Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters

by Неизвестный

  ‘Heard of A’s determination to leave Southsea,’ noted Lottie in her diary on November 30th.

  ‘There were no difficulties about disposing of the practice,’ said Conan Doyle ruefully, ‘for it was so small and so purely personal that it could not be sold to another and simply had to dissolve.’ The Literary & Scientific Society, which had contributed much to his development over his eight and a half years in Southsea, gave him a farewell banquet. ‘It was a wrench to leave so many good friends,’ he told them; and a Portsmouth Grammar School teacher named Alfred Wood spoke in turn of the considerable hole that Conan Doyle’s departure would leave in their football and cricket teams.

  By December 18th he was gone. He and Touie passed the Christmas holiday with their families, where his decision was buttressed by more good news. Fifteen-year-old Ida was proving to be a brilliant student—‘doing all sorts of wonders,’ marvelled Innes, with ‘a certificate which allows her to teach science in a national school and to buy 32s worth of books and send the bill to the government.’ Innes had good news of his own: ‘I have got into Woolwich,’* he announced: ‘I passed 35th out of 60, and got 8065 marks, whereas my coaches didn’t expect me to get 7000.’ He would fulfil his goal of becoming an army officer.

  ‘I left a gap behind me in Portsmouth and so did my wife, who was universally popular for her amiable and generous character,’ Conan Doyle reminisced, but now he was bound for Vienna, and then London.

  ‘We closed the door of Bush Villas behind us for the last time,’ he said. ‘Now it was with a sense of wonderful freedom and exhilarating adventure that we set forth upon the next phase of our lives.’

  * * *

  *Ethel McKenna, ‘Mrs Conan Doyle and Her Children,’ Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1895.

  †In ‘My First Book’, published in McClure’s Magazine, August 1894.

  *Touie’s mother. His own came to visit them later, and he reported to Lottie on February 13, 1886, ‘The mother is looking wonderfully well—rather stouter than of yore but not a day older. She goes in for chess and all manner of vanities, blossoming out into new bonnets and things in a way that would do your heart good. She seems much pleased with our ménage—we have had her nearly a month and she returns to London next week.’

  *‘Conan Doyle was one of the best students I ever had,’ Bell was quoted in his New York Times obituary, October 19, 1911, as saying. ‘[E]xceedingly interested always in everything connected with diagnosis, and these little details one looks for.’

  *Raymond Blathwayt, ‘A Talk with Dr Conan Doyle’, The Bookman (London), May 1892.

  *In its lengthy flashback episode taking place in the American West.

  *In Bram Stoker, ‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Tells of His Career and Work’, New York World, July 28, 1907.

  †In June 2007, a copy of Beeton’s Christmas Annual was auctioned for $156,000.

  *At least one reviewer, perhaps unfamiliar with eighteenth-century title-pages, objected to it, but the critic for America’s Harper’s Magazine for November 1889 approved: ‘A grimmer title than Micah Clarke, His Statement, etc., is not likely to affright the habitual novel-reader. Yet a title more characteristic of the hero or more pertinent to the tale would be more difficult to come by.’

  *For some half dozen commissioned illustrations by his father for a book edition of A Study in Scarlet from Ward Lock, for which he would receive no royalties.

  †Although Charles Doyle was in declining health, his work on A Study in Scarlet remains bold and original, with many characteristic touches. (In contrast to the later, better known depictions of the detective, his Sherlock Holmes, like Charles Doyle himself, wore a dark beard.)

  *Frank Besant was an Anglican clergyman whose wife Annie was a prominent Theosophist and pioneer in women’s rights.

  *It would be the only novel excluded from his twenty-four-volume Crowborough Edition (1930) of his fiction.

  *The Great Cryptogram (1888) by Ignatius Donnelly claimed to have discovered hidden codes in Shakespeare’s plays proving the true author to have been Francis Bacon. This along with other nineteenth-century cryptogrammatic exposures of Shakespeare failed when few if any others but Donnelly could perceive them in the plays in question.

  *‘Nem’ was Touie’s sister Emily. It is unclear whether Touie was along.

  †‘The Ring of Thoth’, a supernatural thriller. ‘[A] queer story—powerful, I think,’ he told his mother later, ‘a direct consequence of my visit to Paris, so that little trip has paid its own way.’ The ‘Problem’ was The Mystery of Cloomber, published in December 1888.

  *One of H. Rider Haggard’s novels of African adventure, following his fantastically popular King Solomon’s Mines.

  †Stevenson’s ‘The Pavilion on the Links’, which Conan Doyle had liked so much when he first read it in The Cornhill.

  ‡The bookseller W. H. Smith, who possessed an enviable monopoly at British Railway stations.

  *In Sir Walter Scott’s A Legend of Montrose (1819), a character similar in personality to Micah Clarke’s Colonel Decimus Saxon. In America, Harper’s for November 1889 noticed the parallel, but praised Conan Doyle’s version: ‘If Saxon is a kinsman of Dugald Dalgetty,’ said the reviewer, ‘he is an honester rogue, and both more interesting and more real.’

  *Drayson’s new book was Thirty Thousand Years of the Earth’s Past History, read by the aid of the discovery of the second rotation of the earth (London: Chapman & Hall, 1888).

  *His mother’s reaction to learning of her first grandchild this way is not on record. She had, after all, managed to weather the suspense through nine pregnancies of her own.

  *The Doyle Diary, edited and introduced by Michael Baker (London: Paddington Press, 1978). A recent medical assessment, ‘What Became of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Father? The last years of Charles Altamont Doyle’, by Dr Allen Beveridge, was published by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in September 2006.

  *Stratton Boulnois was a friend whose later association with the Besson musical instruments company would make it one of Conan Doyle’s longest standing financial investments. Vernon Ford was head of the Portsmouth Eye Hospital where Conan Doyle was working. Hampshire’s New Forest would become a setting for Conan Doyle’s next historical novel, and one day, far in the future, the location of his holiday house, Bignell Wood.

  *Of course family members would wish to think so. Charles Doyle’s Sunnyside sketchbooks give a less contented picture, if not one oblivious to the actual and serious problems that had led to the family taking this step. He is known to have broken out at least once, but he remained institutionalized until his death in October 1893, after his condition had significantly worsened.

  *Parodying Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: ‘You are old, Father William,’ the young man said, / ‘And your hair has become very white; / And yet you incessantly stand on your head—/ Do you think, at your age, it is right?’ Major General Sir William Crossman, an army engineer and administrator, had resigned his commission in 1885 to stand for Parliament, and served as MP for Portsmouth until 1892.

  †Whether she protested about an adverse review of her son’s work by the Athenaeum with tact this time or not, later letters suggest Conan Doyle striving to calm down an overly sensitive lioness out to defend her cub.

  ‡By the prolific and popular Thomas Hall Caine—with whom Conan Doyle would later feud.

  ÀConan Doyle did not have Mary baptized in the Catholic Church, which could not help but pain his Aunt Annette, a member of a religious order.

  *In ‘What I Think’: a symposium on books and other things by famous writers of today, edited by H. Greenhough Smith (London: G. Newnes, 1927).

  *‘It seemed to me,’ he wrote, ‘that the days of Edward III constituted the greatest epoch in English History—an epoch when both the French and the Scottish kings were prisoners in London. This result had been brought about mainly by the powers of a body of men who were renowned through Europe but who had never been drawn in British
literature, for though Scott treated in his inimitable way the English archer, it was as an outlaw rather than a soldier that he drew them.’ While modern judgment of the novel may not fulfill Conan Doyle’s hopes for it completely, The White Company has seldom if ever been out of print in Britain or America, and its influence has been felt occasionally in interesting (and not necessarily Anglo-Saxon) places, for example in the formative boyhood reading of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  *Sappers: army engineers, the branch Innes hoped to join as an officer.

  *Never produced, it was not published until 2001 by the Baker Street Irregulars in cooperation with the Conan Doyle Estate and the Toronto Public Library, which now owns the manuscript.

  *‘I was the first Englishman to reach Berlin after Koch (vide today’s Daily Telegraph) and also the first to leave with full knowledge of the process,’ he bragged in a letter to Reg Hoare dated November 20th.

  *The Royal Military Academy founded in 1741, and second only to Sandhurst in prestige.

  5

  ‘Author of Sherlock Holmes’

  (1891-1893)

  ‘If I had not killed Sherlock Holmes

  I verily believe that he would have killed me.’

  As soon as the holidays were over Conan Doyle was off to Vienna with Touie, ‘arriving on a deadly cold night, with deep snow under foot and a cutting blizzard in the air,’ he said. ‘It was a gloomy, ominous reception, but half an hour afterwards when we were in the warm cosy crowded tobacco-laden restaurant attached to our hotel we took a more cheerful view of our surroundings.’

  Vienna, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s political and cultural capital, was in the forefront of ophthalmological research and surgery at the time, making it a splendid place both to learn and to broaden their experience of the world. Unencumbered by little Mary, whom they left behind with family in England, Arthur and Touie stayed in Vienna just over two months before returning home, with a stop in Paris for some additional study. In Memories and Adventures, he downplayed how much he got out of it professionally:

  I attended eye lectures at the Krankenhaus, but could certainly have learned far more in London, for even if one has a fair knowledge of conversational German it is very different from following accurately a rapid lecture filled with technical terms. No doubt ‘has studied in Vienna’ sounds well in a specialist’s record, but it is usually taken for granted that he has exhausted his own country before going abroad, which was by no means the case with me. Therefore, so far as eye work goes, my winter was wasted, nor can I trace any particular spiritual or intellectual advance. On the other hand I saw a little of gay Viennese society.…I wrote one short book, The Doings of Raffles Haw, not a very notable achievement, by which I was able to pay my current expenses without encroaching on the very few hundred pounds which were absolutely all that I had in the world.

  His biographers, taking him at his word, have described his time in Vienna as devoted to its charms and writing Raffles Haw. Certainly he enjoyed himself, but his letters suggest that he was getting more out of it professionally than he later acknowledged.

  to Mary Doyle HOTEL KUMMER, VIENNA, JANUARY 5, 1891

  Here we are all safe & sound. At one or two points in the journey we felt the cold a little, while at others we did not find it necessary to unstrap our rugs. It was very bitter at 6 this morning when we arrived, but now it is not colder (or does not seem so) than a good brisk English frost.

  We drove to this hotel & were quite fresh by 12 o’clock when we got up. We then had a good meal and started house-hunting together. We have just come back from a good walk. We called at many lodgings, but we eventually settled upon a pension which is very stylish indeed. Madame Bomfort, Universität Strasse 6, Vienna is our address from tomorrow. I think that it will do very well indeed. There are 14 people boarding there, mostly English & Americans. We have our own room which looks out on one of the chief streets of the city. It has two funny little beds, a writing table for my behoof, a sofa, several chairs, wardrobes, & the usual big white porcelain stove, which will heat it to any degree. Meals are in common, breakfast from 8 to 10—dinner at 1.30, supper at 7.30—plenty of good food. The University & the hospitals are quite close—within a hundred yards. We pay £4 a week altogether, with lamp, fire, beer, wine extra—I daresay there won’t be much out of £5 a week, but I think it is best policy to have our environment pleasant, for I am more likely to do good work then. All seems to fit in beautifully.

  Let me have my letters at that address and the Temple Bar M.S.S. also, very carefully done up and addressed. That ought to be a help to us, if I can get it. If ever I worked in my life I must work now—but I feel like it, after my pleasant holiday. I am only yearning to begin. The air here is quite exhilarating. It seems to suit Touie very well indeed. The people are pleasant & courteous—much more so than in Berlin. Now that we have such nice quarters I think that I will call on the Times Correspondent & generally go out a little.

  I have written to Pickard & Curry asking them to send you a pair of -10 which shall be broad in the frame & large in the glass. These are for near work, while your present—13 are for distant objects. As long as you take off your glasses & stoop over your work, so long will your eyes grow worse for they are kept continually engorged & congested. These glasses you are always to wear, except when you go out, when you can put on the others. Now please do this, or you will be worse.

  to Mary Doyle PENSION BOMFORT, VIENNA, JANUARY 1891

  A line to let you know how all things are with us. We are both having a most delightful time and a perfect rest. I don’t know when we have both had such a feeling of complete repose. You see we have to plan or do nothing for ourselves. Everything is done for us. The meals are regular & good. The people are pleasant. The great city lies without, into which we can sally when we wish, while within we have our own quiet & comfortable little room, where we can work at our ease. We English have no idea as to how a house should be made comfortable. It is really wonderful how they manage here. I don’t see how you could catch a cold or a face ache if you were to try. I am sure that no one could tell what season of the year it is in our room, and such a thing as a draught is unknown. One night we were too warm, but bar that we have been most cosy. We usually let our stove out about five & yet the room remains quite warm until bed time. On the other hand we have never found it stuffy. It is quite a revelation to me.

  Our rule of life is a simple one. I have after Monday to be at a class at 8 in the morning, but it is only a couple of hundred yards off. I will have a cup of coffee with my hot water & then a second with Touie when I come back. Then five days in the week I write from breakfast until dinner at 1.30. On the odd days we go skating to a nice place which we have discovered. After dinner we have a walk & do a little sight seeing & afterwards work until 5 when I have another class. At 7 we have supper, and afterwards I do an hour or two more writing. About 10.30 we turn in. Once a week (Sunday night) we go to a café, drink beer and watch the people. It is a pleasant healthy life, and I think we ought to have no difficulty in clearing our expenses, and maybe a few pounds over.

  The people are nice, an American globe trotting woman, very vulgar but good natured. She informed us at dinner that some of the German words were enough to turn her mouth out. Then a more refined American family, father, mother & some children. Item an American doctor with his wife, rather reserved folk. Item a dear old Russian lady, with her niece, a very nice talkative strapping girl. Item an English mother & daughter named Keene, who are very kind to us. These with Madame B, her husband, and her younger sister who does most of the managing, make up our menage. Everyone talks English, so Touie is quite at home. I speak all the German I can however.

  We reckon that we will probably get our letters tomorrow & we are eagerly awaiting them. The play you will kindly pack up and forward to W. Balestier Esqre. 2 Deans Yard, Westminster. It may prove to be worth money. I have written to him to be on the lookout for it. Kindly order also two copies of this mont
h’s Chambers with ‘The Surgeon’ in it. We may wish to include it in our ‘Effects and failures,’ so we must make sure of having it. I wonder if Temple Bar stuck to that yarn or not. Make a note of any small expenses to which I may put you. My love to the boy—Make him stick to his German, as well as chemistry, & see if he can’t pass out near the top. Love also to Dodo, I suppose Ida got back in spite of the railway strike. Touie enjoys Vienna amazingly.

  to Mary Doyle VIENNA, JANUARY 1891

  FROM TOUIE: We were so delighted to get yours and the other letters. I don’t know when I have written so many friends all at once, as I have done lately. Yes, dearie, the beds have been most comfortable. I wonder why you should have such a bad idea of the foreign ones. When I was in Suisse they were very nice, and how well I remember the sweet scent to the linen.—Yesterday we had our first callers—Mrs Gordon—the Independent parson’s wife. She is exceedingly nice, and most kind. Arthur was out, then after she had gone I went for a walk with A., and Mrs Irene Grädauer called and left her card, I found when we returned, so I intend calling there one day soon. This afternoon was Mrs Gordon’s day at home, so I put on my best bib and tucker and off I went. I saw Mr Gordon; and his three children came in for a few minutes. I met four other English girls there, they all seem very jolly, and Mr Gordon told me that he and 14 of the English students were getting up a dance, and he wanted to know if we would go. I said yes, I was sure we should be delighted. This is the first time I have been out alone, I felt I was doing wonders. Arthur spent the afternoon skating & feels all the better for the fresh air. I must tell you—at Mrs Gordon’s they had an open fireplace—it looked very nice—and they are quite proud of it. So we are to receive our formal invitation to this dance soon. I thought about Ida on her journey that day—with all the snow being about and the men on strike—I saw in the D. Telegraph that nothing had happened, but the trains were late. Our last letters crossed. Today we have had very little or no snow. I heard from home on Saturday and Nem is going to Algiers. She started yesterday 12th and I shall be glad now, to hear she has arrived safely.—It is astonishing we don’t find it cold here; one thing it never seems so cold for the snow—at present we have no fire & we are quite warm enough—once or twice he made it rather too hot. I have written a long letter to Connie, and we are sending the Review of R. How very unpleasant for Ida, the engine of her train coming to grief, it must have made all the passengers feel very uneasy.—I am learning a little German under Professor [illegible], he is a great man. Now I will leave this for A. to fill up, with much love, hoping you will escape.