Mary Celeste and added fictional details such as that the ship was found in perfect condition (it had actually taken on water by the time it was discovered), and that its boats remained on board (the single boat was in fact missing). These fictional details have come to dominate popular accounts of the incident, and Doyle's alternate spelling of the ship's name as the Marie Celeste has become more commonly used than the original spelling.

Between 1888 and 1906, Doyle wrote seven historical novels, which he and many critics regarded as his best work. He also wrote nine other novels, and—later in his career (1912–29)—five narratives (two of novel length) featuring the irascible scientist Professor Challenger. The Challenger stories include his best-known work after the Holmes oeuvre, The Lost World. His historical novels include The White Company and its prequel Sir Nigel, set in the Middle Ages. He was a prolific author of short stories, including two collections set in Napoleonic times and featuring the French character Brigadier Gerard.

Doyle's works for the stage include: Waterloo, which centres on the reminiscences of an English veteran of the Napoleonic Wars and features a character Gregory Brewster, written for Henry Irving; The House of Temperley, the plot of which reflects his abiding interest in boxing; The Speckled Band, adapted from his earlier short story "The Adventure of the Speckled Band"; and an 1893 collaboration with J. M. Barrie on the libretto of Jane Annie.

Sporting career

While living in Southsea, the seaside resort of Portsmouth, Doyle played football as a goalkeeper for Portsmouth Association Football Club, an amateur side, under the pseudonym A. C. Smith.

Doyle was a keen cricketer, and between 1899 and 1907 he played 10 first-class matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). He also played for the amateur cricket teams the Allahakbarries and the Authors XI alongside fellow writers J. M. Barrie, P. G. Wodehouse and A. A. Milne. His highest score, in 1902 against London County, was 43. He was an occasional bowler who took one first-class wicket, W. G. Grace, and wrote a poem about the achievement.

In 1901, Doyle was one of three judges for the world's first major bodybuilding competition, which was organized by the "Father of Bodybuilding", Eugen Sandow. The event was held in London's Royal Albert Hall. The other two judges were the sculptor Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge and Eugen Sandow himself.

Doyle was an amateur boxer. In 1909, he was invited to referee the James Jeffries–Jack Johnson heavyweight championship fight in Reno, Nevada. Doyle wrote: "I was much inclined to accept ... though my friends pictured me as winding up with a revolver at one ear and a razor at the other. However, the distance and my engagements presented a final bar."

Also a keen golfer, Doyle was elected captain of the Crowborough Beacon Golf Club in Sussex for 1910. He had moved to Little Windlesham house in Crowborough with Jean Leckie, his second wife, and resided there with his family from 1907 until his death in July 1930.

He entered the English Amateur billiards championship in 1913.

While living in Switzerland, Doyle became interested in skiing, which was relatively unknown in Switzerland at the time. He wrote an article, "An Alpine Pass on 'Ski'" for the December 1894 issue of The Strand Magazine, in which he described his experiences with skiing and the beautiful alpine scenery that could be seen in the process. The article popularized the activity and began the long association between Switzerland and skiing.

In 1885 Doyle married Louisa (sometimes called "Touie") Hawkins (1857–1906). She was the youngest daughter of J. Hawkins, of Minsterworth, Gloucestershire, and the sister of one of Doyle's patients. Louisa suffered from tuberculosis. In 1907, the year after Louisa's death, he married Jean Elizabeth Leckie (1874–1940). He had met and fallen in love with Jean in 1897, but had maintained a platonic relationship with her while his first wife was still alive, out of loyalty to her. Jean outlived him by ten years, and died in London.

Doyle fathered five children. He had two with his first wife: Mary Louise (1889–1976) and Arthur Alleyne Kingsley, known as Kingsley (1892–1918). He had an additional three with his second wife: Denis Percy Stewart (1909–1955), who became the second husband of Georgian Princess Nina Mdivani; Adrian Malcolm (1910–1970); and Jean Lena Annette (1912–1997). None of Doyle's five children had children of their own, so he has no living direct descendants.

Political campaigning

Doyle served as a volunteer doctor in the Langman Field Hospital at Bloemfontein between March and June 1900, during the Second Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902). Later that same year, he wrote a book on the war, The Great Boer War, as well as a short work titled The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, in which he responded to critics of the United Kingdom's role in that war, and argued that its role was justified. The latter work was widely translated, and Doyle believed it was the reason he was knighted (given the rank of Knight Bachelor) by King Edward VII in the 1902 Coronation Honours. (He received the accolade from the King in person at Buckingham Palace on 24 October of that year.)

He stood for Parliament twice as a Liberal Unionist: in 1900 in Edinburgh Central; and in 1906 in the Hawick Burghs. He received a respectable share of the vote, but was not elected. He served as a Deputy-Lieutenant of Surrey beginning in 1902, and was appointed a Knight of Grace of the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem in 1903.

Doyle was a supporter of the campaign for the reform of the Congo Free State that was led by the journalist E. D. Morel and diplomat Roger Casement. In 1909 he wrote The Crime of the Congo, a long pamphlet in which he denounced the horrors of that colony. He became acquainted with Morel and Casement, and it is possible that, together with Bertram Fletcher Robinson, they inspired several characters that appear in his 1912 novel The Lost World. Later, after the Easter Rising, Casement was found guilty of treason against the Crown, and was sentenced to death. Doyle tried, unsuccessfully, to save him, arguing that Casement had been driven mad, and therefore should not be held responsible for his actions.

As the First World War loomed, and having been caught up in a growing public swell of Germanophobia, Doyle gave a public donation of 10 shillings to the anti-immigration British Brothers' League.

Doyle was also a fervent advocate of justice and personally investigated two closed cases, which led to two men being exonerated of the crimes of which they were accused. The first case, in 1906, involved a shy half-British, half-Indian lawyer named George Edalji, who had allegedly penned threatening letters and mutilated animals in Great Wyrley. Police were set on Edalji's conviction, even though the mutilations continued after their suspect was jailed. Apart from helping George Edalji, Doyle's work helped establish a way to correct other miscarriages of justice, as it was partially as a result of this case that the Court of Criminal Appeal was established in 1907.

The story of Doyle and Edalji was dramatised in an episode of the 1972 BBC television series, The Edwardians. In Nicholas Meyer's pastiche The West End Horror (1976), Holmes manages to help clear the name of a shy Parsi Indian character wronged by the English justice system. Edalji was of Parsi heritage on his father's side. The story was fictionalised in Julian Barnes's 2005 novel Arthur and George, which was adapted into a three-part drama by ITV in 2015.

The second case, that of Oscar Slater—a Jew of German origin who operated a gambling den and was convicted of bludgeoning an 82-year-old woman in Glasgow in 1908—excited Doyle's curiosity because of inconsistencies in the prosecution's case and a general sense that Slater was not guilty. He ended up paying most of the costs for Slater's successful 1928 appeal.

Freemasonry and spiritualism

Doyle had a longstanding interest in mystical subjects and remained fascinated by the idea of paranormal phenomena, even though the strength of his belief in their reality waxed and waned periodically over the years.

In 1887, in Southsea, influenced by Major-General Alfred Wilks Drayson, a member of the Portsmouth Literary and Philosophical Society, Doyle began a series of investigations into the possibility of psychic phenomena and attended about 20 seances, experiments in telepathy, and sittings with mediums. Writing to spiritualist journal Light that year, he declared himself to be a spiritualist, describing one particular event that had convinced him psychic phenomena were real. Also in 1887 (on 26 January), he was initiated as a Freemason at the Phoenix Lodge No. 257 in Southsea. (He resigned from the Lodge in 1889, returned to it in 1902, and resigned again in 1911.)

In 1889, he became a founding member of the Hampshire Society for Psychical Research; in 1893, he joined the London-based Society for Psychical Research; and in 1894, he collaborated with Sir Sidney Scott and Frank Podmore in a search for poltergeists in Devon.

Doyle and the spiritualist William Thomas Stead (before the latter was lost in the sinking of the Titanic) were led to believe that Julius and Agnes Zancig had genuine psychic powers, and they claimed publicly that the Zancigs used telepathy. However, in 1924, the Zancigs confessed that their mind reading act had been a trick; they published the secret code and all other details of the trick method they had used under the title "Our Secrets!!" in a London newspaper. Doyle also praised the psychic phenomena and spirit materializations that he believed had been produced by Eusapia Palladino and Mina Crandon, both of whom were also later exposed as frauds.

In 1916, at the height of the First World War, Doyle's belief in psychic phenomena was strengthened by what he took to be the psychic abilities of his children's nanny, Lily Loder Symonds. This and the constant drumbeat of wartime deaths inspired him with the idea that spiritualism was what he called a "New Revelation" sent by God to bring solace to the bereaved. He wrote a piece in Light magazine about his faith and began lecturing frequently on spiritualism. In 1918, he published his first spiritualist work, The New Revelation.

Some have mistakenly assumed that Doyle's turn to spiritualism was prompted by the death of his son Kingsley, but Doyle began presenting himself publicly as a spiritualist in 1916, and Kingsley died on 28 October 1918 (from pneumonia contracted during his convalescence after being seriously wounded in the 1916 Battle of the Somme). Nevertheless, the war-related deaths of many people who were close to him appears to have even further strengthened his long-held belief in life after death and spirit communication. Doyle's brother Brigadier-general Innes Doyle died, also from pneumonia, in February 1919. His two brothers-in-law (one of whom was E. W. Hornung, creator of the literary character Raffles), as well as his two nephews, also died shortly after the war. His second book on spiritualism, The Vital Message, appeared in 1919.

Doyle found solace in supporting spiritualism's ideas and the attempts of spiritualists to find proof of an existence beyond the grave. In particular, according to some, he favoured Christian Spiritualism and encouraged the Spiritualists' National Union to accept an eighth precept – that of following the teachings and example of Jesus of Nazareth. He was a member of the renowned supernaturalist organisation The Ghost Club.

In 1919, the magician P. T. Selbit staged a séance at his flat in Bloomsbury, which Doyle attended. Although some later claimed that Doyle had endorsed the apparent instances of clairvoyance at that séance as genuine, a contemporaneous report by the Sunday Express quoted Doyle as saying "I should have to see it again before passing a definite opinion on it" and "I have my doubts about the whole thing". In 1920, Doyle and the noted sceptic Joseph McCabe held a public debate at Queen's Hall in London, with Doyle taking the position that the claims of spiritualism were true. After the debate, McCabe published a booklet Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud?, in which he laid out evidence refuting Doyle's arguments and claimed that Doyle had been duped into believing in spiritualism through deliberate mediumship trickery.

Doyle also debated the psychiatrist Harold Dearden, who vehemently disagreed with Doyle's belief that many cases of diagnosed mental illness were the result of spirit possession.

In 1920, Doyle travelled to Australia and New Zealand on spiritualist missionary work, and over the next several years, until his death, he continued his mission, giving talks about his spiritualist conviction in Britain, Europe, and the United States.

Doyle wrote a novel The Land of Mist centered on spiritualist themes and featuring the character Professor Challenger. He also wrote many non-fiction spiritualist works. Perhaps his most famous of these was The Coming of the Fairies (1922), in which Doyle described his beliefs about the nature and existence of fairies and spirits, reproduced the five Cottingley Fairies photographs, asserted that those who suspected them being faked were wrong, and expressed his conviction that they were authentic. Decades later, the photos were definitively shown to have been faked, and their creators admitted to the fakery.

Doyle was friends for a time with the American magician Harry Houdini. Even though Houdini explained that his feats were based on illusion and trickery, Doyle was convinced that Houdini had supernatural powers and said as much in his work The Edge of the Unknown. Houdini's friend Bernard M. L. Ernst recounted a time when Houdini had performed an impressive trick at his home in Doyle's presence. Houdini had assured Doyle that the trick was pure illusion and had expressed the hope that this demonstration would persuade Doyle not to go around "endorsing phenomena" simply because he could think of no explanation for what he had seen other than supernatural power. However, according to Ernst, Doyle simply refused to believe that it had been a trick. Houdini became a prominent opponent of the spiritualist movement in the 1920s, after the death of his beloved mother. He insisted that spiritualist mediums employed trickery, and consistently exposed them as frauds. These differences between Houdini and Doyle eventually led to a bitter, public falling-out between them.

In 1922, the psychical researcher Harry Price accused the "spirit photographer" William Hope of fraud. Doyle defended Hope, but further evidence of trickery was obtained from other researchers. Doyle threatened to have Price evicted from the National Laboratory of Psychical Research and predicted that, if he persisted in writing what he called "sewage" about spiritualists, he would meet the same fate as Harry Houdini. Price wrote: "Arthur Conan Doyle and his friends abused me for years for exposing Hope." In response to the exposure of frauds that had been perpetrated by Hope and other spiritualists, Doyle led 84 members of the Society for Psychical Research to resign in protest from the society on the ground that they believed it was opposed to spiritualism.

Doyle's two-volume book The History of Spiritualism was published in 1926. W. Leslie Curnow, a spiritualist, contributed much research to the book. Later that year, Robert John Tillyard wrote a predominantly supportive review of it in the journal Nature. This review provoked controversy: Several other critics, notably A. A. Campbell Swinton, pointed out the evidence of fraud in mediumship, as well as Doyle's non-scientific approach to the subject. In 1927, Doyle gave a filmed interview, in which he spoke about Sherlock Holmes and spiritualism.

Doyle and the Piltdown Hoax

Richard Milner, an American historian of science, has presented a case that Doyle may have been the perpetrator of the Piltdown Man hoax of 1912, creating the counterfeit hominid fossil that fooled the scientific world for over 40 years. Milner noted that Doyle had a plausible motive—namely, revenge on the scientific establishment for debunking one of his favourite psychics—and said that The Lost World appeared to contain several clues referring cryptically to his having been involved in the hoax.Samuel Rosenberg's 1974 book Naked is the Best Disguise purports to explain how, throughout his writings, Doyle had provided overt clues to otherwise hidden or suppressed aspects of his way of thinking that seemed to support the idea that Doyle would be involved in such a hoax.

However, more recent research suggests that Doyle was not involved. In 2016, researchers at the Natural History Museum and Liverpool John Moores University analyzed DNA evidence showing that responsibility for the hoax lay with the amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson, who had originally "found" the remains. He had initially not been considered the likely perpetrator, because the hoax was seen as being too elaborate for him to have devised. However, the DNA evidence showed that a supposedly ancient tooth he had "discovered" in 1915 (at a different site) came from the same jaw as that of the Piltdown Man, suggesting that he had planted them both. That tooth, too, was later proven to have been planted as part of a hoax.

Dr Chris Stringer, an anthropologist from the Natural History Museum, was quoted as saying: "Conan Doyle was known to play golf at the Piltdown site and had even given Dawson a lift in his car to the area, but he was a public man and very busy[,] and it is very unlikely that he would have had the time [to create the hoax]. So there are some coincidences, but I think they are just coincidences. When you look at the fossil evidence[,] you can only associate Dawson with all the finds, and Dawson was known to be personally ambitious. He wanted professional recognition. He wanted to be a member of the Royal Society and he was after an MBE . He wanted people to stop seeing him as an amateur".

Another of Doyle's longstanding interests was architectural design. In 1895, when he commissioned an architect friend of his, Joseph Henry Ball, to build him a home, he played an active part in the design process. The home in which he lived from October 1897 to September 1907, known as Undershaw (near Hindhead, in Surrey), was used as a hotel and restaurant from 1924 until 2004, when it was bought by a developer and then stood empty while conservationists and Doyle fans fought to preserve it. In 2012, the High Court in London ruled in favor of those seeking to preserve the historic building, ordering that the redevelopment permission be quashed on the ground that it had not been obtained through proper procedures. The building was later approved to become part of Stepping Stones, a school for children with disabilities and special needs.

Doyle made his most ambitious foray into architecture in March 1912, while he was staying at the Lyndhurst Grand Hotel: He sketched the original designs for a third-storey extension and for an alteration of the front facade of the building. Work began later that year, and when it was finished, the building was a nearly exact manifestation of the plans Doyle had sketched. Superficial alterations have been subsequently made, but the essential structure is still clearly Doyle's.

In 1914, on a family trip to the Jasper National Park in Canada, he designed a golf course and ancillary buildings for a hotel. The plans were realised in full, but neither the golf course nor the buildings have survived.

In 1926, Doyle laid the foundation stone for a Spiritualist Temple in Camden, London. Of the building's total £600 construction costs, he provided £500.

Doyle was found clutching his chest in the hall of Windlesham Manor, his house in Crowborough, Sussex, on 7 July 1930. He died of a heart attack at the age of 71. His last words were directed toward his wife: "You are wonderful." At the time of his death, there was some controversy concerning his burial place, as he was avowedly not a Christian, considering himself a Spiritualist. He was first buried on 11 July 1930 in Windlesham rose garden.

He was later reinterred together with his wife in Minstead churchyard in the New Forest, Hampshire. Carved wooden tablets to his memory and to the memory of his wife, originally from the church at Minstead, are on display as part of a Sherlock Holmes exhibition at Portsmouth Museum. The epitaph on his gravestone in the churchyard reads, in part: "Steel true/Blade straight/Arthur Conan Doyle/Knight/Patriot, Physician and man of letters".

A statue honours Doyle at Crowborough Cross in Crowborough, where he lived for 23 years. There is a statue of Sherlock Holmes in Picardy Place, Edinburgh, close to the house where Doyle was born.

Arthur Conan Doyle has been portrayed by many actors, including:

Arthur Conan Doyle is the ostensible narrator of Ian Madden's short story "Cracks in an Edifice of Sheer Reason".

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle features as a recurring character in Pip Murphy's Christie and Agatha's Detective Agency series, including A Discovery Disappears and Of Mountains and Motors.

• Arthur Conan Doyle en.wikipedia.org

You might also like

JAVASCRIPT IS DISABLED. Please enable JavaScript on your browser to best view this site.

Conan Doyle Info

The life and work of sir arthur conan doyle.

• List of Sherlock Holmes Fiction
• Sherlock Holmes and Cocaine
• The Death of Sherlock Holmes
• 221B Baker Street
• Characters in the World of Sherlock Holmes
• Professor James Moriarty
• Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Joseph Bell
• The Hound of the Baskervilles
• Sherlock Holmes Quotes

Arthur Conan Doyle Biography

• Conan Doyle’s Marriages
• Mary Foley Doyle, Conan Doyle’s Mother
• Charles Altamont Doyle, Conan Doyle’s Father
• James M. Barrie
• Arthur Conan Doyle and Spiritualism
• Arthur Conan Doyle and George Budd
• Dr. Conan Doyle – Ship’s Surgeon
• Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw and the Titanic
• The Oscar Slater Case
• George Edalji and Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Knighting of Arthur Conan Doyle
• Conan Doyle and World War One
• Skiing at Davos
• Conan Doyle Daily Quote
• Random Quote
• Quotes by Title
• Quotes by Topic
• Search for Quotes
• Ask Sherlock Holmes
• Concentration
• Shelock Holmes Picture Scramble
• Sherlock Holmes Crossword Puzzle
• Sherlock Holmes Title Game
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Quiz
• The Lost World Quiz
• Conan Doyle’s Other Work of Fiction
• J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement
• The Crime of the Congo
• The Lost World
• The White Company
• The Stark Munro Letters

Last Updated June 16, 2023 – Originally published June 24,2015

1859 – Conan Doyle is born on May 22 in Edinburgh, Scotland to Charles and Mary Doyle.

1868 – Conan Doyle is sent to Jesuit boarding school in England.

1876   – Charles Doyle enters a nursing facility to receive treatment for his alcoholism.  Conan Doyle attends the University of Edinburgh Medical School where he meets Dr. Joseph Bell , the person who inspired the character of Sherlock Holmes .

Joseph Bell – Inspiration for Sherlock Holmes

1879   – Conan Doyle’s work is published for the first time . The story is The Mystery of the Sasassa Valley .

1880 – He serves as ship’s surgeon on the Greenland whaler Hope.

1881  – A Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery are awarded to Conan Doyle.    He leaves from Liverpool to serve as shipboard medical officer on the steamer Mayumba.

1882 – Conan Doyle leaves for Portsmouth to establish his own medical practice.

1883 – He joins the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society.

1884 – J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement is published.

1885 – On August 5th, Conan Doyle marries Louise “Toulie” Hawkins .

1887 – A Study in Scarlet , the first Sherlock Holmes story, is published.

1889 – Mary, the first child of Conan Doyle, is born. Micah Clarke is published.

1890 – The Sign of Four is published.

1891 – Conan Doyle gives up his medical practice in favor of writing. The White Company is published.

1892 – Louise gives birth to Arthur Allyne Kingsley.  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is published.

1893 – Conan Doyle visits Reichenbach Falls. Louise is diagnosed with tuberculosis. Conan Doyle’s father, Charles , dies. Conan Doyle takes Louise to Switzerland because of her health. Conan Doyle joins the British Society for Psychical Research. The Adventure of the Final Problem is published.

1894 – The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is published. Conan Doyle goes on a lecture tour of the United States.

1895 – Visits Egypt

1896 – Conan Doyle and family move back to England.

1897 – Conan Doyle meets Jean Leckie, the woman who would later become his second wife .

1899 – A Duet with an Occasional Chorus is published.

1900 – Serves in the Boer War.

1901 – The Hound of the Baskervilles is published in The Strand magazine.

1902 – The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct is published.  Conan Doyle is knighted for this publication.

1904 – Conan Doyle is made a member of the Crimes Club. The Return of Sherlock Holmes is published.

1905 – Sir Nigel is published.

1906 – Louise dies at the age of forty-nine. Conan Doyle begins the investigation of the George Edalji case .

1907 – Conan Doyle marries Jean Leckie .

1909 – Denis Percy Stewart Conan Doyle is born to Jean and Arthur. Conan Doyle writes The Crime of the Congo .

Oscar Slater in 1908

1910 – Conan Doyle becomes involved in the Oscar Slater case . Adrian Malcom is born to Jean and Arthur.

1911 – Conan Doyle and Jean take part in the Prince Henry Tour .

1912 – The Lost World is published. Lena Jean Annette is born to Jean and Arthur. Conan Doyle argues with George Bernard Shaw about the Titanic .

1913 – The Poison Belt is published.

1914 – Conan Doyle visits the United States.

1915 – The Valley of Fear is published in book form.

1916 – Conan Doyle declares his belief in Spiritualism in the Light magazine.

1917 – Conan Doyle speaks publicly on Spiritualism for the first time. His Last Bow is published.

1918 – His son, Kingsley, dies. His brother, Innes, also dies.

“My Two Sweethearts”—Houdini with his mother and wife around 1907

1920 – Conan Doyle writes about the Cottingley fairies in the December issue of The Strand .  Conan Doyle meets Houdini .

1921 – Jean Conan Doyle discovers that she has the ability to do automatic writing.

1922 – The Coming of the Fairies is published. Jean Conan Doyle attempts to contact Houdini’s mother.

1925 – The Lost World is made into a film. The Land of Mist is published.

1926 – History of Spiritualism is published.

1927 – The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes is published.

1928 – Conan Doyle launches a five-month tour of Africa.

1930 – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dies on July 7. They bury him at the rose garden in Windlesham.

The Eventful Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

S ir Arthur Conan Doyle is remembered today as an author and the creator of Sherlock Holmes, one of the most iconic fictional characters of all time. This, however, was just one role Doyle undertook during his long and eventful life – and one that he came to resent as time moved on. As well as being a writer, he was also an accomplished (though failed) doctor, a keen sportsman, and a would-be politician, among many other things. Here, we will explore the story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, tracing the highs and lows of his extraordinary life.

A Difficult Start: Doyle’s Early Life

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 22nd May 1859 to Mary Doyle (née Foley), an Irish Catholic, and Charles Altamont Doyle, who was born in England but was of Irish Catholic heritage. His father came from an artistic family and followed the family tradition, working as an artist and a civil servant, though his fame would come to be eclipsed by his son’s.

By 1864, however, the family’s fortunes were in disarray, and the Doyle family itself was scattered across Edinburgh due to Charles Altamont Doyle’s struggles with alcohol addiction . During this time, Arthur Conan Doyle stayed with the reformer Mary Burton, who was the aunt of a school friend. Three years later, the family was once again living together under one roof, though in vastly reduced circumstances, taking up residence in an Edinburgh tenement flat.

Due to his father’s reduced circumstances and failing physical and mental health, Arthur Conan Doyle’s education was paid for by his comparatively affluent relatives. He attended private Roman Catholic schools in England, the first being the Jesuit preparatory school in Stonyhurst, Lancashire, from 1868 to 1870. From here, he went on to Stonyhurst College (of which he had few happy memories) before leaving in 1875 to spend a year studying at the Stella Matutina in Fedlkirch, Austria, to improve his German language skills. Though the Stella Matutina was also a Jesuit school, it was considerably less strict than his previous Lancashire schools had been, and it was here that he lost his faith and became an agnostic.

Hard Luck: Doyle’s Medical Career & First Forays into Writing

After leaving the Stella Matutina, Doyle enrolled at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, where he also studied botany at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh alongside his medical degree. In addition, he wrote fiction as a medical student, with his first published story, “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,” appearing in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in 1879. During that same year, he also published his first academic article, “Gelsemium as a Poison,” in the British Medical Journal .

Thus, we can see how Doyle would later put his medical training to use in constructing murder mysteries for Holmes and Watson to solve. He also famously based Sherlock Holmes on his Edinburgh university lecturer Joseph Bell. The likeness between the two was immediately obvious to fellow Edinburgh man of letters Robert Louis Stevenson , who was a friend of Bell.

A year after these publications appeared, Doyle worked as a doctor on the Greenland Whaler Hope of Peterhead in 1880. The following year, he graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and a Master of Surgery from the University of Edinburgh. His time aboard the Hope of Peterhead had presumably given him a taste for life on the open sea, however, and he soon put his master’s degree to good use by becoming the ship’s surgeon on the SS Mayumba on a voyage to the coast of West Africa.

Upon returning to England in 1882, he made two abortive attempts to set up a medical practice in Plymouth and Portsmouth, respectively. (A decade later, he faced similarly bad luck when trying to set up a practice in London). He returned, therefore, to the University of Edinburgh, where he was awarded his MD in 1885, writing his dissertation on tabes dorsalis . While he struggled to make a living as a professional doctor, it is clear that Doyle was a highly intelligent man of science who was fully engaged in the medical debates of his time. He was a keen proponent of compulsory vaccination, for example, and was deeply interested in ophthalmology.

He had a similarly difficult time trying to make money from his writing. Though he made his name through his writings on Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, the first novels Doyle wrote are, in fact, The Mystery of Cloomber (which was not published until 1888) and The Narrative of John Smith , which he did not finish and was only published posthumously in 2011.

After writing A Study in Scarlet – the first work to feature Holmes and Watson – in just three weeks, however, he did manage to secure a publication deal with Ward, Lock & Co., but, as a young and relatively unknown writer, he was paid just £25 for the story and all rights to it. In 1887, the novel was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual . Having received positive reviews, a sequel was commissioned by Ward, Lock & Co., which in turn led to the serial publication of The Sign of the Four in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890. By this time, however, Doyle had become increasingly aware of the exploitation of his work under Ward, Lock & Co., with whom he severed ties.

This Sporting Life

One aspect of Doyle’s life that is less well-known is his keen interest in sports. His main sporting passion was cricket , playing ten first-class matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club between 1899 and 1907. He also played for amateur cricket teams, including the Authors XI, which also included P.G. Wodehouse, A.A. Milne , and fellow Scott J.M. Barrie.

Perhaps more surprisingly, Doyle established the Undershaw Rifle Club after installing a 100-yard shooting range at his home. The range was open to men in the local area, as Doyle believed that the recent Boer War had demonstrated that British marksmanship left a lot to be desired. (In 1900, Doyle had been a volunteer physician in the Langman Field Hospital in Bloemfontein during the Second Boer War and went on to write The Great Boer War and The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct that same year. It was for this, Doyle believed, he was knighted in 1902). He would later go on to be part of the Rifle Clubs Committee of the National Rifle Association.

As well as this, Doyle was also interested in boxing and bodybuilding. While he was an amateur boxer, his interest in bodybuilding was that of an outsider rather than an active participant. In fact, in 1901, he was among the three judges of the first-ever major bodybuilding competition, held at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

And, like many others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Doyle was also interested in the Alps and Alpine sports, especially skiing. In December 1894, his article “An Alpine Pass on ‘Ski’” was printed in The Strand Magazine . Here, he outlined his own passion for skiing, waxing lyrical on the sublime alpine landscape that could be appreciated from the slopes.

Though born in Edinburgh, Doyle was of Irish Catholic descent and, though he later turned to mysticism, was brought up Roman Catholic. The question of Irish independence was a key political issue of the time, with Doyle (a Liberal Unionist) favoring British rule in Ireland.

Doyle, however, was a supporter of the campaign movement for the reform of the Congo Free State, spearheaded by the journalist E.D. Morel and the diplomat and Irish nationalist Roger Casement. Through his support of this cause, he came to know both Morel and Casement.

Following his work in Africa, Casement returned to Ireland in 1904 and joined the Gaelic League and, a year later, joined Arthur Griffith’s newly founded Sinn Féin. In support of the 1916 Easter Rising , Casement smuggled German arms and ammunition into Ireland for the rebels’ use. He was subsequently found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. Though Doyle was a unionist, he argued that Casement was mad and so not liable for his actions. Doyle’s pleas were in vain, however, and Casement was hanged.

In the lead-up to the First World War , Doyle donated ten shillings to the British Brothers’ League, an anti-immigration, proto-fascist pressure group whose views gained traction among a British public gripped by Germanophobia. However, Doyle was also involved in the case of Oscar Slater, a German Jewish man wrongly accused of murdering an 82-year-old woman in Glasgow in 1908. In 1912, Doyle (who, in 1903, founded the Crimes Club, in which members discussed crimes, criminals, and detection) published The Case of Oscar Slater , in which he marshaled the available evidence to argue that Slater was innocent. He continued to raise the matter publicly and paid the majority of the legal fees Slater incurred during his successful 1928 appeal.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Death & Legacy

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died suddenly of a heart attack at age 71 at his home in East Sussex. In many ways, his life was a series of apparent contradictions. Educated at private, fee-paying schools, his childhood was marked by financial instability due to his father’s ongoing struggles with alcoholism. An accomplished and trained physician, he failed to establish a career in medicine, and after finding fame as an author, he came to resent his greatest creation. He struggled to decide where he stood on the issue of freemasonry, joining and abandoning the order on more than one occasion. And while on one occasion he publicly supported the far-right and deeply xenophobic British Brothers’ League, he was also appalled by the miscarriage of justice in Oscar Slater’s case, which led to a German-born Jewish man being imprisoned for twenty years for a crime he had not committed. Doyle, then, was not an uncomplicated figure, and his life was a tale of extreme highs and lows that could have rivaled the narrative arc of even his most ambitious works of fiction.

• Advertising
• Mail Delivery
• Manage Account
• Dining & Entertainment
• Life, Style & Art

Download Latest Issue

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.”

A British writer and physician, Doyle created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887.

*Source: Brainy Quotes

Previous Post

Leave a reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Could not authenticate you.

Popular posts.