37. ‘Half-pay’ refers to the reduced salary of a military officer retired or not on active service. Dr Watson refers to himself as a ‘half-pay surgeon’ in The Sign of the Four, the second Holmes tale.
38. Conan Doyle had been a boy at Stonyhurst College, a medical student at Edinburgh, and harboured hopes of becoming a literary man in London. He had travelled to the Arctic, West Africa and parts of Europe. He had not been a soldier in America, of course, though he was interested in the US Civil War, and he had not been a diamond digger at the Cape. But his first published story, ‘The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,’ in Chambers’ Journal several years before, had been set in the diamond fields of South Africa.
39. A sentiment he long held, in these years of constant story submissions met usually by repeated rejection slips. ‘My poor “Study” has never even been read by anyone except [the editor James] Payn,’ he complained two years later to his mother, having failed so far to find a publisher for his first Sherlock Holmes tale A Study in Scarlet: ‘Verily literature is a difficult oyster to open.’
40. As presumably the original manuscript of The Narrative of John Smith had been in 1883 – never to be seen again!
41. Conan Doyle had assumed the care of his young brother Innes, who had come to live with him during the summer of 1882. While he was delighted to have Innes, the responsibility for raising and educating the young boy sometimes wore heavily upon Conan Doyle during these lean years. Most of these comments about the difficulty of getting started as a writer are autobiographical in nature, and echoed in his letters in Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters.
42. ‘Fifty little cylinders of manuscript did I send out during eight years, which described irregular orbits,’ declared Conan Doyle in 1893 in My First Book, ‘and usually came back like paper boomerangs to the place that they had started from.’
43. Conan Doyle refers to James Payn (1830–1898), once co-editor of Chambers’ Journal and now editor of The Cornhill, Britain’s leading literary magazine. Payn had published Conan Doyle’s first story in 1879, and his true breakthrough story (though without a byline), ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,’ in 1883. Conan Doyle remained devoted to Payn for the older writer’s life, even though, when Payn read A Study in Scarlet in manuscript, he had told Conan Doyle that he shouldn’t waste his time with ‘shilling shockers.’ (In 1893 Conan Doyle came to agree, killing off the by then immensely popular Sherlock Holmes in the story ‘The Final Problem.’)
44. ‘I determined that literature should be my staff, not my crutch, and that the profits of my literary labour, however convenient otherwise, should not, if I could help it, become necessary to my ordinary expenses.’
45. Alluding to the eighteenth-century London district known for writers at the low end of literary life. Samuel Johnson called the term ‘originally the name of a street … much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems, whence any mean production is called grubstreet.’ In 1891 it inspired a novel by Conan Doyle’s friend George Gissing entitled New Grub Street.
46. The Education Act of 1870 provided for compulsory universal education. In Conan Doyle’s 1893 story ‘The Naval Treaty,’ Sherlock Holmes enthused to Dr Watson about the schools the Act had created: ‘Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future.’
47. An obsolete term for uric acid.
48. The breakthrough work of French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) in treating anthrax (splenic fever), proving his originally controversial case for vaccination and immunology. His first use of a rabies vaccine on a human subject would follow in 1885, a year or two later. Conan Doyle was a medical student when germ theory was still being argued over by physicians, but in the March 1883 issue of the popular magazine Good Words he took a public position on these and other medical issues mentioned in his novel in an article called ‘Life and Death in the Blood.’
49. This quotation, which may have been taken from some published medical literature of the period, strongly echoes the thesis he was then writing for his M.D. degree from Edinburgh University, ‘An Essay upon the vasomotor changes in tabes dorsalis and on the influence which is exerted by the sympathetic nervous system in that disease.’ The handwritten thesis, dated April 1885, is part of the Edinburgh Research Archive today, and online at www.era.lob.ac.uk/handle/1842/418. Later, in his 1892 novel Beyond the City, Conan Doyle wrote: ‘Doctor Balthazar Walker was a very well-known name in the medical world. Did not his qualifications, his membership, and the record of his writings fill a long half-column in the “Medical Directory,” from his first little paper on the “Gouty Diathesis” in 1859 to his exhaustive treatise upon “Affections of the Vaso-Motor System” in 1884?’ Gouty diathesis describes John Smith’s affliction; the second topic is a generalized way of describing Conan Doyle’s own M.D. thesis.
50. Conan Doyle’s ‘Life and Death in the Blood’ presaged the 1966 science-fiction movie Fantastic Voyage in its examination of the human bloodstream and its microbial content: ‘Had a man the power of reducing himself to the size of less than one-thousandth part of an inch, and should he, while of this microscopic structure, convey himself through the coats of a living artery, how strange the sight that would meet his eye!’
51. At medical school in Edinburgh a few years before, Conan Doyle had witnessed the war over germ theory, with Dr Joseph Lister there in the forefront by applying antisepsis in surgery. Later Conan Doyle recorded it in a piece of medical fiction, ‘His First Operation,’ based on his student days: ‘It’s Lister’s antiseptic spray,’ one characters says, ‘and Archer’s one of the carbolic-acid men. Hayes is the leader of the cleanliness-and-cold-water school, and they all hate each other like poison.’ Conan Doyle sided with the ‘carbolic-acid men.’
52. Robert Koch’s work on tuberculosis would draw Conan Doyle to Berlin in 1890, where he filed a report on the findings for W.T. Stead’s Review of Reviews. In his autobiography, Conan Doyle would suggest that the trip had been an impulsive decision – ‘I could give no clear reason,’ he wrote – but the reference here suggests a long-standing interest in Koch’s work. In any case, the trip to Berlin would mark a significant turning point, as it introduced him to a Harley Street specialist named Malcolm Morris, who ‘assured me that I was wasting my life in the provinces and had too small a field for my activities.’ On his return to Southsea, he decided to sell his medical practice. ‘I came back a changed man,’ he recalled. ‘I had spread my wings and had felt something of the powers within me.’
53. The Tugela is a river in the Zulu country of South Africa.
54. Conan Doyle’s next comment, ‘cast your mind back to your dear old mother, who strove so long and worked so hard to find the means for your education,’ is autobiographical. While he opposed women’s suffrage most of his life, out of concern for the divisiveness within families he felt it might cause, the influence of certain women in his life was very strong. Foremost among them was his Irish-born mother, Mary Foley Doyle, who held the family together and ensured her children’s educations (seven surviving into adulthood) when Charles Doyle collapsed into alcoholism. Conan Doyle also idolized his older sister Annette, who until her early death from influenza in 1890 was sending home her wages as a governess in Lisbon for the family’s benefit, followed in this by his younger sisters Lottie and Connie.
55. Here Conan Doyle may have been thinking about something else, his on-again, off-again romance with a young lady named Elmore Weldon. This was a case in which his mother felt there was room for improvement, in Miss Weldon’s attitude toward her son and herself. In time Conan Doyle came to agree, and let the relationship end. In 1885 he married Louisa Hawkins, known as ‘Touie,’ the 27-year-old sister of an adolescent patient of his who had died.
56. Sikes was the villainous brute in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Conan Doyle had not thought this way about the matte
r when he was a medical student, according to his 1910 speech at St Mary’s Hospital, London, where his son Kingsley was a student. ‘The Romance of Medicine’ looked back at the less spiritual, more determinist views of medicine in the 1870s: ‘We looked upon mind and spirit as secretions from the brain in the same way as bile was a secretion of the liver. Brain centres explained everything, and if you could find and stimulate the centre of holiness you would produce a saint – but if your electrode slipped, and you got on to the centre of brutality, you would evolve a Bill Sikes. That was, roughly, the point of view of the more advanced spirits among us. I can clearly see now as I look back, that this frame of mind was largely a protest and a reaction against transcendental dogmas which had no likelihood either in reason or in science. Swinging away from dogma, we lost all grip upon spirituality, confusing two things which have little connection with each other – indeed, my experience is that the less the dogma the greater the spirituality. We talked about laws, and how all things were done by immutable law, and thought that was profound and final.’
57. Not, of course, the path China actually took, and in a few years Conan Doyle would also see growing rivalry with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, leading to the World War in which Conan Doyle would participate as a Home Guardsman, propagandist, war correspondent and historian. He lived long enough (dying in July 1930) to see the work of the victors in that war undone by the rise of Bolshevism and Fascism in Europe.
58. Farid ud-Din ‘Attar, author, among other works, of The Conference of the Birds, from which the line quoted comes, and one of the ‘Big Six’ ancient Persian poets in whom Conan Doyle took an interest, as we shall see further on.
59. Sir John Lubbock (1834–1913) was a British banker and amateur scientist (and champion of Darwin), well known for his observations of ants and other insects. He would go on in another two years to co-found the Great Books movement, and his 1887 book The Pleasures of Life, rhapsodizing about books and his personal library, may have been a model for Conan Doyle’s own such book Through the Magic Door.
60. Conan Doyle was not a Freemason at the time he composed this manuscript, though he became one in Southsea in 1887, if not long an active one. The thought expressed here, though, remained part of his literary vocabulary. ‘There is a wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among horsy men,’ Sherlock Holmes tells Dr Watson in the 1891 story ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’
61. Samuel Carter Hall (1800–1889) was a prominent art critic and journalist whose memoirs Retrospect of a Long Life had just been published in 1883. While Conan Doyle was no artist himself, in terms of painting and other visual arts, his father, uncles and grandfather John Doyle were all notable artists, and he was attuned to their world. Hall’s advocacy of art he approved of was influential, but he was also known for a sanctimonious character that got him frequently satirized, including supposedly by Dickens as the model for Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit. Not all saw him as virtuous as Conan Doyle did.
62. In the name ‘Dr Pontiphobus’ Conan Doyle may have been suggesting ‘aversion to Pontiffs,’ or Popes – i.e., the Roman Catholic Church, which he had renounced without having embraced Dr Pontiphobus’s Anglican Church instead.
63. James (not John) Anthony Froude, the English writer and biographer of Carlyle, whose falling away from the Oxford Movement and the Roman Catholic Church had been an inspiration for Conan Doyle’s own defection from the Church as a youth – causing discord with his relatives, if not his mother.
64. The German Romantic writer Johann Paul Richter (1763–1825), often called Jean Paul, was noted for his love of nature, and cited by Sherlock Holmes in his second tale, The Sign of the Four (1889), about the beauty of the dawn.
65. ‘Against stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain.’ Conan Doyle acquired his French from his mother, an avid reader of French periodicals, but studied German in school, including a year between Stonyhurst College and Edinburgh University at a Jesuit school in Feldkirch, Austria.
66. Perhaps Mark Twain, a favourite of Conan Doyle’s, but he was an enthusiastic reader of others as well, and after joining the Portsmouth Literary & Scientific Society thought about giving a talk there on ‘The American Humourists.’ (He made his debut there instead on ‘The Arctic Seas.’)
67. Apparently a reference to the Salvation Army, founded in London in 1865 by William Booth, a former Methodist minister.
68. A Roman Catholic order founded in France in the late twelfth century.
69. In the first chapter of A Study in Scarlet, written in 1885 and published in 1887, Dr Watson related his service as an Army surgeon in Afghanistan: ‘The campaign brought honours and promotion to many, but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster. I was removed from my brigade and attached to the Berkshires, with whom I served at the fatal battle of Maiwand. There I was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery. I should have fallen into the hands of the murderous Ghazis not it not been for the devotion and courage shown by Murray, my orderly, who threw me across a pack-horse, and succeeded in bringing me safely to the British lines.’ (Although sometimes in the Sherlock Holmes stories Watson’s wound seems to have been in his leg.) After being invalided home, Watson is introduced to Holmes, and agrees to share lodgings with him.
70. Usually spelled Afridi, a Pashtun tribe of Afghanistan, frequent foes of the British.
71. Or perhaps an expression of Social Darwinism, a concept in circulation since the 1870s, in the application of Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution to social phenomena.
72. A passage perhaps suggested by the crusted mud and creeping fog of the famous atmospheric opening of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House.
73. Devotees of Sherlock Holmes will be reminded of the 1903 story ‘The Adventure of the Empty House,’ by which Conan Doyle brought Holmes back from the dead, and once again into the pages of the Strand Magazine. Here Conan Doyle, a great admirer of Poe, may have had in mind Poe’s description of Roderick Usher’s decaying family mansion, in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ of ‘vacant eye-like windows,’ though Conan Doyle included a characteristic touch of medical knowledge.
74. A coloured lithograph done in oil colours on canvas to approximate an oil painting.
75. ‘the fancy’: Regency slang (circa 1800) for its prizefighting world. (‘nose-ender’: a straight blow to the nose.) In The Sign of the Four, an ex-pug recognizing Sherlock Holmes as a former amateur opponent says, ‘Ah, you’re one that has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.’ In 1896 Conan Doyle, avid amateur boxer himself, wrote an historical novel about that Regency life, Rodney Stone.
76. Some commentators on Conan Doyle’s life have taken remarks like these in his fiction as reflecting turmoil and even violence in his own family, given his father’s alcoholism, but there is no actual evidence of such incidents, and some testimony against it. Part of Conan Doyle’s earlier work for Dr Reginald Ratcliffe Hoare had been in the slums of Birmingham, where he had witnessed that dimension of life. He entirely approved of women having power in marriages, and in later years became president and spokesman of the Divorce Law Reform Union, to make divorces easier and less disadvantageous for women to obtain.
77. Australia’s gold-rush started at Ballarat, Victoria, in 1851. Conan Doyle was interested in it and the upheavals that resulted: the crime in his 1891 Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ has a Ballarat gold-rush background, and in The Sign of the Four Conan Doyle had already placed Dr Watson there in his earlier days: ‘It looks as though all the moles in England had been let loose in it. I have seen something of the sort on the side of a hill near Ballarat where the prospectors had been at work.’ Conan Doyle himself did not visit Australia until 1920, during a Spiritualist speaking tour there and in New Zealand.
78. Young Conan Doyle was convinced that, despite his profession and his conformity to its canons, his was a Bohemian disposition. Recounting his
first visit to London, staying with his uncles and aunts, he wrote in Memories and Adventures: ‘I fear that I was too Bohemian for them and they too conventional for me.’ He felt he was Bohemian by nature, living a Bohemian life in Southsea, and transferred this posture to Sherlock Holmes, who Dr Watson said ‘loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul.’
79. An idea Conan Doyle reworked considerably but recognizably later for Rodney Stone: ‘Well I remember his thin, upright figure and the way in which he jauntily twirled his little cane; for cold and hunger could not cast him down, though we knew that he had his share of both. Yet he was so proud and had such a grand manner of talking, that no one dared to offer him a cloak or a meal. I can see his face now, with a flush over each craggy cheek-bone when the butcher made him the present of some ribs of beef. He could not but take it, and yet whilst he was stalking off he threw a proud glance over his shoulder at the butcher, and he said, “Monsieur, I have a dog!” Yet it was Monsieur Rudin and not his dog who looked plumper for a week to come.’
80. Conan Doyle, an enthusiastic reader of American humourists, was perhaps ill advised to turn to Ralph Waldo Emerson, America’s foremost nineteenth-century philosopher and essayist, on the subject. Emerson (1803–1882) had a very earnest attitude toward life and its burdens, and his essay ‘The Comic,’ from his 1876 collection Letters and Social Aims, seems determined to convince readers that there is little reason in life to laugh.
81. William Rutherford, a physiologist who experimented with methods of measuring ‘the rapidity of nerve-force,’ was one of Conan Doyle’s most memorable professors at Edinburgh. Later, in Memories and Adventures, the author recalled ‘his Assyrian beard, his prodigious voice, his enormous chest and his singular manner’ in creating Professor Challenger in The Lost World. ‘He fascinated and awed us,’ Conan Doyle said. ‘He would sometimes start his lecture before he reached the classroom, so that we would hear a booming voice saying: “There are valves in the veins,” or some other information, when his desk was still empty. He was, I fear, a ruthless vivisector, and though I have always recognized that a minimum of painless vivisection is necessary, and far more justifiable than the eating of meat as food, I am glad that the law was made more stringent so as to restrain such men as he.’
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