Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters

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  It also kept his hand in fiction, but he was much occupied with public issues now, along with growing participation in society. Lady Jeune, a writer married to a prominent judge, was a useful friend, leading not only to Ida’s introduction to society, but to Conan Doyle’s own widening circle—even though he and the family lived a very simple life, he assured his mother in the letter following.

  ‘I attended several of Lady Jeune’s famous luncheon parties, which were quite one of the outstanding institutions of London,’ he wrote in Memories and Adventures, and ‘am indebted to this lady for very many kind actions.’ Sir Francis Jeune influenced his views on a different subject for which Conan Doyle later led a reform movement—divorce law. Sir Francis ‘always impressed me with his gentle wisdom,’ he wrote.

  He presided over the Divorce Courts, and I remember upon one occasion I said to him: ‘You must have a very low opinion of human nature, Sir Francis, since the worst side of it is for ever presented towards you.’ ‘On the contrary,’ said he very earnestly, ‘my experience in the Divorce Courts has greatly raised my opinion of humanity. There is so much chivalrous self-sacrifice, and so much disposition upon the part of every one to make the best of a bad business that it is extremely edifying.’ This view seemed to me to be worth recording.

  to Mary Doyle MOORLANDS, FEBRUARY 19, 1897

  So glad to get your long interesting letter. The only things we ever differ upon are questions of feeling and those are simply outside all argument & all personal control. So it is best perhaps not to broach them for it is as unlikely that you will change your point of view as that I will. I have to explain what I think because otherwise you cannot see what governs me in my actions, but nothing is further from my thoughts than to hurt you in any way.*

  My new book is practically finished and I will get some money on account from Newnes which will relieve me from the temporary pressure under which I have been suffering. I think the book will justify itself, and that it will be popular.

  I send my Irish speech—on March 1st I give a reading for the Indian Fund—on the 25th another for servants—on the 17th a lecture on the Irish Brigade—so I shall be before the public in the immediate future.

  The horse is a great success. I ride out every day and hope soon to hunt. The house is going along very well. It is right under our nose here so we keep a close eye upon it.

  I dont think the children spend much on dress, dear. 30/ was what Kingsley’s little suit came to. I should be sorry to bring them up anything but simply—but they are brought up very simply, I assure you.

  Excuse this scrawl—I have just time before dinner to give the Coup de Grace to my book.

  to Mary Doyle REFORM CLUB, LONDON, APRIL OR MAY 1897

  I have used you scurvily in the matter of letters of late—but I have been rushing about very much. Touie & the mother & the maid are now in Eastbourne, governess & children at Reigate, Lottie & Ida in Oakley Street, Dodo with Connie—it’s a little mixed is it not, but we shall soon begin to concentrate upon Eastbourne. The presentation I have managed all right—May 10th it comes off—Lady Dillon does it. Your four big girls are enjoying themselves. Dodo was introduced to Sir Henry Irving & Ellen Terry & has generally been painting the town red. Let me know when the banking account is at a low ebb and I shall at once send that money. I have had news from B’ham. Reg is very ill indeed—quite beyond work.

  Eastbourne seems—from her letters—to suit Touie splendidly so I have no doubt that we shall spend our summer there. I give a reading at Southsea on May 18 for a charity. On May 22 I go to visit Astor at Cliveden for a week end. I shall probably meet some interesting people there.

  to Mary Doyle CLAREMONT, GRAND PARADE, EASTBOURNE, SUSSEX, MAY 14, 1897

  I have been squaring my accounts—which means of course a cheque to you.

  You’ll be pleased by the Chronicle Review of ‘Uncle Bernac’. It is much too laudatory but as it has always underrated my work before it restores the balance by overrating this particular book—which I had grave doubts about publishing at all.

  I am reading a course of Renan to steady myself down. That with plenty of golf & cricket ought to keep me right—body and mind.

  Ernest Renan, a French philosopher who had died in 1892, would have been congenial reading for a fallen-away Roman Catholic like Conan Doyle. Despite a Church-school education, Renan made scientific inquiry his approach to religious issues: He believed the life of Christ should be biographically treated like anyone else’s, and also insisted that the Bible be subjected to scholarly analysis instead of being accepted on faith. ‘My mind felt out continually into the various religions of the world,’ Conan Doyle said about these years. ‘I could no more get into the old ones, as commonly received, than a man could get into his boy’s suit. I still argued on materialist lines.’ But, while he did not mention it in these letters to his mother, he also continued to study psychic matters.

  to Mary Doyle CLIVEDEN, MAIDENHEAD, BUCKS., MAY 1897

  Many thanks for the beautiful letter which you wrote me for my birthday. I assure you that no present could have given me the same pleasure.

  I have been here for the weekend. I had the distinction of being the only untitled English guest. The home secretary & his wife, Byng Equerry to the Queen, Lord & Lady Savile, Lord & Lady Earn, Sir Henry Hawkins, Sir Henry Irving, Sir Gerald & Lady FitzGerald, Lady Evelyn Crichton, Mr & Mrs Morton, American Minister to Paris—that, I think, is all. Very nice amiable people, all of them. Astor himself I like very much—rather a pathetic figure with his dead wife & his millions.

  I shall get home again tomorrow (Monday) I hope. I left little Kingsley not very well, bilious, but I trust he will be all right. Touie seems to gain strength weekly—but Lottie causes me anxiety at times.

  Adieu, my dearest mother—Dodo gained all our love.

  [P.S.] Lady FitzGerald is Lord Houghton’s daughter & remembers your letters re Heine.

  Cliveden, a spectacular estate previously owned by the Duke of Westminster, was now the home of the perennially unsatisfied American millionaire William Waldorf Astor, one of the world’s richest men.

  Conan Doyle’s interest in crime made him interested also in Henry Hawkins, the notorious hanging judge: ‘so capricious,’ Conan Doyle wrote in his memoir, ‘that one never knew whether one was dealing with Jekyll or with Hyde.’ The weekend gave him a good anecdote about it:

  On the first night at dinner, before the party had shaken down into mutual acquaintance, the ex-judge, very old and as bald as an ostrich egg, was seated opposite, and was wreathed in smiles as he made himself agreeable to his neighbour. His appearance was so jovial that I remarked to the lady upon my left: ‘It is curious to notice the appearance of our vis-à-vis and to contrast it with his reputation,’ alluding to his sinister record as an inexorable judge. She seemed rather puzzled by my remark, so I added: ‘Of course you know who he is.’ ‘Yes,’ said she, ‘his name is Conan Doyle and he writes novels.’ I was hardly middle-aged at the time and at my best physically, so that I was amused by her mistake, which arose from some confusion in the list of guests. I put my dinner card up against her wine-glass, so after that we got to know each other.

  to Mary Doyle CLAREMONT, JULY 5, 1897

  This is to wish you every joy, dear, for your birthday. We could not get any jewel worthy of you—for the Queen still wants to keep the Koh-i-noor—but we send a wee ring, so that we are all on your finger and you can still turn us round it—as you always could.

  Nelson arrived last night & very well he looks. He and Ida are away for a walk, and in the afternoon we shall take them a good long drive to Alfriston (Alfred’s town) where there is an inn 1000 years old, where we shall get tea. They leave us on Tuesday. It is quite pleasant to see Ida so happy.

  Touie continues to keep very well & Kingsley has quite recovered from the small operation which he had to undergo. His general health has been much improved thereby. I am contemplating a new book, modern, about the Jesuits among
other things. You dont know any young Jesuit who would tell me about the inner workings of the order, do you? I want to put my hero into it and then get him out again.

  Conan Doyle now embroiled himself in literary controversy again. Hall Caine, a writer who lived in a castle on the Isle of Man, was noted for popular novels with exotic settings—and for self-promotion that others found offensive, feeling that his success was based less on literary merit than upon a calculated pursuit of celebrity unbecoming in a serious writer. (And worse, if this was Hall Caine’s strategy, it was successful, for his novels sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies.) He was at it again for a forthcoming novel, The Christian, whose sales would reach a million copies.

  Caine had defenders like literary biographer Robert Harborough Sherard, who opened a lengthy homage with the words:

  Extreme dignity is the leading characteristic of Thomas Henry Hall Caine as a man, just as extreme conscientiousness is his leading characteristic as a writer. He possesses in a high degree the sense of the responsibility which an author owes to the public and to himself.*

  But Conan Doyle could not have agreed less. Said journalist Coulson Kernahan later: ‘[I]n his professional life, Doyle was never once known to stoop to self-advertisement.’

  He detested any and every form of self-advertisement by authors. Advertised, his books of course were, but only by the publishers whose legitimate business it was… Doyle’s share in the book’s success was to do the best that was in him, but that done, he left the book, so far as he was concerned, to win the ear of the public wholly and solely on the merit of the work.*

  In 1893, early in his dealings with The Strand Magazine, Conan Doyle had told its editor Greenhough Smith that ‘I may be too conservative, but I am strongly of the opinion that a man’s personality and private opinions should be kept in the background. I should feel I was guilty of egotism and impertinence if I bothered the public with my likes and dislikes.’†

  ‘It has become a perfect scandal,’ he told James Payn now: ‘The papers teem with letters, interviews, corrections, statements, all with the same Hall-mark—Hall Caine-mark—upon them. He has suborned many of the small fry of journalism by having them over—twenty at a time—to Greeba Castle.’ He sent an indignant letter about the practice to the August 7th Daily Chronicle, signing it ‘An English Novelist’, but without keeping his identity secret from the target of his criticism. ‘If I do not sign my name,’ he wrote, ‘it is because I do not desire to import personalities into what is an impersonal matter. I have no desire, however, to make an anonymous attack, and I enclose my card, with full permission that it should be forwarded to Mr Hall Caine should he so desire.’

  ‘When Mr Kipling writes such a poem as his “Recessional”, he does not state in public what he thinks of it, and how it came to be written,’ he then declared: ‘When Mr Barrie produces so fine a work as Margaret Ogilvie, there are no long interviews and explanations to advertise it before it appears. The excellence of the literature commends the poem or the tale to the discerning reader, and the ordinary advertising agencies present its merits to the general public. As a literary man, I would beg Mr Hall Caine to adopt the same methods.’

  And after giving his views as to the etiquette that ‘every high profession—be it law, medicine, the Army, or literature’ should follow, he condemned Caine’s approach:

  I think it unworthy of the dignity of our common profession that one should pick up paper after paper and read Mr Caine’s own comments on the gigantic task and the colossal work which he has just brought to a conclusion, with minute descriptions of its various phases and of the different difficulties which have been overcome. Surely in the case of another man Mr Caine would clearly perceive that it is for others to say these things, and that there is something ludicrous and offensive about them when they are selfstated. All these wire-pullings and personalities tend to degrade literature, and it is high time that every self-respecting man should protest against them.

  to Mary Doyle CLAREMONT, AUGUST 1897

  Item what did your skirt come to? That was my affair. Now please use your nice caps and nice dresses. Dont cut that skirt short. It does not look well, however convenient it may be. You are too good to spoil. Please dont get into Miss Burtony ways but remain the sweet & comely woman that Nature made you. With no criticism in the country one is, I know, liable to drift.

  The Isle of Man or the Man of the Isle has not shown fight. One of his jackals (Sherard) has howled in the press about the jealousy which H.C.’s great success has raised in the breasts of his brother authors. Nothing more. There seems to be no public opinion in our profession. Twice I have struck in for what I thought the interests of literature, once against Smith’s system, once against H.C. but I was always alone in the lists. Still it eases one’s soul.

  Lottie has gone this morning to Hindhead, where Mrs Corrie (the professional settler-down—funny trade!) awaits her. Work does Lottie good, I observe. In a week or two you will find us installed. Touie & I will have a few days in London first.

  to Mary Doyle EASTBOURNE CRICKET & FOOTBALL CLUB

  I had a letter from Hemming this morning in which he says that the window is ready to go up as it stands, but that if he puts the 3 coats in the lower panes, which have already 3 coats in them it will look cramped & destroy the symmetry of the design which depends upon having one coat in each pane. I had foreseen this difficulty & wondered how he & you intended to get over it. It is important that the window should go in at once as the furniture has actually arrived. I have therefore directed him to put it in as it is, and to put the Foley & the other two coats into the centres of the other large window which opens on the other side of the Hall. This will distribute the heraldic effect & be better in every way, I think.

  I understand that the window is complete, so he must have done it.

  Lottie sends us long accounts. We shall need more electric lights & one room must be repapered. I shall go down for a day when we go to London.

  Tell Willie the MCC beat us. Trott bowled like a demon. He is, I think, the best bowler now in England. I made 35 & 27 so I did my share.

  to Mary Doyle

  Tell Willie I have searched for my Bookman but someone seems to have walked it off. Sherard’s article was of the usual ‘Palpitating after his Colossal work’ ‘Wrote “thank God” on the Proofs after “Finis”’ &c &c stamp. H.C. has not played up yet. I dont quite see what he can do, and I dont think he does either. I have had letters from Payn, Wemyss Reid & Maclauchlan congratulating me. Reid says that Anthony Hope is strongly on my side but I cannot see how any literary man can be otherwise. But there is so little esprit de corps in the Profession!

  I dont know that there is any particular news. I have not been in London since I saw you there on your arrival. My health is quite restored now, thanks to a good course of cricket. This is my best season both with bat and ball. Touie keeps very well & we still expect to be in Undershaw in September. Payn writes his letters to ‘My dear Undershaw’ for he says that I must take my territorial title.

  Conan Doyle’s comment about little esprit de corps in the literary profession was echoed by William Rideing on ‘Literary Life in London’ in the June 1898 North American Review: ‘There is very little esprit de corps, very little pride in one another, in the profession,’ he alleged, despite Walter Besant’s Society of Authors to advance its interests, and the ‘networking’ opportunities afforded by the Authors Club, and also the New Vagabonds Club, hosting luncheons and dinners for both home and visiting literary lights.* For much of their work was ill paid, Rideing continued, but ‘let an author have the ability to produce fiction of a kind that hits the popular taste’—mentioning Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and Hall Caine’s immensely popular novels—and fortune followed, even if the friendliest of critics found no real literary merit in them.

  Grant Allen, holding that ‘no work can be considered really first-rate unless it teaches
us—not merely pleases us’, saw in the success of Hope, Haggard, and Conan Doyle ‘the taste of boys and girls and casual readers, of the survivors from the past, of the conservative and reactionary as against the progressive and ascending element’. He did not mean, he said, that Conan Doyle had not done admirable work—but work that ‘(as a rule) does not aim at the highest audience’.*

  Andrew Lang, on the other hand, saw in Hope, Haggard, and Conan Doyle something better than this suggested. It was, he argued, ‘the good old tendency to love a plain tale of adventure, of honest loves, and fair fighting’, mentioning both Micah Clarke and The White Company by name. ‘Here is what men and boys have always read for the sheer delight of the fancy,’ Lang declared, ‘honest, upright romancers, who make us forget our problems and the questions that are so much with us, in the air of moor and heath, on the highway, on the battlefield, in the deadly breach. Our novels in this kind are not works of immortal genius: only five or six novelists are immortal. But the honest human nature that they deal with, the wholesome human need of recreation to which they appeal—these are immortal and universal.’†

  But once again Conan Doyle’s most ambitious work to date, The White Company, was being taken as something fit for escapist reading by boys of any age. And by now he was also feeling the financial pinch of the new house and expanded household—the sort of pinch that only Sherlock Holmes could quickly relieve.