Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters

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  His harsh impressions were leavened in the end by some time with a celebrated American abolitionist, Henry Highland Garnett. His diary for December 24th recorded:

  American consul came as a passenger with us. Rather a well read intelligent fellow, had a long chat with him about American and English Literature, Emerson, Prescott, Irving, Bancroft & Motley. He was as black as your hat however. He told me what I myself think, that the way to explore Africa is to go without arms and without servants. We wouldn’t like it in England if a body of men came armed to the teeth and marched through our country, and the Africans are quite as touchy. Thats why they begin getting their stewpans and sauces out when they see a Stanley coming.

  It was a revelation for Conan Doyle. ‘This negro gentleman did me good,’ he declared in Memories and Adventures: ‘My starved literary side was eager for good talk, and it was wonderful to sit on deck discussing Bancroft and Motley, and then suddenly realize that you were talking to one who had possibly been a slave himself, and was certainly the son of slaves.’ And he was no longer glib about Garnett’s advice regarding exploration: ‘[T]he method of Livingstone as against the method of Stanley,’ he summed up, ‘takes the braver and better man.’

  ‘I vowed that I would wander no more,’ he remembered long afterwards, ‘and that was surely one of the turning-points of my life.’ But his letters indicate that he continued looking for medical vacancies far away after returning to the Hoares.

  to Mary Doyle BIRMINGHAM, JANUARY OR FEBRUARY 1882

  I am being bullied in this house. They are taking advantage of a simple visitor and making him lose his valuable time writing letters to a distant relative. My Birmingham mother has collared me, stolen my novel, dragged me to a table and confronted me with a sheet of notepaper so that I am in for it. I have not had a single letter here except your enclosure so I have absolutely no news for you. Oh yes I have by the way. On the evening that I arrived here the Boss and I were standing at the door smoking our evening pipe when a cab drove up to the door out of which stepped Claud Augustus Currie. He had come up to apply in propria persona. We have put him up at Aspinal’s in Gravelly Hill* for a month when the berth will be vacant for him. Everyone here is as jolly as ever. Mrs D gave me a grand frame to put Elmore’s likeness in—by the way I have not heard from that young lady for six days. The cheques for L.S. will be payable to you and sent to you. I want you to pay McLaren & Williamson first if it is all the same to you, as it is just as well to keep up the credit of the rising generation. I am still full of the S. American scheme. Poor Elmore wants me to take £500 from her and start there but I don’t see it—unless I fail by my own unaided exertions.

  [P.S.] By the way I have no money.

  That Elmore Weldon had money of her own did not make her less attractive to Conan Doyle, but his comments, and what followed, make clear that he was determined to win his own way in the world.

  to Mary Doyle THE ELMS, GRAVELLY HILL, MARCH 1882

  You must think that I have given up writing letters entirely judging from my long silence. I have been working very hard, and that is the reason.

  I called on Hogg in London, he was very polite and flattering, said that ‘he and many of his friends looked upon me as one of the coming men in literature’. ; His chief editorial fault is an utter want of sense of humour. In this story which I regard as my chef d’oeuvre, ‘The Actor’s Duel—a legend of the French Stage’, there is a very amusing passage—one which Uncle Dick said was most excellent, and which has amused everyone I have read it to. The situation is a simple old mother living apart from the world reading a slangy sporting letter from her son, and coming to most ridiculous conclusions & making endless blunders over what she regards as ‘modern refinements of speech’. Hogg was utterly ignorant that it was even meant to be funny. It was something entirely beyond his comprehension. He wanted me to change this which I refused to do. He then asked me to write him a story about a fool for next months number—I am sending it off today—46 pages of closely written manuscript. I think it is not bad ‘Bones’ or ‘The April Fool of Harvey’s Sluice’. The first real love story which I have attempted. I am to have another commission to write a story about the Derby.

  It is a pleasant place to stay in, this, & I am very comfortable & quiet. Writing all day, and reading with Aspinal after supper. The reading is doing me a good deal of good too. By the way there is a very great demand for photos. You positively must send me down half a dozen of the small—I am getting into disgrace all round about them. What a curious thing that none of those hospitals have answered my application. The more I think of it the more convinced I am that that is the thing for me. It is the only way of aiming high. If I could get an appointment in London I should go in for my FRCS Eng.* I need another year matric—to be 25 years old—and a few more classes, but it wd be very well worth it. You seem to be having high jinks at home—I wish I was with you.

  [P.S.] Do write soon. I’m not in love again yet—at least not to any great extent.

  to Mary Doyle BIRMINGHAM, MARCH 1882

  How is it that you never make any allusion to the Doctor in your letters now? Pray give him my love if he is about. We have had the deuce and all to pay here. First the Missus went and had a miscarriage (tho’ that is a secret) and then she developed Rheumatism and has been in bed ever since. Miss Joey got a sore throat with some scarlatinal symptoms, and finally the poor old Boss was taken with a very painful, and at one time serious attack of intestinal inflammation and colic. He has been down with it four days now, but is coming round nicely. The result of all this was that I was drafted from Gravelly Hill to Aston with the double duty of being on the spot to see dangerous cases, and of doctoring the invalids. The doctor lies in the red room where you used to be and the others next door, so I have Ward 1 & Ward 2 chalked up on the doors. It shows the confidence they have in my professional opinion that tho’ they might have had any man in Birmingham gratis, they were contented with me.

  You’ll get the 200 right enough. If I can cooperate or assist by word or pen let me know and you will find me a fearless champion. I believe if you had sent in a claim for half we should have got it. The only real opposition would come from Mrs James.* I am so glad you liked ‘Bones’. My own opinion of it was that it was weak at the beginning but grew very strong indeed as the plot culminated. It was written to order, which makes it the more creditable, as it is hard to pump up originality about a given theme. ‘Write a story bearing on fools & All fools day’ were my directions. I also got an order to write one about ‘a Derby Sweepstakes’ for May. I finished it yesterday and am beginning to copy it for the press. It is quite a different style to any I have written yet—more playful and Rhoda Broughtonesque; the ladies here think it is good. ;

  Have you seen my article in this week’s ‘Lancet’ on leucocythemia. They have put that infernal Cowan again. What can I do? I am very careful in forming my ‘n’ always, but they won’t see it. I saw in acknowledging the contribution that they put Cowan, so I wrote up at once sending a card with the ‘n’ underlined—however all to no purpose as you see. It reads very learnedly, don’t it? By the way I will test your power of correcting proofs. Did you observe that in one part of Bones I described the young lady’s eyes as being violet & in another as hazel—at least I think I did.

  I am going in for the Charles Murchison Scholarship in Clinical Medicine—exam in London April 22nd, value 20 guineas. Open to all London & Edinburgh graduates, students & FRCSs. A goodly competition but I shall read hard & stand as good a chance as my neighbours. If I fail it is only the fare lost—if I get it the look of it in the Directory would be worth more than the money. I am also going to send in for the Millar Prize (£50) for an essay on some surgical subject open to Licentiates & Fellows of the college of P & S Glasgow.* I don’t think there can be many good men among the L & F so I shall write a rattling essay on ‘Listerism—a success or a failure’, and send it in in Hoare’s name. If it is good I shall use it for my MD thesi
s also. Not a bad idea is it? It has to be in by the end of the year.

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

  Ever your loving

  Arthur ‘Cowan’

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

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

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

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

  He was now primed to take a desperate step.

  * * *

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

  *The brutal villain of Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist.

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

  *An Edinburgh medical celebrity under whom Conan Doyle would later serve a stint as his outpatient clerk—and, from Bell’s powers as a diagnostician, still later derive the Sherlock Holmes method.

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

  *Paraphrasing from Byron’s poem ‘The Sea’.

  ;Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, commander in chief of the British Army for some forty years, would review Conan Doyle in 1900 before the latter’s departure for the Boer War.

  ;A man named Max Hoedel had attempted to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm I in Berlin only two weeks before. The crown prince was the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, Britain’s foe in World War I.

  *It is not clear who Dr Quin is. Frederick F. H. Quin, an Edinburgh graduate who died in 1878, pioneered homoeopathic medicine in Britain.

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

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

  *Major (later Major General Sir William) Butler was already a distinguished soldier at this time, and his wife, Elizabeth Thompson, a celebrated painter of battle scenes.

  *The reference is to the fictive play The Murder of Gonzago performed in Hamlet.

  *Author of Scripture Testimony Against Intoxicating Wine, notorious for insisting that the wine that Christ made in the miracle at Cana was nonalcoholic.

  *A slang term for money.

  *Licentiate of the King’s and Queen’s College of Ireland, a degree which Conan Doyle would have regarded as inferior to the one he was earning at Edinburgh. Bourchier had certainly fallen out of favour by now.

  ;A joke on the name of Dr Sampson Gamgee, a well-known Birmingham surgeon, and, with Dr Joseph Lister in Edinburgh, a pioneer in aseptic surgery.

  ‘A goose weighs seven pounds and one-half its own weight.’

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

  ;The Lancet for June 28, 1879, noted receipt of a letter from a Mr Hughes, but did not print it. Given what medical students are like, the editors were probably old hands at spotting hoax letters.

  ;Meaning the solution to the mathematical puzzle that he posed to thirteen-year-old Lottie in his earlier letter; ‘the calculation is a simple one,’ as Sherlock Holmes said of another problem in the story ‘Silver Blaze’.

  *Joseph Cook was a well-known American divine whose ‘Boston Monday Lectures’ included, among other subjects, harmony between religion and science, and which were now being heard by enormous audiences in an around-the-world tour.

  *The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe was neither published nor returned by Blackwood’s Magazine, and the manuscript is now in the magazine’s archives at the National Library of Scotland. The story was finally published by the Arthur Conan Doyle Society in 2000.

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

  ;Intriguing, but unknown.

  ;Porter’s identity is unknown, but belies a joke that Conan Doyle liked to make about himself, after giving up medicine for literature, that no living patient of his had ever been seen.

  *See Georgina Doyle, Out of the Shadows, op. cit., pages 42-44.

  ;The Land League, founded with nationalist overtones by Charles Parnell in 1879, took the side of tenants against landlords in Ireland’s Land War of the early 1880s. The Foleys were among the landlords, hence Conan Doyle’s sympathies in the mutual exchange of acts of intimidation.

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

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

  *A satellite station of Hoare’s practice, outside Birmingham a distance, run by a Dr Aspinal.

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