For the next several weeks, they cruised roughly northward, hunting for seals and finding slim pickings as they pressed on toward the whale hunting grounds in the far north. By May 22, the Hope was at 80 degrees north latitude, close to the limits of Arctic exploration of the time; it was in bleak, gale-churned waters between the top of Greenland and Spitsbergen, its “great line of huge black perpendicular crags running up to several thousand feet … a horrible looking place,” he noted in the log.
It was up there, at the top of the world, that he turned twenty-one. “I come of age today,” he wrote. “Rather a funny sort of place to do it in, only 600 miles or so from the North Pole.” They couldn’t get much closer—the northern barrier, the edge of the polar ice cap, barred the way. In 1880, no human being had seen the North Pole. It was uncharted territory, a big blank spot on the maps. For all anyone knew, Santa Claus did live there.
In June, the Hope turned and sailed southward along the coast of Greenland’s ice sheet. There Conan Doyle got his first sighting of narwhals, also known as sea unicorns for their tusks, which can grow to ten feet. One calm evening the sea was covered with them, “great brutes 15 & 16 feet long,” he recorded. “You hear their peculiar ‘Sumph!’ in every direction. I saw one pass like a great white flickering ghost beneath the keel.” But what they wanted most was the sighting of whales, and that they got on June 4.
It wasn’t until June 26, however, that they caught their first whale. On July 8, they caught a second, bigger specimen, a huge “finner” whale, yielding twelve tons of oil. “It is worth quite £1,000 and has secured our voyage from being a failure,” Doyle wrote.
On Monday, August 9, 1880, the Hope was bound for home. “A beautiful clear day with a blue sky and a bright sun,” Conan Doyle noted in the ship’s log. “Wind from the NE, a good strong breeze before which we are flying homeward with all sail set, and the bright green waves hissing and foaming from her bows … All hands on the lookout for land.”
* * *
ARTHUR CONAN Doyle had grown up in a kind of genteel poverty in Edinburgh, Scotland, one of ten children, whose family and lineage were of sturdy Celtic-Catholic stock. In the cul de sac where the family lived in a modest tenement, there was a fierce feud between two groups of small neighborhood boys. Ultimately, each group put up a “champion”—the strapping Arthur being chosen as the champion of the poorer lads—and he went out to fight the champion pugilist of the other team in a bitter battle of many rounds, ending in a bloody draw.
It was prophetic, in a way. Arthur Conan Doyle would be a fighter for the rest of his life.
From a very early age, he excelled at two things. One was any sport, and the other was storytelling. It was from his mother, whom he always affectionately called “The Ma’am,” that he learned his love of a good yarn. He once told Bram Stoker:
My real love for letters, my instinct for storytelling, springs, I believe, from my mother, who is of Anglo-Celtic stock, with the glamour and romance of the Celt very strongly marked.… In my early childhood, as far back as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories which she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life. It is not only that she was—is still—a wonderful storyteller, but she had, I remember, an art of sinking her voice to a horror-stricken whisper when she came to a crisis in her narrative, which makes me goosefleshy when I think of it.
His mother’s stories came down to him through the misty tangles of the Celtic past and the fog-shrouded glens of northern Scotland and Ireland, in which, in ancient times, people would gather around the fire to retell the tales that kept the people alive. These gatherings, or ceilidh, told of a tribal history of great warriors and great battles, loves won and lost, but also of a dreamlike, surrealistic world in which gnomes, elves, and fairies flitted through the glens in the half-light of dawn or twilight. Sometimes—for better or worse—they would even intersect with the affairs of men. It was an in-between world that, in the Gaelic imagination, was as real as daylight, perhaps even more vivid than “the real facts of my life.” It is a world considered real in some parts of rural Scotland and Ireland to this day.
It was also a world that was to be vividly portrayed in the art of many of Conan Doyle’s relatives, who shared a gift for imaginative illustration. His grandfather John Doyle developed a reputation as a sharp political satirist and caricaturist, producing the series Political Sketches for a London publisher. John’s oldest son, James—Conan Doyle’s uncle—produced an illustrated work called A Chronicle of England.
But it was John’s second son, Richard, known as Dicky Doyle, who became the most famous artist of the clan. Dicky Doyle famously designed one of the very first covers of Punch, the renowned British satirical magazine. He mastered the art of elaborately decorative lettering, which seemed to hark back to the illuminated manuscripts of the early Celtic monks. But it was his fantastical illustrated books depicting the lives of elves, fairies, and woodland life-forms the Theosophists called “elementals”—illustrations for Grimm’s “Fairy Ring,” “The King of the Golden River,” and In Fairyland—that seemed to create a netherworld so real it practically pranced off the page. Many years later, when Conan Doyle became embroiled in the “Cottingley Fairies” case—in which two young girls claimed to have photographed fairies beside a brook in rural England—some of Doyle’s defenders remembered the vivid fairylands depicted by his uncle and the ancient Celtic storytelling traditions from which they came. In a deep Scots-Irish way, it all made sense, and Conan Doyle, despite all evidence to the contrary, was to persist in his belief in fairies until his dying day.
But it was Conan Doyle’s own father, Charles, who had the most profound influence on the boy’s upbringing. As a young man, Charles had been sent to Edinburgh to take a job as an assistant surveyor in the Scottish Office of Works, doing architectural drawings. Among other things, he designed a fountain at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh and windows at Glasgow Cathedral. In truth, it was a fairly low-level civil service job that produced a pitifully small paycheck. Charles supplemented his small income by selling his eccentric drawings and watercolors, though many of them he simply gave away. In 1855, Charles married Mary Foley, his landlady’s daughter, and they went on to have ten children, of whom seven survived into adulthood.
In his memoirs, Doyle remembered his childhood wistfully: “We lived in the hardy and bracing atmosphere of poverty and we each in turn did our best to help those who were younger than ourselves. My noble sister Annette, who died just as the sunshine of better days came into our lives, went out very early as a governess to Portugal and sent all her salary home. Our younger sisters, Lottie and Connie, both did the same thing; and I helped as I could. But it was still my dear mother who bore the long, sordid strain.”
Though the Doyles lived in shabby circumstances, it was a family proud of its illustrious lineage; his mother was distantly related to Sir Walter Scott, and another relative, Sir Denis Pack, had commanded the Scottish forces at Waterloo. Doyle’s uncle James had spent thirteen years working on a massive genealogy called The Official Baronage of England. His uncle Conan had traced his lineage back to the dukes of Brittany.
“From his tenderest years,” Doyle’s son Adrian later wrote of his father’s childhood, he was surrounded by “the chivalric sciences of the fifteenth century in the bosom of a family to whom pride of lineage was of infinitely greater importance than the discomforts of comparative poverty that had come to surround them.” It was one’s bloodlines, one’s heritage, and one’s quest for chivalric greatness—in effect, one’s family stories—that lifted a man’s head high, even if “home” was a dreary tenement block in Edinburgh.
As the years went by, Doyle’s father seemed to grow increasingly distant, adrift in his own thoughts. He was a gentle, imaginative soul who seemed completely overwhelmed by the burdens of raising a large family on next to nothing. But the world was not terribly interested in his artistic gifts or his gift for verbal whimsy. One early bi
ographer, John Dickson Carr, wrote that “to his family he was becoming a dreamy, long-bearded stranger, with exquisite manners and an unbrushed top hat. Each day he trudged the long walk from home to his office at Holyrood Palace and back again to pat the children’s heads absentmindedly, as he might have stroked his pet cats.”
In his memoirs, Conan Doyle said very little about his father, though what he did say is revealing. “He had a charm of manner and courtesy of bearing which I have seldom seen equaled. His wit was quick and playful. He possessed, also, a remarkable delicacy of mind … [but] he was unworldly and impractical and his family suffered for it.… My father, I fear, was of little help to [my mother], for his thoughts were always in the clouds and he had no appreciation of the realities of life.”
Eventually, Charles seemed to slip away completely, an empty top hat floating down the street. In 1885, when he was in his mid-fifties, he was admitted to a nursing home called Fordoun House, which specialized in alcoholism, then to a series of three institutions known at the time as lunatic asylums. In 1893, he died at the Crichton Royal Institution, in Dumfries, with the official cause of death listed as “epilepsy of many years’ standing.” But he wasn’t an epileptic, nor was he insane. He was an improvident and unworldly soul who was also an alcoholic that occasionally became violent. In the Victorian era, nobody knew what to do with a person like that.
A more revealing, more sympathetic story about the fate of Charles Doyle emerged years after his death, in a sketchbook he had kept in the lunatic asylum, which had been bought at a yard sale at the country house Conan Doyle once owned.
The picture that emerges out of this little book is of a man who is charmingly odd and ineffably sad. It’s a kind of carnival of whimsy, elegance, and death, filled with make-believe gnomes and fairies cavorting around real flowers, with skeletons and angels seeming to lure Charles Doyle himself—always depicted as a nattily dressed Victorian gentleman with a frock coat and a long beard—into the waiting arms of death. In one drawing, he is shown shaking hands with the grim reaper with one hand and an angel with the other. In another, picnickers in the Scottish Highlands have individual angels hovering over their heads. Charles Doyle was deathly afraid of birds, and the book is filled with them, all absolutely enormous. One early biographer, the Reverend John Lamond, observed some of Charles’s pictures hanging in his son’s house and noted that “they are more weird than anything Blake ever produced.”
In many ways, these themes were through lines that carried on into Conan Doyle’s later work, which repeatedly returned to the supernatural, the macabre, the terrifying, and the occult. And not unlike his father’s sketchbook, there sometimes seemed to be nothing separating the “real” from the otherworldly.
* * *
SOMEHOW, MARY “The Ma’am” Doyle (with the help of a wealthy relative) managed to scrape together the money to send young Arthur to a Jesuit preparatory school, Hodder, when he was nine years old. He spent two mostly happy years there and then went on to Stonyhurst College, where he got a rigorous British education, complete with rapped knuckles, spartan accommodations, and a liberal helping of the classics. In school, young Arthur quickly gained a reputation for his skill at cricket and storytelling. He loved to regale his classmates with fantastical tales, borrowing his mother’s gifts for the deftly drawn character and the pretzel-like plot. He later remembered how, “with an audience of little boys squatting on the floor, with their chins on their hands, I have talked myself husky over the misfortunes of my heroes.… I was bribed with pastry to continue these efforts,… which shows that I was born to be a member of the Authors’ Society.”
But Stonyhurst had a darker side, one that would later lead to a spiritual longing for escape from the airless Roman Catholicism into which he was born. “Nothing can exceed the uncompromising bigotry of the Jesuit theology,” he later remembered in his memoirs. “I remember that when, as a grown lad, I heard Father Murphy, a great fierce Irish priest, declare that there was sure damnation for every one outside the Church, I looked upon him with horror, and to that moment I trace the first rift which has grown into such a chasm between me and those who were my guides.”
In this period of spiritual disenchantment and longing, Doyle read voraciously—as he did for the rest of his life, like a man dying of thirst in the desert—John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, and every other major thinker of the day.
Increasingly, the solace offered by the church seemed empty. He could see the good things the church had to offer—“its unbroken and solemn ritual, the beauty and truth of many of its observances, its poetical appeal to the emotions.” At the same time, there was much about it that he found “vile and detestable. If some second reformation inside the Church were to preserve the one and destroy the other, it might still make a great agent for change in the world. It is hardly likely to be so, so long as it is the unresisting servant of the little Junta of prelates in Italy.”
Doyle was not alone in his growing disenchantment with the deadness, the self-aggrandizing, self-appointed hierarchy that ran the shop, and the scorn for other religions that seemed to characterize the Catholic Church. In fact, scholars have observed that one of the driving forces behind the emergence of the new “religion” called spiritualism in the Victorian and Edwardian eras was loss of faith in organized religion. As in so many other ways, Arthur Conan Doyle’s life became a mirror of the grand events unfolding across the Western world during his lifetime.
At the same time, Doyle’s doubts “never for an instant degenerated into atheism, for I had a very keen perception of the wonderful poise of the universe and the tremendous power of conception and sustenance which it implied.” He was, more than anything else, a man devoted to seeking truth—“reverent in all my doubts”—continuously wondering about the meaning of the universe and man’s place in it.
By the time he finished at Stonyhurst, and spent a year studying in Germany, Doyle had decided to become a doctor, at least partly to contribute to his family’s shaky finances. He applied for and won a “bursary,” or Scottish scholarship, to help pay for the four-year program, but a clerical error prevented him from getting any money at all. So he soldiered on, one more impoverished medical student in the cold, high-ceilinged lecture halls of Edinburgh University.
It was while he was still a twenty-year-old third-year medical student that Doyle published his first medical paper, a letter to the British Medical Journal, or BMJ, published on September 20, 1879. It was titled “Gelsemium as a Poison,” and in retrospect it underscores Doyle’s character—a budding man of science, a medical detective, and “a wild, full-blooded, and a trifle reckless” adventurer. He explained to the readers of the BMJ that due to neuralgia (nerve pain) he had been taking a tincture of gelseminum. (Gelseminum is made from a genus of yellow-flowering vines native to Asia and the southeastern United States, including Carolina jasmine and so-called heartbreak grass. It contains an alkaloid poison similar to strychnine.)
Because a little bit seemed to help, Doyle “determined to ascertain how far one might go in taking the drug, and what the primary symptoms of an overdose might be.” He prepared a fresh tincture and, over the next several days, dispassionately recorded what happened. At low doses, he experienced no effect, but at 90 minims (drops) he experienced extreme “giddiness,” at 120 he developed vision problems, a mild paralysis, and a “great depression,” which seemed to lessen at 150, though now he noted headaches and diarrhea. He pushed himself to 200, at which point the diarrhea became debilitating, his pulse weakened, and he quit. He calmly concluded, “I feel convinced that I could have taken as much as half an ounce of tincture, had it not been for the extreme diarrhea it brought on. Believe me, yours sincerely, A.C.D.”
Once again, he was pushing things to the brink.
Of all Doyle’s professors in medical school, there was one—a surgeon at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh named Dr. Joseph Bell—who was to leave a lasting
impression and in fact change Doyle’s life forever. Joe Bell was “thin, wiry, dark, with a high-nosed acute face, penetrating gray eyes, angular shoulders, and a jerky way of walking. His voice was high and discordant,” Doyle remembered. But Bell, despite his somewhat eccentric manner, had one extraordinary ability. He could diagnose patients—and discern much else about them—simply through keen observation. Because Doyle had been chosen to be Bell’s personal clerk, checking in patients as they came into the examining room to see him, he got to witness Bell’s special gifts firsthand. In one typical case, recalled in Doyle’s 1924 memoirs, Memories and Adventures, he ushered in a young man to see Bell (who had never laid eyes on the man before).
“Well, my man, you’ve served in the army,” Bell announced without hesitation.
“Aye, sir.”
“Not long discharged?”
“No, sir.”
“A Highland regiment?”
“Aye, sir.”
“A non-com officer.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Stationed at Barbados?”
“Aye, sir.”
Then Bell proceeded to explain his method to the students gathered around him. The man was respectful but did not remove his hat. In the army, that’s the custom, but he would have learned civilian ways, and taken off his hat, if he had been discharged for quite some time. He had an air of authority and was obviously Scottish. And as to his station in Barbados, his complaint was elephantiasis, which occurs in the West Indies, not Britain.
To Arthur Doyle, a keen student of human behavior, a born storyteller, and a young man seeking some direction in life, Dr. Joseph Bell was to become a life-changing figure indeed.
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