Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters

by Неизвестный

  The boy is very well. Silk worms are his latest fad and he has a great box full of the ugly things.

  to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA

  I work spasmodically at the nameless book. I have now finished the first volume and am progressing with the second. Under the stimulus of tea I work much at the villainies of that rascally house of Girdlestone, at the great fraud at the diamond fields, the eccentricities of Major Tobias Spangletop and his flirtations with the widow Skellig, the charms of Miss Kate Harston and all the other manoeuvres of my puppets. The book will either be a laughable failure or a good success. It is too full of incident to ever be mediocre.

  My reading is varied. Gordon’s Tacitus—Balzac’s humourous tales—Blackwoods critiques on French Novelists and a French book ‘Un drame au Trouville’ have been the chief. The latter a sensational novel considerably below Miss Braddon. On Saturdays I play football on the quiet and so get a little exercise for I am growing quite stout (15 stone eight was my last weight).*

  to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA

  I hope this will reach you in time to tell you that the black edged crested paper is the best in my opinion and I am somewhat short of it. The only other thing that I can think of which you might have better & cheaper than us is butter. My friend Lloyd has promised to send me down a sack of potatoes which will come useful during the winter. I am economising very hard just now for the reason that it seems very probable that I may not get any more Gresham examinations to do, and as I drew about £70 from them last year that would make a difference in the income. It seems that some of the old original examiners here have complained to the head office that I am taking all the work, and head office are inclined to favour their appeal by stopping my exams for a year or two so as to give them a turn. Nothing is decided yet, but the matter is being discussed up there and it is very likely to go against me. In case it does it will not do me any permanent harm for I can keep going without their aid very nicely now, though it was invaluable at the time. I shall drop my policy, apply for an examinership in another office, and by cutting down some of my unnecessary expences such as egg for breakfast, newspapers &c (including my holiday by the way) I shall more than cover the amount. I shall also pitch into the writing very hard this winter, as indeed I am doing now. So don’t annoy yourself about this—even if it goes against me—for it may do me good rather than harm.

  to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA

  It was very ungracious of me not to send and acknowledge the fine bird which came almost as soon as your letter and which gave us dinners & suppers on Thursday Friday Saturday & Sunday & I am about to have its last bones warmed for my Monday’s breakfast. Many thanks for it, dear.

  ‘Professor Baumgarten’ came back from Cornhill as I prophesied it would. I have had a great run of bad luck of late. I changed the name to ‘The Great Keinplatz Experiment’ and sent it to Belgravia. May luck go with it! We need a lift sorely. I have another which I am pushing on with ‘The fate of the Evangeline’ I shall hurl it also at Cornhill. A refusal breaks no bones, and since Payn has informed me that I have plenty of talent I shall show him that I have also plenty of industry. The novel is therefore temporarily suspended. I work hard all the week & go out little except after the patients. On Saturday afternoon I play football which I find does me good.

  No word from the Gresham yet, and things pecuniary are very quiet. As far as immediate expences go we want nothing—our taxes, which including gas amount to over five pounds are paid and there are no debts worth talking of. My rent however begins to weigh upon me. However I know that the luck may change at any moment. In the meantime every penny shall be laid by towards that object. It is difficult to draw the line between letting bills go too far, and risking giving offence to good patients by writing for them.

  to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA

  The practise is stirring up again. I wile the happy hours away county courting my patients. No word for good or evil from the Gresham as yet. Barnden seems hopeful.

  My dear, I am continually sending things to Cornhill and they send them back with a perseverance worthy of a better cause. I hope however that during the winter I may force my way once more into the charmed circle. I assure you it is not for want of trying. I shall stand or fall however by Girdlestone & Co or whatever I may name my novel.

  Although Belgravia Magazine did accept the re-titled ‘Great Keinplatz Experiment’, an early science fiction-style story in which a professor and his student exchange bodies, it was another four years before Conan Doyle worked himself back into the charmed circle of The Cornhill (though not, as he said, for lack of trying). In the meantime, as the loss of his Gresham income became a certainty, he realized that the deficit could not be made up by cutting back on his breakfast egg.

  ‘I was still in the days of small things,’ he wrote in Memories and Adventures, ‘so small that when a paper sent me a woodcut and offered me four guineas if I would write a story to correspond I was not too proud to accept. It was a very bad woodcut and I think the story corresponded all right.’

  * * *

  *The British Museum had purchased some five hundred of his grandfather John Doyle’s ‘H.B.’ political cartoons, for £1000. Though in the keeping of his Uncle James, they were part of his grandfather’s estate, with shares due to all his children and their families, including Charles. Conan Doyle was premature in his complaint, though, for museum records dated the 11th of the following November, months later, indicate that the initial installment of £250 had yet to be paid.

  *Whatever Conan Doyle’s habits in this area, few of his mother’s letters to him have survived.

  *John Dickson Carr’s Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (London: John Murray, 1949) alleges that Conan Doyle’s refusal to accept his London relatives’ help to establish a Roman Catholic practice in Southsea caused a bitter breach in relations. Conan Doyle refers in Memories and Adventures to receiving a letter of introduction from them to the local bishop, but burning it because, having renounced Catholicism, he felt he could not use it in good conscience. His letters refer to this monetary dispute instead. In April 1883 he told Lottie: ‘Isn’t it jolly that the mother has cleared £130 out of Uncle James. There is a lot of bad feeling in London about it though. What a set of muffs they are—i.e. the male Doyles. They have heads like turnips apart from art and literature. We hope to get another £50 out of them.’ His relations with his Aunt Annette were unimpaired, at any rate.

  *Reporting on briefly visiting his Doyle relatives in London on the trip down from Edinburgh.

  †Egypt had been in turmoil for a year, and a nationalist called Arabi was threatening to take over its government. With the Suez Canal at stake, Britain sent troops. ‘I remember how we waited together outside the office of the local paper that we might learn the result of the bombardment of Alexandria,’ Conan Doyle later said. It marked the beginning of Innes’s interest in a military career, leading eventually to the rank of brigadier general in World War I.

  *The circumstances of the early death of his chum Jimmy Ryan’s sister are unknown, but it occurred during one of Conan Doyle’s stints with Dr Hoare; a letter from Gravelly Hill to her mother, Margaret Ryan, says: ‘We have lost an old dear friend, and the sweetest nature in all our little Edinburgh circle.’

  *Though ill used by Budd, Conan Doyle never stopped liking him. His depiction of Budd in The Stark Munro Letters and Memories and Adventures was vivid but not harsh. Budd died at only thirty-four years old; in his memoirs Conan Doyle said that ‘an autopsy revealed some cerebral abnormality, so that there was no doubt a pathological element in his strange explosive character.’ See also D. N. Pearce, ‘The Illness of Dr George Turnavine Budd and Its Influence on the Literary Career of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’, Journal of Medical Biography, November 1995.

  *‘The Pavilion on the Links’, published without a byline in The Cornhill, was by Robert Louis Stevenson, whose influence on Conan Doyle’s work was great. But the practice of publishing stories without their authors’ names he called
‘a most iniquitous fashion by which all chance of promotion is barred to young writers’, in 1907. ‘Sometimes I saw my stories praised by critics, but the criticism never came to my address.’

  †By Celia’s Arbour was coauthored by Walter Besant, a valuable associate later as founder in 1891 of the Authors Club (social in nature) and the Society of Authors (established to protect and promote writers’ interests).

  *A story, never finished, written by Conan Doyle in the back of the diary he kept on his West African voyage aboard the Mayumba.

  †Dr Conan Doyle provides no further information here about the lump, but it was likely a mild and transitory glandular disorder not unknown to growing nine-year-old boys like Innes. Later he reports that it was responding to treatment.

  *Mickey was Dr Hoare’s young son, and Currie the former medical school classmate (now assisting Dr Hoare) whose berth on the Hope Conan Doyle took. ‘J.R.’ was Jimmy Ryan.

  *Asphodel was by Mary Braddon, one of Victorian Britain’s most popular women authors. ‘The Man with the Red Hair’ was a story in The Cornhill by William Edward Norris.

  *Dr William Royston Pike would become a good friend, ‘a kindly sort of man’, Conan Doyle wrote in The Stark Munro Letters who, ‘knowing that I have had a long uphill fight, has several times put things in my way’.

  *The mention of Watson is striking, and this could have been an early introduction to Dr James Watson, later one of Conan Doyle’s friends in Southsea. (But not his first Dr Watson: there was Dr Patrick Heron Watson of Edinburgh, an associate of Dr Joseph Bell’s in forensic matters.)

  *From Tennyson’s The Passing of Arthur: ‘But now the whole Round Table is dissolved / Which was an image of the mighty world, / And I, the last, go forth companionless, / And the days darken round me, and the years, / Among new men, strange faces, other minds.’

  †‘Drink, Puppy, Drink’ was a popular 1874 song by George Whyte-Melville, ‘laureate of fox-hunting’, with the refrain ‘Then drink puppy drink, / And let every puppy drink / That is old enough to lap and to swallow; / For he’ll grow into a hound, / So we’ll pass the bottle ‘round, / And merrily we’ll whoop and we’ll hollow.’ It enjoyed a considerable vogue, even pressed into service as the regimental march of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps. The joke may have been aimed at Conan Doyle. Having learned in Sheffield that some patients ‘would rather be poisoned by a man with a beard, than saved by a man without one’, he grew a moustache to make himself appear older.

  *‘Life and Death in the Blood’, in March 1883’s Good Words, presaged the science-fiction movie Fantastic Voyage: ‘Had a man the power of reducing himself to the size of less than one-thousandth part of an inch, and should he, while of this microscopic structure, convey himself through the coats of a living artery, how strange the sight that would meet his eye!’

  †Captain Palmer may be the origin of The Stark Munro Letters ‘Captain Whitehall (Armed Transport)’: ‘By God, Dr Munro, sir, I’m the man that’s going to stick to you. I’m only an old sailorman, sir, with perhaps more liquor than sense; but I’m the Queen’s servant, and touch my pension every quarter day. I don’t claim to be R.N., but I’m not merchant service either. Here I am, rotting in lodgings, but by—, Dr Munro, sir, I carried seven thousand stinking Turks from Varna to Balacalava Bay. I’m with you, Dr Munro, and we put this thing through together.’

  *Mrs Boismaison may have been the elderly patient described in Memories and Adventures as a very tall, horse-faced old lady with an extraordinary dignity of bearing. She would sit framed in the window of her little house, like the picture of a grande dame of the old régime. But every now and again she went on a wild burst, in the course of which she would skim plates out of the window at the passers-by. I was the only one who had influence over her at such times, for she was a haughty, autocratic old person. Once she showed an inclination to skim a plate at me also, but I quelled her by assuming a gloomy dignity as portentous as her own. She had some art treasures which she heaped upon me when she was what we will politely call ‘ill’, but claimed back again the moment she was well. Once when she had been particularly troublesome I retained a fine lava jug, in spite of her protests, and I have got it yet.

  *The Daily Telegraph. No known article by Conan Doyle appeared in it in 1883.

  *‘I went to a subscription ball the other night—such a lark!’ he told Lottie. ‘I got as drunk as an owl by some mischance. I have a dim recollection that I proposed to half the women in the room—married and single. I got one letter next day signed “Ruby” and saying the writer had said “yes” when she meant “no”—but who the deuce she was or what she had said “yes” about I can’t conceive.’

  *When ‘the Income Tax paper arrived,’ said Conan Doyle in Memories and Adventures, ‘I filled it up to show that I was not liable. They returned the paper with “Most unsatisfactory” scrawled across it. I wrote “I entirely agree” under the words, and returned it once more. For this little bit of cheek I was had up before the assessors, and duly appeared with my ledger under my arm. They could make nothing, however, out of me or my ledger, and we parted with mutual laughter and compliments.’

  *Published in 1882 by the Canadian-born cosmopolitan, political adventurer, and British writer Gustave Louis Maurice Strauss, known around London as ‘the Old Bohemian’, and a co-founder in 1857 of the Savage Club. Conan Doyle called himself a Bohemian often in his letters, and in Memories and Adventures. In ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, Dr Watson remarked that Sherlock Holmes ‘loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul’ (and had no less than the King of Bohemia for a client).

  *Dr Hoare of Birmingham. It may have been a frequent temptation during these difficult years to give up his practice and return to working for people he liked as much as Reg and Amy Hoare.

  *‘F. Anstey’ was the pen-name of Thomas Anstey Guthrie, a lawyer turned novelist; his Vice Versa was the first comic tale of two people switching bodies (a father and son in this case).

  *Actually Grant Allen, who became a friend. It was upon his advice that Conan Doyle built a house at Hindhead, Surrey, in 1896, and at the dying Allen’s request in 1899, he completed his final novel Hilda Wade. George Du Maurier (grandfather of Daphne, the author of Rebecca) was already well known, but in 1894 made ‘Svengali’ a household word in Trilby, a tale of a wicked musician whose hypnotic power turns a young woman into a great singer—and causes her tragic death. Frederick Boyle was the author of a series of Camp Notes collections of ‘Stories of Sport & Adventure in Asia, Africa, and America’. Harry Furniss was famous for his humorous and satirical cartoons; William Heysman Overend was a painter of battles and maritime subjects.

  †A major change in the family’s affairs: Mary Doyle had moved from Edinburgh to Masongill Cottage, on the Yorkshire estate of Dr Waller, where she, with her two youngest daughters, would spend many years, until she moved during World War I to southern England near her by then married daughter Connie.

  *The nature of the sad occasion is unknown.

  *Conan Doyle’s known contributions to the British Journal of Photography have been collected in Essays in Photography: The Unknown Conan Doyle, edited by John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982).

  *For more about the Portsmouth Literary & Scientific Society, see A Study in Southsea: From Bush Villa to Baker Street by Geoffrey Stavert (Portsmouth, Hants: Milestone, 1987).

  *Waterstone’s identity and the nature of the dispute are unknown.

  *‘The Blood-Stone Tragedy’ appeared without attribution in Cassell’s Saturday Journal in February 1884, and was not identified as Conan Doyle’s work for over one hundred years.

  *‘Innes is as sturdy a little Briton as ever was seen,’ he told Lottie. ‘I must say that his stay down here has improved him wonderfully. He is as manly and self confident as possible.’

  *He did reconstruct it from memory, for the manuscript of a novel centring on a man named Smith was found among his papers i
n 2004, and is now in the British Library. To date his spirit has been spared the horror of seeing it appear in print.

  †The fate of Willie Burton’s novel is unknown. Conan Doyle’s ‘John Barrington Cowles’ appeared in Cassell’s Saturday Journal in April 1884.

  *This story, retitled ‘A Pastoral Horror’, did not find its way into print for another five years, when it appeared in The People, December 1890.

  †There is no evidence that Mary Doyle ever acted upon her son’s suggestion that she try her hand at fiction. His youngest sister, however, later published two novels under the pen name H. Ripley Cromarsh: The Episodes of Marge: Memoirs of a Humble Adventuress (1903) and The Secret of the Moor Cottage (1907). Neither book sold well, and in the first case, Conan Doyle felt obliged to buy up a substantial number of copies to defray the publisher’s losses, as he had encouraged him to publish it.

  *Conan Doyle played under the nom de match of A. C. Smith. See Stavert, page 59, A Study in Southsea. Today he is counted as one of the founders of the Portsmouth Football Club.

  4

  Cracking the Oyster

  (1884-1890)

  ‘My poor ‘Study in Scarlet’ has never even been read by anyone

  except Payn. Verily literature is a difficult oyster to open.’

  ‘Southsea is much as ever,’ he told Lottie with his chin up. ‘The same old set come here now and again. The practice is fairly brisk and the novel grows. Every day I add on a little concerning the villainies of that most wicked house of Girdlestone.’ And despite difficulties, the household was keeping its chin up too. ‘Mrs Smith is flourishing and so is Innes. We have a little servant maid now who comes in the early part of the day and relieves Mrs S of the heavy work. We pay her the munificent sum of a shilling a week.’