Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters

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  FROM ARTHUR: All well & jolly. The morning class (Bergmeister’s) is well worth coming to Vienna for. He makes you go on doing an operation until you do it perfectly. It is excellent training. Our quarters are not dear, if you consider that at restaurant prices we could not at the lowest get our meals under 5/ each a day (1/ breakfast, 2/ dinner 2/ supper). That would come to £3.10 a week and 10/ for rooms—so you see we would pay as much if we were in some little box. As it is there has been no day yet on which I have not earned enough to pay the whole week’s expenses. I have already done 60 pages of ‘The Doings of Raffles Haw’ and it goes on apace. Not a bad week’s work, eh? I hope we shall leave Vienna richer than we came. It is an expensive town in the little accessories of life. 6d for doing a white shirt & so on. Even beer is dearer than in England. We see all the English papers. I have bought a grand new pair of skates which screw onto the boots.

  [P.S.] Thanks, Innes, for Atomic Weights just arrived. It is for an Alchemist.*

  to Mary Doyle VIENNA, JANUARY 30, 1891

  I think that I have sold the first use of my book ‘The Doings of Raffles Haw’ to ‘Answers’ who are going to bring out a series of novelettes by Hardy &c &c. As far as I can see at present I will get enough from them to pay our journeys each way, our whole Vienna expenses, and allow us perhaps to do Venice, Milan and Genoa on our way home. It is not much out of our way and it would be nice if we could feel ourselves justified in doing it. Raffles Haw will pay all that, leave us a handsome balance over, and also the remaining rights, which will bring in a hundred or two, so that I think that you may congratulate us on our first months work in Vienna, especially as it has not been done at the expense of the medical work. If I can do three or four more stories before I leave I think you will agree with me that we are entitled to a little holiday on our way back. I want to do a good story for Harper’s but I can’t quite get it in training. Perhaps tomorrow will bring light.

  Such a jolly letter from Lottie. Is she not a dear good girl—and Connie too. We must try & make it very pleasant for them when they come over in summer. Perhaps you could come down to London at that time and all be together.

  We went to the Anglo American Ball last night, and had a very pleasant time until about 1.30 when we came home. Lady Paget, the Ambassadress was there, and all went well. You heard about poor Nem’s return. Algiers suited her very badly, the boarding house people insisted on sending for her mother, so rather than that she started off alone & reached home more dead than alive. I hear however that she is already rallying.

  Goodbye, dear. I feel sleepy and stupid or I would write a better and longer letter. No fresh cuttings, but I expect a batch presently, as the second instalment is out. I wonder what the critics will say of Aylward. By my hilt, ma belle, I swear by these ten fingerbones that a truer man never twirled shaft over his thumbnail.

  to Mary Doyle VIENNA, FEBRUARY 1891

  First of all as to the Doctor’s very generous and kind deed much as I feel his kindness I do not think that we can honourably avail ourselves of it. Were we really in a scrape we might borrow from an old friend, but as matters stand we cannot possibly turn to others for help when we can help ourselves. That is my opinion very strongly, and having expressed it I leave the matter in your hands to act as you think right. In any case I am equally obliged to the Doctor for his kindness.*

  Yes—We must have Lottie & Connie here this summer, and when we take apartments we shall arrange at once that there shall be accommodations for them. It would be better to have good rooms in Bedford or Russell Square, I think, than a house in the suburbs. The cost is just about the same, as I reckon it. Connie can then see all she will of W.B.C.† You know my opinion on the matter. I think she could probably do very much better. Within the next few years I shall be going out a good deal in London, and if Connie were with me, with her many advantages, I am sure that she might aim very high. Cross is a nice goodnatured boy, but he is very shallow with no sympathies or tastes in common with Connie. Let them come together again by all means, and we will help in every way, but don’t set your heart on it for I don’t believe it will come to anything. He has no profession and indeed I see nothing to recommend him save his good nature. If she is really fond of him that is final. Mais nous verrons. It is dear Lottie who I wish to see married. You must let us have her all you can, for she is lost (matrimonially) at Masongill.

  I shall not go to Buda now, but shall come straight home, simply breaking my journey for a fortnight at Paris to be able to say that I have studied under Landolt. I can gain a fair idea of his practise in two weeks. My Puritan Story will be an immense affair. I am working hard at it. Harpers have, as I think I told you, definitely ordered it. I hear that the Copyright Bill has passed. If so it ought to send my income up a good deal which will be very welcome.‡

  See that the boy has all he may need in the shape of an outfit. It is cruelty to let a lad be worse fitted up than his fellows. I hope he looks after his nails, shaving &c. He must in the service. Tell him we laughed much at his football match. They were certainly a very heavy lot of forwards.

  Conan Doyle was in London before the end of March. He took lodgings in Montague Place, around the corner from the British Museum—and had Sherlock Holmes say in the story ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ several years later, ‘When I first came up to London I had rooms in Montague Street, just round the corner from the British Museum, and there I waited, filling in my too abundant leisure time by studying all those branches of science which might make me more efficient.’

  In Memories and Adventures Conan Doyle told the same sort of story about himself, in the consulting room that he took in Upper Wimpole Street near, but not in, medically prestigious Harley Street:

  There for £120 a year I got the use of a front room with part use of a waiting-room. I was soon to find that they were both waiting-rooms… Every morning I walked from the lodgings at Montague Place, reached my consulting-room at ten and sat there until three or four, with never a ring to disturb my serenity. Could better conditions for reflection and work be found? It was ideal, and so long as I was thoroughly unsuccessful in my professional venture there was every chance of improvement in my literary prospects. Therefore when I returned to the lodgings at tea-time I bore my little sheaves with me, the first-fruits of a considerable harvest.

  He claimed that by the time he abandoned medicine for writing five or six months later, ‘[N]ot one single patient had ever crossed the threshold’ of his consulting-room. It is a good story, and another one that Conan Doyle’s biographers love, but it was contradicted by Conan Doyle himself a year after that, when he told an interviewer that he had given up medicine because he had had too little time for writing. ‘As a matter of course, he again began to write,’ the interviewer reported, but he

  very soon found out the evident incompatibility between the desk and the consulting-room. He was compelled to attend to his patients in the morning, and spend most of the afternoon at the hospital, so that no time remained for his writing but a portion of the night. For months he struggled to combine the two wholly dissimilar avocations; but in the end his health began to give way, and, after mature consideration, he resolved ‘to throw physic to the dogs’, and to rely entirely on the profits of his books and articles.*

  The different story that Conan Doyle liked to tell in later years will not be easily overcome, but his one surviving letter touching upon his life at that time, written to Dr Reginald Ratcliff Hoare, also refers to the hospital work mentioned in his remarks to the interviewer in 1892.

  to Dr Reginald Ratcliff Hoare 2 UPPER WIMPOLE STREET, LONDON, MARCH OR APRIL 1891

  Just a line to say that I have got into my quarters here & have fairly settled down to work. I wish you could run down & have a look at my Consulting Room & give me a word of advice generally. We are lodging at 23 Montague Place, Russell Square (Gower Street is the nearest station). We can put Amy & you up nicely if you could run down. I had good opportunities at Vienna & Paris & as I hav
e now hooked on at the Westminster Ophthalmic I shall keep up to date. Drop me a line to let me know if you can come. My love to Amy & to as many of the Xmas household as still remain.

  Busy with patients or not, Conan Doyle continued to pursue his goals as a writer. The White Company was being serialized in The Cornhill, to considerable notice, and he acquired a literary agent, A. P. Watt. Watt already represented Rudyard Kipling, but his fortunes would soon soar with those of his newer client. Despite his newfound success with novels, Conan Doyle still had his eye on the magazines. ‘A number of monthly magazines were coming out at the time, notable among which was The Strand, under the editorship of [Herbert] Greenhough Smith,’ he recalled. ‘[I]t had struck me that a single character running through a series, if it only engaged the attention of the reader, would bind that reader to that particular magazine.’

  A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four had not been successful, but he had not forgotten Dr Lawson Tait and Lord Coleridge finding their protagonist engaging. Although The Strand was published by the George Newnes whose Tit-Bits Christmas story competition had outraged the young writer in Southsea, Conan Doyle sent it two short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ and ‘The Red-headed League’. ‘Greenhough Smith liked them from the first, and encouraged me to go ahead with them,’ he said later, mildly.

  Looking back from the 1920s, Greenhough Smith described his reaction to them in rather stronger terms:

  I at once realised that here was the greatest short story writer since Edgar Allan Poe. I remember rushing into Mr Newnes’s room and thrusting the stories before his eyes… Here, to an editor jaded with wading through reams of impossible stuff, comes a gift from Heaven, a godsend in the shape of the story that brought a gleam of happiness into the despairing life of this weary editor. Here was a new and gifted story-teller: there was no mistaking the ingenuity of the plot, the limpid clearness of the style, the perfect art of telling a story.

  ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ appeared in July’s Strand, and the public’s reaction was all that author, editor, and delighted publisher could hope for. Ingeniously, the story’s titillating details played to public fascination with royal scandals, sparking widespread speculation as to the real identities of the characters. At a stroke Conan Doyle became one of the most famous writers in Britain. He set to work on more Holmes stories to bring them up to a half dozen, while Watt ‘relieved me of all the hateful bargaining, and handled things so well that any immediate anxiety for money soon disappeared’.

  Then, in the midst of writing the additional stories, he was struck down by the kind of virulent influenza that had killed his sister Annette three years earlier. ‘Now it was my turn, and I very nearly followed her.’

  For a week I was in great danger, and then found myself as weak as a child and as emotional, but with a mind as clear as crystal. It was then, as I surveyed my own life, that I saw how foolish I was to waste my literary earnings in keeping up an oculist’s room in Wimpole Street, and I determined with a wild rush of joy to cut the painter and to trust for ever to my power of writing. I remember in my delight taking the hand-kerchief which lay upon the coverlet in my enfeebled hand, and tossing it up to the ceiling in my exultation. I should at last be my own master. No longer would I have to conform to professional dress or try to please any one else. I would be free to live how I liked and where I liked. It was one of the great moments of exultation of my life. The date was in August, 1891.

  Before the month was out he had given up his practice and left central London for the suburb of South Norwood.

  It was, a Ladies’ Home Journal correspondent reported in 1895, ‘sufficiently remote to escape the noise and smoke of the great city, yet within a few minutes’ train journey from its very centre’. Soon the household also included Connie, brought back from Portugal.* Now his letters to the Mam came from his middle-class but spacious villa at 12 Tennison Road.

  to Mary Doyle TENNISON ROAD, SOUTH NORWOOD, SEPTEMBER 28, 1891

  It is so long since I have had any practise with my type-writer that I must really have a little now at your expense. It has however been a very useful investment to me, for Connie often does as many as six or seven letters a day for me with it, and very well indeed she does them. In this way a great deal of work is taken off my shoulders, and I am left free for other purposes. Another investment which has very well justified itself is our tandem tricycle.† It is in many ways better than having a dog-cart, and we keep it in constant use. Yesterday Touie and I went fifteen miles between dinner and tea without turning a hair. We hope some day this week if all is well to go to Chertsey on it. That would be thirty miles, all down the valley of the Thames through Kingston etc. Then we have designs on Woking, and on Reading and eventually on Portsmouth, and I should not be surprised if our next visit to Yorkshire were not made upon wheels. We both find it very healthy exercise. I don’t know when we have been in such good condition.

  It is a great pleasure to us to think that there is a good chance of our seeing Lottie permanently next year. When Innes’ last payment is made then I think that she has nobly earned her final home coming, for though I know very well that her place is an exceptionally happy one, still I know also that it is very different to home. I am well able now to afford the luxury of looking after her, so vex not your maternal heart on that score, and she will have a chance of looking over a few young men and seeing if there was any pattern which she would care for. I can give her plenty to do here to keep her out of mischief from potato digging to baby spanking.

  I have not heard from the bank people yet, but I am not much concerned whether they sell or not. I have done a new story since I wrote last—only a short one—called ‘De Profundis’. We have ordered ‘The Wages of Sin’ for you at the library in the one volume form.* The White Company comes out in 3 vols on the 26th October, so it will be out in a month. Is not that fine?

  Conan Doyle was a success at last, with no intention of sticking only to detective stories.

  to Mary Doyle SOUTH NORWOOD, OCTOBER 14, 1891

  What a gale there was last night! Our house was quite shaken & I thought the windows were coming in.

  Another note from Watt to say that some big journal wants an immediate serial from me. I refused. Also one today to ask me to write a book for the wit & humour series. I again refused. Ward Lock & Co wrote to ask me to write a preface for ‘A Study in Scarlet’. I refused. Then they wrote for leave to use a subtitle with the name of Sherlock Holmes. I refused again. So you see what a cantankerous son you have.

  ‘The Strand’ are simply imploring me to continue Sherlock Holmes. I enclose their last. The stories brought me in an average of £35 each, so I have written by this post to say that if they offer me £50 each, irrespective of length I may be induced to reconsider my refusal. Seems rather high handed, does it not?

  Meanwhile I see my way to my American book & am almost ready to start. It will again be told by Micah Clarke. When he flies from England he goes to France in 1685, gets to the Court of Louis XIV, joins the Swiss Guard, is mixed up in the Montespan & Maintenon intrigues, is present at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, finds himself in the Varennes Country, shares the vicissitudes of a Huguenot family, gets in love with the girl, loses them, finds that they have fled to the Puritan Settlements of America, follows them, picks up Saxon at sea under very strange circumstances, gets to Canada, is plunged into the French & Indian wars, makes his way with Saxon through the Iroquois Country, & so to rejoin his friends in the States. How of that? Don’t you think there is material there. I have the knowledge now, & all I want is a little of the sacred fire to warm it all up & blend it in a whole.

  Arthur and Touie on their tandem tricycle

  I sold my eye instruments for £6.10.0 with which I shall buy photographic apparatus, so we have been able to start a hobby without any outlay. Baby, Connie & Touie are flourishing. If it clears at the end of the week we shall cycle to Woking & Reading. The Milbournes are our
friends at Woking. He is the nephew of Charles Kingsley. They have a beautiful place there & are very nice friends indeed. He is a West Indian merchant, rather younger than I. It is a pleasant place for a visit.

  I go into town tonight to see Zola’s ‘Therése Raquin’. I go alone, as it is hardly a lady’s piece. When I get straight with my work I intend to try a piece for Irving. I think I know what would suit him. One can but try. I had a letter from Mrs Gray of Peterhead & responded by sending her a ‘Captain of the Polestar’.