Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters

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  to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA

  I have used you rather badly of late in the matter of letters so here goes for something a little more satisfactory. I have had a few days of bad cold, influenza &c but am now coming round splendidly & feel bright and strong. The practice has been fairly good of late—it varies from ten to fifteen pounds a month occasionally a little under or over. The loss of the Gresham involved the abstraction of more than a third of my income and though I at once cut off every unnecessary expense it has made things very very tight. This pressure however is temporary and the outlook ahead is good. I was counting up the other day and find that there are more than hundred families, rich or poor, for whom I am sole medical adviser. That I think is a good result for a stranger in a strange town in 21/2 years. After you work a practise up to a certain pitch it increases by leaps and bounds. The whole battle is that preliminary process of working up.

  I am going to take my MD this coming year, if I can. I find it will be useful to me. I have too many irons in the fire to hope to write anything elaborate, so I shall content myself with a little treatise on locomotor Ataxy, with some theories of my own concerning that disease. To that end I wish you to get me through Livingstone a copy of Julius Althaus’ recent monograph on Locomotor Ataxia. It is the latest thing on the subject and will be very useful. I have already collected materials for my work. I should like to have a look also at Grainger Stewarts recently published ‘Introduction to the Study of Nervous Disease’—but I hardly see how that can be done.

  Yesterday evening I was chairman at a committee meeting—tonight I go out to supper at some new friends—tomorrow evening I dine out and afterwards have a conversatzione to attend. Thursday night I am engaged for supper and on Friday evening ditto—so you see my hands are full. It does not interfere with my work however as (except tomorrow) I shall never be out until after 8.30 which is the limit of patient hours.

  Literature is not brisk. The inspiration seems to have left me. I hope it will return refreshed for its rest. On Saturdays I play football which keeps me in pretty good fettle.

  Conan Doyle, like many other physicians at the time, had the Bachelor of Medicine & Master of Surgery degree qualifying him to practice, while the M.D. was an advanced degree. Not all troubled to obtain one, but he now felt the need for it.

  As a dissertation subject, he thought of Locomotor ataxia, a symptom of tabes dorsalis, a degeneration of the nerves in the spinal column in untreated cases of syphilis affecting movement control. (Later, in Through the Magic Door, he called it ‘the special scourge of the imaginative man’, speculating that Shakespeare suffered from it.) Over the next few months he worked toward his M.D.—intermittently, but looking forward to great things in 1885.

  The new year started inauspiciously but he remained hopeful, with the publication of a ‘very strong’ new story:

  to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA, JANUARY OR FEBRUARY 1885

  Have come back from London. Was most unfortunate for on my way up I got in a draught and got a toothache which lasted me the whole time I was there and distorted my face so that my good housekeeper could hardly recognise me when I reappeared. I have still a somewhat lopsided expression, but it is steadily subsiding. The great thing is that I have got the clock and a very good clock too, more solid looking than elegant, but most amusing for each time it strikes the hour it goes into a chime of bells which play an Irish jig or something of the sort. The day of the month is also marked upon a small dial upon it, so it is a very complicated piece of machinery. I also brought down a little picture which would do for one of the bedrooms.

  Have you heard that Uncle’s Diary fetched £200, of which you are to get your fifty in a few months. I think what with this and the proceeds of the Exhibition (which you must see in March) and the fact that my novel will be out this year, ’85 should be an eventful year with us. I think your idea of sending Mrs S. 10/ is a charming one. She is a wonderfully faithful servant and her screw is only £6 a year, so that some little recognition from you would be nice.

  I think the novel grows stronger as it advances. I took it up to London with me and in spite of my toothache read four chapters at random to Burton and the Brysons who were unfeignedly delighted with it. The Man from Archangel is out in the January London Society. I think it is very strong but I should prefer to trust to your opinion. I had a copy which was destined for you but Dr Pike came in last night & carried it off. When it comes back I shall send it to you. I have had no luck yet with any of my other numerous ventures.

  I seem to be eternally sending you bills. I enclose two more of the same degrading form of literature. How they do come pelting in at quarter time.

  Very few letters have survived from 1885 and the next two years, driving Conan Doyle’s biographers to other sources for some momentous things happening in his life. One was his standing as a physician. In February ’85 he reported to Lottie that: ‘I am working at my MD thesis—on inflammation of the sebaceous glands at the base of the orthro foito sukafantadika teleiporos—or some such title. I hope by August to have the magic letters behind my name’, and adding: ‘The poor old novel has had its nose put out of joint by the thesis, but it is sure to be completed some day or another… I suppose I shall have to go up to Edinburgh in March to pass my Moral Philosophy as a preliminary to the MD. What a nuisance it is!’

  His eventual dissertation, entitled ‘An Essay Upon the Vasomotor Changes in Tabes Dorsalis and on the Influence Which is Exerted by the Sympathetic Nervous System in that Disease’, satisfied the scientific requirements, while occasionally straying into a literary mode:

  The sufferer is commonly a man of between five and twenty and fifty. In many cases he is of that swarthy neurotic type which furnishes the world with an undue proportion of poets, musicians and madmen.

  And he allowed some insight into his professional plight as he saw it at the end of 1884 and the beginning of 1885:

  It is with diffidence that a young medical man must approach a subject upon which so many master minds have pondered—more particularly when the views which he entertains differ in many respects from any which he has encountered in his reading. Doubly diffident must he be when enforced residence in a provincial town cuts him off from those pathological and histological aids which might enable him to strengthen his arguments. In the preparation of a thesis upon such a subject the post-mortem room and the microscope are of more value than the writing desk and the library. A workman must however work with such tools as he finds to his hand and this I have endeavoured to do to the best of my ability.

  But in the meantime something else of importance intervened: he acquired a wife.

  She was Louisa Hawkins, nicknamed Touie. In The Stark Munro Letters he called her ‘a quiet, gentle-looking girl of twenty or so’ with ‘a very sweet and soothing voice’; in fact she was twenty-seven, or just twenty-eight, when they met, nearly two years older than he. She was the sister of a young man with cerebral meningitis whom Conan Doyle took into his house as a resident patient. At first that seemed like a good idea: ‘[I]t was a business matter,’ as he saw it, ‘and a resident patient was the very thing that I needed.’ But the situation soon turned dark:

  I could see that he was much worse than when I saw him with Dr Porter [Pike, in reality]. The chronic brain trouble had taken a sudden acute turn… It was evident to me at a glance that the responsibility which I had taken upon myself was no light one.

  And after some fits during the night,

  I asked [Dr Pike] if he would step up and have a look at my patient. He did so, and we found him dozing peacefully. You would hardly think that that small incident may have been one of the most momentous in my life.

  For in the morning, Jack Hawkins was dead. In the novel he had been given a nightly sedative of chloral hydrate; and if this was the case that night in 1885, and Dr Pike had not been able to confirm that the treatment had been proper and justified, there might have been an inquest:

  And then—well, there would be chlor
al in the body; some money interests did depend upon the death of the lad—a sharp lawyer might have made much of the case. Anyway, the first breath of suspicion would have blown my little rising practice to the wind. What awful things lurk at the corners of Life’s highway, ready to pounce upon us as we pass!

  The young man’s mother and sister did not blame the young doctor: ‘[I]n their womanly unselfishness their sympathy was all for me, for the shock I had suffered, and the disturbance of my household’, and the tragedy brought him and Touie together, for even

  before I had spoken to her or knew her name, I felt an inexplicable sympathy for and interest in her. Or was it merely that she was obviously gentle and retiring, and so made a silent claim upon all that was helpful and manly in me? At any rate, I was conscious of it; and again and again every time that I met her.

  ‘The result was the same as it often has been and often will be: [t]he Doctor learned to love the young nurse who so faithfully fulfilled his directions and untiringly ministered to his patient’s wants,’ said a Ladies’ Home Journal interview of Touie in 1895, and she in turn ‘found her gratitude toward the man to whose skill she felt she largely owed her brother’s life develop into a warmer feeling.’* He proposed, and she accepted. They were married in August at Masongill, where his mother lived. ‘No man could have had a more gentle and amiable life’s companion,’ he said in Memories and Adventures.

  The degree and marriage brought many changes to Conan Doyle’s life, but not a revolution. Marriage meant domesticity with a sweet-natured companion who took an interest in everything that interested him, and an ordered, less ‘bohemian’ household, but it appears to have been more a matter of affection than passion on Conan Doyle’s part. He carried on with many of the habits of bachelorhood, including a passion for sports that found him playing cricket on his honeymoon in Ireland.

  And despite his new medical degree he remained, as an irritable Sherlock Holmes called Dr Watson in ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’, ‘only a general practitioner with very limited experience and mediocre qualifications’. He continued to write and publish stories, but ‘after ten years of such work,’ he recalled in later years, ‘I was as unknown as if I had never dipped a pen in an ink-bottle.’† He believed that his name was needed on the spine of a book, but no Opera Collecta was in sight. His novel The Narrative of John Smith had disappeared, and The Firm of Girdlestone was not being snapped up by publishers.

  to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA, JULY OR SEPTEMBER 1885

  I really should have acknowledged the diploma and you are quite right to draw my attention to my culpable omission. Many thanks, dear, for all your kindness which is represented in that small square of parchment. Touie had set to work to write to you about it, but housekeeping or something broke in upon her letter and it is unfinished. Many thanks for cheque—instead of you sending cash to me, I should be doing so to you. As to the cards I remember saying that we should balance that against the jersey which you paid for—so I add 8/ to Innes’ fare with orders that he shall hand over the whole balance to you. It is very hard for me to get away, dearie—It is not the will that is wanting.

  According to present arrangements the mother* goes to Bath on the 11th and Touie runs through there with her for a week or so to get a change. As for me I am so strong and hearty that I can very well do without any holiday this year. Should any unexpected luck come on my way however I should possibly run up—but don’t count on it, as the chance is a remote one.

  I wrote Hogg a very civil note and offered him Girdlestone as a serial in L.S. No word from him yet. As to the tweeds, dear, I hardly know what to say. They would make good ulsters and there are one or two patterns which might make into touring or yachting suits, but such very fuzzy & fluffy trousers under a smooth coat—as all my coats are—would look funny. However I have not consulted the better half yet—so attends un peu.

  Innes is away going over the Duke of Wellington. Mother upstairs writing letters. Touie below superintending cooking—so I am alone in my glory. Adieu, dearest, may all that is good go with you.

  Though he had ‘no word of Girdlestone yet’, as he told Lottie, he remained hopeful:

  I think that the book ought to do something. It is open to the charge of being ultra sensational but on the other hand it has a fair sprinkling of humour which is a rare commodity in these days… The book abounds in exciting scenes, murder and sudden death—in fact I would need a private graveyard to plant all my characters in. If I can make any sort of suc cess with it it would give me fresh heart—though in any case we shall not be cast down.

  But eventually he gave up. ‘When I sent it to publishers and they scorned it,’ he wrote in Memories and Adventures, ‘I quite acquiesced in their decision and finally let it settle, after its periodical flights to town, a dishevelled mass of manuscript at the back of a drawer.’ He made a fateful decision to turn his literary energies to something different in 1886: a detective story.

  I felt now that I was capable of something fresher and crisper and more workmanlike. Gaboriau had rather attracted me by the neat dovetailing of his plots, and Poe’s masterful detective, M. Dupin, had from boyhood been one of my heroes. But could I bring an addition of my own? I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details. If he were a detective he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer to an exact science. I would try if I could get this effect.

  Joseph Bell had been one of his professors in medical school, and Conan Doyle had served as his outpatient clerk.* Bell’s uncanny skill at observation and diagnosis was the basis for ‘the Sherlock Holmes method’, Conan Doyle frequently said—perhaps first in an 1892 interview:

  I asked him [the interviewer said] how on earth he had evolved, apparently out of his own inner consciousness, such an extraordinary person as his detective Sherlock Holmes. ‘Oh! but,’ he cried, with a hearty, ringing laugh—and his is a laugh it does one good to hear—‘Oh! But, if you please, he is not evolved out of anyone’s inner consciousness. Sherlock Holmes is the literary embodiment, if I may so express it, of my memory of a professor of medicine at Edinburgh University, who would sit in the patients’ waiting-room with a face like a Red Indian and diagnose the people as they came in, before even they had opened their mouths. He would tell them their symptoms, he would give them details of their lives, and he would hardly ever make a mistake. ‘Gentlemen,’ he would say to us students standing around, ‘I am not quite sure whether this man is a cork-cutter or a slater. I observe a slight callus, or hardening, on one side of his forefinger, and a little thickening on the outside of his thumb, and that is a sure sign he is either one or the other.’ His great faculty of deduction was at times highly dramatic. ‘Ah!’ he would say to another man, ‘you are a soldier, a noncommissioned officer, and you have served in Bermuda. Now how did I know that, gentlemen? He came into our room without taking his hat off, as he would go into an orderly room. He was a soldier. A slight authoritative air, combined with his age, shows he was an NCO. A slight rash on the forehead tells me he was in Bermuda, and subject to a certain rash known only there.’ So I got the idea for Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock is utterly inhuman, no heart, but with a beautifully logical intellect.’*

  Conan Doyle spent six weeks of March and April 1886 writing his tale, first calling it A Tangled Skein, and then A Study in Scarlet. It drew

  from more literary sources than Gaboriau and Poe; it owed a good deal to Robert Louis Stevenson, and perhaps to Bret Harte as well.* But it was energetic and exciting, and narrated by a young doctor recently released from army service after returning to England from the terrible Second Afghan War. And a few pages into it occurred one of the most famous introductions in literature, at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, as narrated by Dr Watson:

  It was familiar ground to me, and I needed no guiding as we ascended the bleak stone staircase and made our way down the long corridor with its vista
of whitewashed wall and dun-coloured doors. Near the farther end a low arched passage branched away from it and led to the chemical laboratory.

  This was a lofty chamber, lined and littered with countless bottles. Broad, low tables were scattered about, which bristled with retorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps with their blue flickering flames. There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work. At the sound of our steps he glanced round and sprang to his feet with a cry of pleasure. ‘I’ve found it! I’ve found it,’ he shouted to my companion, running towards us with a test-tube in his hand. ‘I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by haemoglobin, and by nothing else.’ Had he discovered a gold mine, greater delight could not have shone upon his features.

  ‘Dr Watson, Mr Sherlock Holmes,’ said Stamford, introducing us.

  ‘How are you?’ he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’

  ‘How on earth did you know that?’ I asked in astonishment.

  That was but the first surprise for Dr John H. Watson and his readers in this story whose roots went back to events in Utah ten years before—a tale of murder and revenge out of the American West, where wild things could and often did happen. ‘Arthur has written another book,’ Touie told Lottie, ‘a little novel about 200 pages long, called “A Study in Scarlet”. It went off last night. We have had no news of Girdlestone yet, but we hope that no news is good news. We rather fancy that the “Study in Scarlet” may find its way into print before its elder brother.’