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I thought I had told you all about Cloomber. Surely I did. Ward & Downey bring it out, I to have nothing down, but a royalty of 11/2 d in the copy. I thought I would like to try the royalty system. You see 20,000 copies would yield about £120. I expect it out every day.
I wrote to the Syndicate and got Girdlestone back. I have been looking it over & copying parts of it out. It will, I think, cut into a very strong 6/ book to follow Micah up with should he do well. I am working now at cutting it down, also at the eye, also at Egyptian hieroglyphics, also at Peruvian antiquities, also at astronomy, the latter in connection with Drayson’s new book, which promises to be a success. The Americans bought up the whole of the first edition. It seems to me he proves his point. If he succeeds in doing so his name will live in history, I think.*
I am busy, & must set off on my round. Up three nights in succession. Yes, dear, I’ll try & get R. Feverel, but one effect of my lecture has been to produce a run on Meredith’s work at local libraries & they are not to be had. I had a letter from Meredith thanking me for my paper, of which I sent him a copy. Reading Whittier’s poems—very fine.
George Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) is nearly the only one of his many novels by which he is judged today, but Conan Doyle was far from alone among their contemporaries in praising Meredith lavishly. Oscar Wilde, for example, exclaimed in print: ‘Ah, Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning,’ and Meredith was chosen to be the Society of Authors’ second president, succeeding Tennyson. For Conan Doyle, George Meredith always remained the epitome of the English novelist.
to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA, DECEMBER 18, 1888
I send another instalment of Micah. I think Sir Gervas is fine. Weather dull down here. Lottie will be interested to know that Boulnois gave his paper last night & that it went off very well, and that I spoke at some length on the Eiffel Tower, Egyptian hydraulic engineers & other subjects in which my knowledge is considerably hampered by limits. I am taking a holiday. Read ‘She’ which disappointed me, and ‘Three Musqueteers’ which I think is most excellent & quite what the historical novel should be, with history quite subservient to the Romance. Touie is well. I play football today. ‘The Bravos’ was accepted by Chambers. It was only 8 pages long, so I won’t get more than 30/ for it, I fear.
With Cloomber out, and Micah Clarke coming, two more novels with his name on the spine joined the book edition of A Study in Scarlet.
to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA, JANUARY 1889
Ball has been travelling about England & tells me that the Mystery is on all the bookstalls and is selling well. I hope there may be a steady demand.
‘Micah’ is already advertised in some journals. Favourable notice of the Mystery in the Scottish Leader. I am thinking of trying a Rider Haggardy kind of book called ‘the Inca’s Eye’ dedicated to all the naughty boys of the Empire, by one who sympathizes with them. I think I could write a book of that sort con amore. It would come as a change after Micah. The notable experiences of John H Calder, Ivan Boscovitch, Jim Horscroft, and Major General Pengelley Jones in their search after the Inca’s Eye. How’s that for an appetite whetter. Reading history hard. Must go & see some patients. Ain’t the appendix fine. I’m afraid on second thoughts that it is too suggestive of Waverley novels, & might produce invidious comparisons. Lang wants me to leave out some dry places. I don’t know what to do—I want to preserve some solidity in the book.
Just as lifechanging was the birth of a daughter, whom Dr Conan Doyle delivered at home himself.
to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA, JANUARY 28, 1889
Toodles produced this morning at 6.15 a remarkably fine specimen of the Toodles minor, who is now howling her head off in the back bedroom. I must say that I am surprised at the conduct of the young woman, seeing that both her parents are modest sort of people. She came evidently for a long visit, and yet she has made no apology for the suddenness of her arrival. She had no luggage with her, nor any possessions of any kind, barring a slight cough, and a voice like a coalman. I regret to say that she had not even any clothes, and we have had for decency’s sake to rig her out with a wardrobe. Now one would not mind doing all this for the sake of a visitor, but when the said visitor does nothing but snuffle in reply it becomes monotonous. She has frank and engaging manners, but she is bald which will prevent her from going out into society for some little time.
Forgive me for not telling you, dear. I knew how trying the suspense of waiting would be, and thought that on the whole it would be best that you should learn when it was too late to worry yourself.*
Touie is in capital form.
[P.S.] Tell Lottie her flannel square came in very useful for the young Empress—her first bit of property.
to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA, FEBRUARY 1889
I thought it would ease your mind to hear that Touie does very nicely and so does Mary Louise Conan Doyle, who is really a very good child, sleeps all day & is very placid & contented. It was in the papers yesterday so I sent a paper to Aunt Annette, Mrs Ryan, Mrs Hoare, Annette & Nem. Touie & I have had quite a match as to which should get our little creations off first. However Mary Louise has got the start of Micah Clarke, though he wont be very far behind her. How will that name do? It combines yours and Touie’s and I think sounds nice. From where I sit writing at the foot of the bed I see a long perspective of downy white sheet—Then at the far edge there rises a little nose and a fringe of hair which represents where Touie lies—Now run your eye along the bed-horizon and presently you come upon another little nose, the living image of the first, but so small and so perky! That is Mary Louise, with a little red hood over her little red head. She is fat & plump, blue eyes, bandy legs and a fat body. Any other points will be answered on enquiry. I have had no practise in describing babies. Her manners are painfully free. When she doesn’t like anything she says so, and they know it all down the street. The nurse is a very nice one and all is very comfortable. I attended Touie myself, but Claremont comes in every day. I will send you a couple of papers in case you wish to send them to anyone.
I have had my final revise of Micah Clarke. I revised the whole 400 pages in one day, which was a big bit of work—began at 10—finished at 7.30. I cut out 11/2 pages of the religious matter at the beginning, also half a page of Sir Gervas’ descriptions of life in town which critics seemed to think might be a little overdone—about 50 other alterations I made. Mostly modern words into short Saxon ones. We shall hear no more now until it comes out, which I should think would be by the end of next week. We must not build too much upon its success. It must make some friends, but it may fail to reach the populace. What is, is best. Enclose a letter just received from Connie. We are having notes & cards showering in on Touie, as you may suppose. Enclose another of Lang’s which pray send back.
Goodbye, dearie—I must be off shopping—I am housekeeper now—love to all.
to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA, FEBRUARY 14, 1889
Just a line to say that all is well. Touie will, I hope, sit up a little today, it being the 14th. Ward Lock & Co seem inclined to push the Study at last. I received about a hundred of these the other day, and I suppose they are scattering them broadcast over the country. It will pave the way for Micah nicely. How about those notebooks of Papa’s which I sent to Hampton Court. We must not lose them for nothing, eh? I spend 3 hours a day at the Eye hospital, and have learned a lot. Baby flourishes. Letter from Connie yesterday—very jolly & astonished. I wrote her a long reply. If Connie came here this summer I would not be at all surprised if old Ball were to propose, for she knocked him off his equilibrium last time so far that he proposed going to Lisbon after she left.
Not all were doing so well. Charles Doyle was not, and had been transferred in 1885 from Blairerno to Scotland’s Montrose Royal Asylum, known as Sunnyside, where epilepsy also emerged. In his writings Conan Doyle preserved a Victorian taciturnity about his father’s condition, but one of his father’s sketchbooks from this period was published in fac
simile in 1978, revealing Charles Doyle’s condition for the first time.*
‘Keep steadily in view that this Book is ascribed wholly to the produce of a Madman,’ Doyle wrote across its first page, dated March 8, 1889: ‘Whereabouts would you say was the deficiency of Intellect? or depraved taste?’ Later in the sketchbook, whose drawings are usually whimsical, and occasionally morbid, he sighed, ‘I believe I am branded as Mad solely from the narrow Scotch misconception of jokes.’ That he was not embittered towards his family, at least at this time, is suggested by his having drawn himself looking winsomely at his wife (above), as well as quotations from reviews of Arthur’s Mystery of Cloomber and Micah Clarke, and other expressions of affection for his family.
to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA, FEBRUARY 26, 1889
Micah comes out this morning. I had a very nice letter from T Longman, saying that he did not know whether the public would like it but that they ought to. He had read it & been deeply interested. They would spare no pains to make it a success. Another letter from Charles Longman (Ed of the magazine) saying that he also liked it, and asking me whether I had anything I cared to offer as a serial in the magazine for 1890. So that is very jolly.
We must write to our friends & ask them to enquire at the libraries for it. When you write always give the publisher’s name & the price that they may order it, if they like. We wrote yesterday to Mrs Hoare, Rippingille, Letty Foley, David Thomson, Mrs Drummond, Miss Crump, Louis Robertson, Mr Astrop, Miss Sims, Miss Powell, Miss Harward—any others you can think of pray write to. I would not press it on the Ryans or any R.C. friends, as they may find it unorthodox. I have arranged for good notices with all the local papers & I expect to sell some hundreds down here.
If Micah never becomes popular—which is likely enough—at least I think he must make some friends.
Touie & baby came down yesterday. She (baby) is very fat and strong—white long dress, blue mantle and hood, large round white face, big staring blue eyes, upturned homely nose, sturdy serious expression, great limbs and hands and feet of delicately moulded wax—that is the little dame.
Conan Doyle did not let grass grow under his feet. ‘I wrote [Micah Clarke] in about five months,’ he told Margaret Ryan,
but it took me about two years to collect my materials. I am now reading for a medieval book, but as I must consult at least a hundred works first, it will be some time before I get it under weigh. Should there be a prospect of my being able to depend entirely on literature I should sell my practice here and start in London as an ophthalmic surgeon and oculist.
Not all approved of his new literary vein: ‘How can you, dare you, go on spending your time and wits upon an historical novel!’ James Payn had exclaimed in rejecting Micah Clarke. But success would mean his liberation from an obscure general practice in the provinces. ‘Micah seems to be thriving, though we have not been able yet to see how far the good reviews have reacted upon the sale,’ Conan Doyle told Lottie on March 18th: ‘I am three hours a day at the Eye hospital, and have still my old plan in view.’
to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA, MARCH 1889
Yours with parcel of sago to hand. Many thanks. Baby is quite good at night, but we will be giving her a little sago & milk tonight as you advise. She is very fat & strong & laughs a great deal, especially when she looks at me. There is something about my appearance which strikes her as irresistibly funny.
I send the Athenaeum cutting. I would not send it if I thought it could annoy you, but it is so very foolish that there is no sting in it at all. That remark about the title page ‘taking a week to read’ is too puerile for any halfpenny evening print. Of course long title pages were the fashion 200 years ago—and as my story dates from that time I have to give it a title of those days. It would almost be a joke to paste the Academy notice and the Athenaeum on one sheet of paper & send them to the critic. But I think I see a way of getting profit out of this Athenaeum notice—more than all the others. Nous verrons.
Nice short notices have appeared lately in ‘England’ and in ‘The Bradford Daily Telegraph.’ I have 17 notices now in my commonplace book of which every one is very nice bar the Athenaeum and the Hampshire Post. I have sent an Academy to Annette, so don’t send but keep your copy. Sarah Doudney tells me that in London the Academy is cutting out the Athenaeum. This she told me before I told her of the nasty notice.
I have a good idea for a new story if I can work it out. I have rearranged Girdlestone and it reads well now in point of interest, though it is too melodramatic & sensational to be true art. Longman have had it for a fortnight, but I don’t in the least know if they will take to it.
The weather is cold so Touie and Toodlekin are confined to the house. At Easter I hope to have a few days in the New Forest with Drayson, Boulnois, and, I hope, Dr Vernon Ford.* Good company by day & a rubber at night. The air there is something splendid.
to Amy Hoare SOUTHSEA
It struck me that if you were leaving on Monday I would just have time to send you a line to wish you God-speed and a pleasant trip. If you are away and if Reg is not quite the thing why don’t you send Reg down to me for a change. Touie would be delighted. She would have written suggesting it, but she has gone over to the Island for a few days with baby to stay with Mrs Hawkins. If Reg doesn’t mind the baby it would be great fun if he came down—I promise him a quiet life & lots of fresh air.
So glad that you liked the book—the politics and religion are Micah’s not mine. I was trying to draw the intelligent young Puritan of those days. Personally I don’t agree with a word—or hardly a word that he says. The critics were very kind. The Graphic is the second worst notice out of some 40 which I have by me. The best are the Spectator, Saturday Review and Academy. Longmans tell me that the second edition is nearly exhausted.
I also send you a copy of the Baby, taken at 5 weeks. She is now double the size with enormous limbs and a voice like a coal heaver. She is of a humourous and jocular turn, and has some small joke concealed about her person for she is continually chuckling to herself. She is capital fun.
Excuse this awful scrawl. I have a quill pen the point of which would make a very good garden chair. We have Balfour coming down on the 5th, and as I am the Sec. to the Lib. Unionists it gives me some work. For the rest I divide my time between oculism, occultism and my writing, with a little cricket as a corrective.
Arthur Balfour was at that time a leading politician, and a future prime minister. Conan Doyle’s political work helped him learn to speak in public, he wrote in Memories and Adventures:
I was what was called a Liberal-Unionist, that is, a man whose general position was Liberal, but who could not see his way to support Gladstone’s Irish [Home Rule] Policy. Perhaps we were wrong. However, that was my view at the time. I had a dreadful first experience of platform speaking on a large scale, for at a huge meeting at the Amphitheatre the candidate, Sir William Crossman, was delayed, and to prevent a fiasco I was pushed on at a moment’s notice to face an audience of 3,000 people. It was one of the tight corners of my life. I hardly knew myself what I said, but the Irish part of me came to my aid and supplied me with a torrent of more or less incoherent words and similes which roused the audience greatly, though it read to me afterwards more like a comic stump speech than a serious political effort. But it was what they wanted and they were mostly on their feet before I finished.
Conan Doyle had stepped onto the Liberal Unionist stage in July 1886 with a letter to the Portsmouth News endorsing its platform. He and his mother did not see eye-to-eye about Home Rule. It would mean giving Ireland its own government and parliament within the framework of the United Kingdom, something opposed not only by many Britons, but by the Protestants of Ulster. Mary Doyle appears to have favoured it; her son opposed it for many years, not only out of concerns for internal strife in Ireland, but also for its potential for damaging the fabric of Empire.
He was quite prepared to discuss Home Rule with her despite their disagreement. Until 1916, by contrast, the subjec
t of ‘occultism’ is conspicuous by its absence from his letters to her, even though he was devoting a good deal of time to it. ‘It was in these years,’ he said in Memories and Adventures, ‘that I planted the first seeds of those psychic studies which were destined to revolutionize my views and to absorb finally all the energies of my life.’ Spiritualism had been of growing interest on both sides of the Atlantic since the emergence as mediums of two sisters in Hydesville, New York, in 1848, Kate and Margaret Fox. Britain’s Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by three members of Cambridge University’s faculty, and the American society followed in 1885 with founders that included William James of Harvard.
The subject seized Conan Doyle’s imagination. Despite an initial scepticism that he later ascribed to his materialist education as a doctor, he became interested along with his friend Henry Ball, the architect. They began with experiments in mental telepathy that Conan Doyle found encouraging. But it was Alfred Drayson—the retired general with a scientific bent as an astronomer—who was Conan Doyle’s mentor in this area, for ‘when he told me his views and experiences on Spiritualism I could not fail to be impressed, though my own philosophy was far too solid to be easily destroyed’.
Conan Doyle started attending séances in Drayson’s company, and was sufficiently impressed by some of the results to write them up for the July 2, 1887, issue of Light, a weekly paper of psychic exploration. In it he called himself ‘a novice and inquirer’, but sounded quite won over when he stated that he ‘could no more doubt the existence of the phenomena than I could doubt the existence of lions in Africa, though I have been to that continent and have never chanced to see one.’