Sir Arthur Ignatius
Conan Doyle KStJ, DL (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and
physician. He created the character Sherlock
Holmes in 1887 for A Study in
Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes
and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes
stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction.
Doyle was a prolific writer; other than Holmes's stories, his
works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger, and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as
well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. One of
Doyle's early short stories, "J.
Habakuk Jephson's Statement" (1884), helped to popularize the mystery
of the Mary Celeste.
Name
Doyle is often referred to as "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" or "Conan Doyle", implying that "Conan" is part of a compound surname rather than a
middle name. His baptism entry in the register of St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, gives "Arthur Ignatius Conan" as his given name and "Doyle" as his surname. It
also names Michael Conan as his
godfather. The catalogs of the British
Library and the Library of Congress treat
"Doyle" alone as his
surname.
Steven Doyle,
publisher of The Baker Street Journal,
wrote: "Conan was Arthur's middle
name. Shortly after he graduated from high school he began using Conan as a
sort of surname. But technically his last name is simply 'Doyle'." When
knighted, he was gazetted as Doyle, not under the compound Conan Doyle.
Early life
Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 at 11 Picardy Place,
Edinburgh, Scotland. His father, Charles
Altamont Doyle, was born in England, of Irish Catholic descent, and his
mother, Mary (née Foley), was Irish Catholic. His parents
married in 1855. In 1864 the family scattered because of Charles's growing
alcoholism, and the children were temporarily housed across Edinburgh. Arthur
lodged with Mary Burton, the aunt of
a friend, at Liberton Bank House on
Gilmerton Road, while studying at Newington
Academy.
In 1867, the family reunited and lived in squalid
tenement flats at 3 Sciennes Place.
Doyle's father died in 1893, in the Crichton
Royal, Dumfries, after many years of psychiatric illness. Beginning at an
early age, throughout his life Doyle wrote letters to his mother, and many of
them were preserved.
Supported by wealthy uncles, Doyle was sent to England, to
the Jesuit preparatory school Hodder
Place, Stonyhurst in Lancashire, at the age of nine (1868–70). He then went
on to Stonyhurst College, which he
attended until 1875. While Doyle was not unhappy at Stonyhurst, he said he did
not have any fond memories of it because the school was run on medieval
principles: the only subjects covered were rudiments, rhetoric, Euclidean
geometry, algebra, and the classics. Doyle later commented that
this academic system could only be excused "on
the plea that any exercise, however stupid in itself, forms a sort of mental
dumbbell by which one can improve one's mind". He also found the
school harsh, noting that, instead of compassion and warmth, it favored the
threat of corporal punishment and ritual humiliation.
From 1875 to 1876, he was educated at the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria.
His family decided that he would spend a year there to perfect his
German and broaden his academic horizons. He later rejected the Catholic faith
and became an agnostic. One source attributed his drift away from religion to
the time he spent in the less strict Austrian school. He also later became a
spiritualist mystic.
Medical career
From 1876 to 1881, Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School;
during this period he spent time working in Aston (then a town in Warwickshire,
now part of Birmingham), Sheffield, and Ruyton-XI-Towns, Shropshire. Also during
this period, he studied practical botany at the Royal Botanic Garden in
Edinburgh. While studying, Doyle began writing short stories. His earliest
extant fiction, "The Haunted Grange
of Goresthorpe", was unsuccessfully submitted to Blackwood's Magazine. His first published piece, "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley",
a story set in South Africa, was printed in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal on 6 September 1879. On 20 September
1879, he published his first academic article, "Gelsemium as a Poison" in the British Medical Journal, a study which The Daily Telegraph regarded as potentially useful in a 21st-century
murder investigation.
Doyle was the doctor on the Greenland whaler Hope of Peterhead in 1880. On 11 July
1880, John Gray's Hope and David Gray's Eclipse met up with Eira and Leigh Smith. The photographer W.
J. A. Grant took a photograph aboard the Eira of Doyle along with Smith,
the Gray brothers, and ship's surgeon William
Neale, who were members of the Smith expedition. That expedition explored Franz Josef Land, and led to the
naming, on 18 August, of Cape Flora, Bell Island, Nightingale Sound, Gratton ("Uncle Joe") Island, and
Mabel Island.
After graduating with Bachelor
of Medicine and Master of Surgery
(M.B. C.M.) degrees from the University
of Edinburgh in 1881, he was a ship's surgeon on the SS Mayumba during a voyage to the West African coast. He completed
his Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) degree
(an advanced degree beyond the basic medical qualification in the UK) with a
dissertation on tabes dorsalis in 1885.
In 1882, Doyle partnered with his former classmate George Turnavine Budd in a medical
practice in Plymouth, but their relationship proved difficult, and Doyle soon left
to set up an independent practice. Arriving in Portsmouth in June 1882, with
less than £10 (£1100 in 2019) to his name, he set up a medical practice at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea.
The practice was not successful. While waiting for patients, Doyle returned to
writing fiction.
Doyle was a staunch supporter of compulsory vaccination and
wrote several articles advocating the practice and denouncing the views of
anti-vaccinators.
In early 1891, Doyle embarked on the study of ophthalmology
in Vienna. He had previously studied at the Portsmouth Eye Hospital to
qualify to perform eye tests and prescribe glasses. Vienna had been suggested
by his friend Vernon Morris as a
place to spend six months and train to be an eye surgeon. But Doyle found it
too difficult to understand the German medical terms being used in his classes
in Vienna and soon quit his studies there. For the rest of his two-month stay
in Vienna, he pursued other activities, such as ice skating with his wife
Louisa and drinking with Brinsley Richards of the London Times. He also wrote The
Doings of Raffles Haw.
After visiting Venice and Milan, he spent a few days in
Paris observing Edmund Landolt, an
expert on diseases of the eye. Within three months of his departure for Vienna,
Doyle returned to London. He opened a small office and consulting room at 2 Upper Wimpole Street, or 2 Devonshire Place as it was then.
(There is today a Westminster City Council commemorative plaque over the front
door.) He had no patients, according to his autobiography, and his efforts as
an ophthalmologist were a failure.
Literary career
Sherlock Holmes
Doyle struggled to find a publisher. His first work
featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, A Study in Scarlet, was
written in three weeks when he was 27 and was accepted for publication by Ward Lock & Co on 20 November 1886,
which gave Doyle £25 (equivalent to £2,900 in 2019) in exchange for all rights
to the story. The piece appeared a year later in the Beeton's Christmas Annual and received good reviews in The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald.
Holmes was partially modeled on Doyle's former university
teacher Joseph Bell. In 1892, in a
letter to Bell, Doyle wrote, "It is
most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes ... round the center of
deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have
tried to build up a man", and in his 1924 autobiography, he remarked, "It is no wonder that after the study
of such a character [viz., Bell] I used and amplified his methods when in later
life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own
merits and not through the folly of the criminal." Robert Louis Stevenson was able to recognize
the strong similarity between Joseph Bell and Sherlock Holmes: "My compliments on your very ingenious
and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes. ... Can this be my old
friend Joe Bell?" Other authors sometimes suggest additional
influences—for instance, Edgar Allan
Poe's character C. Auguste Dupin,
who is mentioned, disparagingly, by Holmes in A Study in Scarlet. Dr. (John) Watson owes his surname, but
not any other obvious characteristic, to a Portsmouth medical colleague of
Doyle's, Dr. James Watson.
A sequel to A Study
in Scarlet was commissioned, and The
Sign of the Four appeared in Lippincott's
Magazine in February 1890, under agreement with the Ward Lock Company. Doyle felt grievously exploited by Ward Lock as an author new to the
publishing world, and so, after this, he left them. Short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes were published in the Strand Magazine. Doyle wrote the first
five Holmes short stories from his office at 2 Upper Wimpole Street (then known as Devonshire Place), which is now marked by a memorial plaque.
Doyle's attitude towards his most famous creation was
ambivalent. In November 1891, he wrote to his mother: "I think of slaying Holmes, ... and winding him up for good and
all. He takes my mind from better things." His mother responded, "You won't! You can't! You
mustn't!" In an attempt to deflect publishers' demands for more Holmes
stories, he raised his price to a level intended to discourage them but found
they were willing to pay even the large sums he asked. As a result, he became
one of the best-paid authors of his time.
In December 1893, to dedicate more of his time to his
historical novels, Doyle had Holmes and Professor
Moriarty plunge to their deaths together down the Reichenbach Falls in the
story "The Final Problem".
Public outcry, however, led him to feature Holmes in 1901 in the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. Holmes's
fictional connection with the Reichenbach Falls is celebrated in the nearby
town of Meiringen.
In 1903, Doyle published his first Holmes short story in ten
years, "The Adventure of the Empty
House", in which it was explained that only Moriarty had fallen, but
since Holmes had other dangerous enemies—especially Colonel Sebastian Moran—he had arranged to make it look as if he
too were dead. Holmes was ultimately featured in a total of 56 short
stories—the last published in 1927—and four novels by Doyle and has since
appeared in many novels and stories by other authors.
Other works
Doyle's first novels were The Mystery of Cloomber, not published until 1888, and The Unfinished Narrative of John Smith,
published only posthumously, in 2011. He amassed a portfolio of short stories,
including "The Captain of the
Pole-Star" and "J. Habakuk
Jephson's Statement", both inspired by Doyle's time at sea. The latter
popularized the mystery of the Mary
Celeste and added fictional details such as that the ship was found in
perfect condition (it had actually taken on the water by the time it was
discovered), and that its boats remained on board (the single boat was in fact
missing). These fictional details have come to dominate popular accounts of the
incident, and Doyle's alternative spelling of the ship's name as the Marie Celeste has become more commonly
used than the original spelling.
Between 1888 and 1906, Doyle wrote seven historical novels,
which he and many critics regarded as his best work. He also wrote nine other
novels, and—later in his career (1912–29)—five narratives (two of novel length)
featuring the irascible scientist Professor
Challenger. The Challenger
stories include his best-known work after the Holmes oeuvre, The Lost World. His historical novels
include The White Company and its
prequel Sir Nigel, set in the Middle
Ages. He was a prolific author of short stories, including two collections set
in Napoleonic times and featuring the French character Brigadier Gerard.
Doyle's works for the stage include Waterloo, which centers
on the reminiscences of an English veteran of the Napoleonic Wars and features a character Gregory Brewster, written for Henry
Irving; The House of Temperley,
the plot of which reflects his abiding interest in boxing; The Speckled Band, adapted from his earlier short story "The Adventure of the Speckled
Band"; and an 1893 collaboration with J. M. Barrie on the libretto of Jane Annie.
Sporting career
While living in Southsea, the seaside resort near
Portsmouth, Doyle played football as a goalkeeper for Portsmouth Association Football Club, an amateur side, under the
pseudonym A. C. Smith.
Doyle was a keen cricketer, and between 1899 and 1907 he
played 10 first-class matches for the Marylebone
Cricket Club (MCC). He also played for the amateur cricket teams the Allahakbarries and the Authors XI alongside fellow writers J. M. Barrie, P. G. Wodehouse, and A. A. Milne. His highest score, in 1902
against London County, was 43. He was an occasional bowler who took one
first-class wicket, W. G. Grace and
wrote a poem about the achievement.
In 1900, Doyle founded the Undershaw Rifle Club at his home, constructing a 100-yard range and
providing shooting for local men, as the poor showing of British troops in the Boer War had led him to believe that
the general population needed training in marksmanship. He was a champion of "miniature" rifle clubs, whose
members shot small-caliber firearms on local ranges. These ranges were much
cheaper and more accessible to working-class participants than large "full-bore" ranges, such as Bisley Camp, which were necessarily
remote from population centers. Doyle went on to sit on the Rifle Clubs Committee of the National Rifle Association.
In 1901, Doyle was one of three judges for the world's first
major bodybuilding competition, which was organized by the "Father of Bodybuilding", Eugen Sandow. The event was held in London's Royal Albert Hall. The other two judges were the sculptor Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge and Eugen
Sandow himself.
Doyle was an amateur boxer. In 1909, he was invited to
referee the James Jeffries–Jack Johnson
heavyweight championship fight in Reno, Nevada. Doyle wrote: "I was much inclined to accept ...
though my friends pictured me as winding up with a revolver at one ear and a
razor at the other. However, the distance and my engagements presented a final
bar."
Also a keen golfer, Doyle was elected captain of the Crowborough Beacon Golf Club in Sussex
in 1910. He had moved to Little
Windlesham house in Crowborough with Jean
Leckie, his second wife, and resided there with his family from 1907 until
his death in July 1930.
He entered the English Amateur billiards championship in
1913.
While living in Switzerland, Doyle became interested in
skiing, which was relatively unknown in Switzerland at the time? He wrote an
article, "An Alpine Pass on
'Ski'" for the December 1894 issue of The Strand Magazine, in which he described his experiences with skiing
and the beautiful alpine scenery that could be seen in the process. The article
popularized the activity and began the long association between Switzerland and
skiing.
Family life
In 1885 Doyle married Louisa
(sometimes called "Touie") Hawkins (1857–1906).
She was the youngest daughter of J.
Hawkins, of Minsterworth, Gloucestershire, and the sister of one of Doyle's
patients. Louisa had tuberculosis. In 1907, the year after Louisa's death, he
married Jean Elizabeth Leckie
(1874–1940). He had met and fallen in love with Jean in 1897 but had
maintained a platonic relationship with her while his first wife was still alive,
out of loyalty to her. Jean outlived him by ten years and died in London.
Doyle fathered five children. He had two with his first
wife: Mary Louise (1889–1976) and Arthur Alleyne Kingsley, known as Kingsley (1892–1918). He had an
additional three with his second wife: Denis
Percy Stewart (1909–1955), who became the second husband of Georgian Princess Nina Mdivani; Adrian Malcolm (1910–1970); and Jean Lena Annette (1912–1997). None of
Doyle's five children had children of their own, so he has no living direct
descendants.
Political campaigning
Doyle served as a volunteer physician in the Langman Field Hospital at Bloemfontein between
March and June 1900, during the Second
Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902). Later that year, he wrote a book on
the war, The Great Boer War, as well
as a short work titled The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, in
which he responded to critics of the United Kingdom's role in that war, and
argued that its role was justified. The latter work was widely translated, and
Doyle believed it was the reason he was knighted (given the rank of Knight
Bachelor) by King Edward VII in the 1902 Coronation Honors. He received the
accolade from the King in person at Buckingham Palace on 24 October of that
year.
He stood for Parliament twice as a Liberal Unionist: in 1900 in Edinburgh
Central, and in 1906 in the Hawick
Burghs, but was not elected. He served as a deputy lieutenant of Surrey beginning in 1902 and was appointed a Knight of Grace of the Order of the
Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem in 1903.
Doyle was a supporter of the campaign for the reform of the Congo Free State that was led by the
journalist E. D. Morel and diplomat Roger Casement. In 1909 he wrote The Crime of the Congo, a long pamphlet
in which he denounced the horrors of that colony. He became acquainted with Morel and Casement, and it is possible
that, together with Bertram Fletcher
Robinson, they inspired several characters that appear in his 1912 novel The Lost World. Later, after the Irish Easter Rising, Casement was found
guilty of treason against the Crown and was sentenced to death. Doyle tried,
unsuccessfully, to save him, arguing that Casement had been driven mad, and
therefore should not be held responsible for his actions.
As the First World
War loomed, and having been caught up in a growing public swell of
Germanophobia, Doyle gave a public donation of 10 shillings to the
anti-immigration British Brothers'
League. In 1914, Doyle was one of fifty-three leading British
authors—including H. G. Wells, Rudyard
Kipling, and Thomas Hardy—who
signed their names to the "Authors'
Declaration", justifying Britain's involvement in the First World War. This manifesto
declared that the German invasion of Belgium had been a brutal crime and that
Britain "could not without dishonor
have refused to take part in the present war".
Legal advocate
Doyle was also a fervent advocate of justice and personally
investigated two closed cases, which led to two men being exonerated of the
crimes of which they were accused. The first case, in 1906, involved a shy
half-British, half-Indian lawyer named George
Edalji, who had allegedly penned threatening letters and mutilated animals
in Great Wyrley. Police were set on
Edalji's conviction, even though the mutilations continued after their suspect
was jailed. Apart from helping George
Edalji, Doyle's work helped establish a way to correct other miscarriages
of justice, as it was partially as a result of this case that the Court of Criminal Appeal was
established in 1907.
The story of Doyle and Edalji was dramatized in an episode
of the 1972 BBC television series, The
Edwardians. In Nicholas Meyer's pastiche The West End Horror (1976), Holmes manages to help clear the name
of a shy Parsi Indian character
wronged by the English justice system. Edalji was of Parsi heritage on his
father's side. The story was fictionalized in Julian Barnes's 2005 novel Arthur and George, which was adapted
into a three-part drama by ITV in 2015.
The second case, that of Oscar Slater—a Jew of German origin who operated a gambling den
and was convicted of bludgeoning an 82-year-old woman in Glasgow in
1908—excited Doyle's curiosity because of inconsistencies in the prosecution's
case and a general sense that Slater was not guilty. He ended up paying most of
the costs for Slater's successful 1928 appeal.
Freemasonry and
spiritualism
Doyle had a longstanding interest in mystical subjects and
remained fascinated by the idea of paranormal phenomena, even though the
strength of his belief in their reality waxed and waned periodically over the
years.
In 1887, in Southsea, influenced by Major-General Alfred Wilks Drayson, a member of the Portsmouth Literary and Philosophical
Society, Doyle began a series of investigations into the possibility of
psychic phenomena and attended about 20 séances, experiments in telepathy, and
sittings with mediums. Writing to the spiritualist journal Light that year, he
declared himself to be a spiritualist, describing one particular event that had
convinced him psychic phenomena were real. Also in 1887 (on 26 January), he was
initiated as a Freemason at the Phoenix Lodge No. 257 in Southsea. (He resigned
from the Lodge in 1889, returned to it in 1902, and resigned again in 1911.)
In 1889, he became a founding member of the Hampshire Society for Psychical Research;
in 1893, he joined the London-based Society
for Psychical Research; and in 1894, he collaborated with Sir Sidney Scott and Frank Podmore in a
search for poltergeists in Devon.
Doyle and the spiritualist William Thomas Stead (who would die on the Titanic) were led to
believe that Julius and Agnes Zancig had genuine psychic
powers, and they claimed publicly that the Zancigs used telepathy. However, in
1924, the Zancigs confessed that their mind-reading act had been a trick; they
published the secret code and all other details of the trick method they had
used under the title "Our
Secrets!!" in a London newspaper. Doyle also praised the psychic
phenomena and spirit materializations that he believed had been produced by Eusapia Palladino and Mina Crandon, both of whom were also
later exposed as frauds.
In 1916, at the height of the First World War, Doyle's belief in psychic phenomena was
strengthened by what he took to be the psychic abilities of his children's
nanny, Lily Loder Symonds. This and
the constant drumbeat of wartime deaths inspired him with the idea that spiritualism
was what he called a "New
Revelation" sent by God to bring solace to the bereaved. He wrote a
piece in Light magazine about his
faith and began lecturing frequently on spiritualism. In 1918, he published his
first spiritualist work, The New Revelation.
Some have mistakenly assumed that Doyle's turn to
spiritualism was prompted by the death of his son Kingsley, but Doyle began
presenting himself publicly as a spiritualist in 1916, and Kingsley died on 28
October 1918 (from pneumonia contracted during his convalescence after being
seriously wounded in the 1916 Battle of
the Somme). Nevertheless, the war-related deaths of many people who were
close to him appear to have even further strengthened his long-held belief in
life after death and spirit communication. Doyle's brother Brigadier-general
Innes Doyle died, also from pneumonia, in February 1919. His two
brothers-in-law (one of whom was E. W.
Hornung, creator of the literary character Raffles), as well as his two
nephews, also died shortly after the war. His second book on spiritualism, The Vital Message, appeared in 1919.
Doyle found solace in supporting spiritualism's ideas and
the attempts of spiritualists to find proof of an existence beyond the grave.
In particular, according to some, he favored Christian Spiritualism and encouraged the Spiritualists' National Union to accept an eighth precept – that of
following the teachings and example of Jesus
of Nazareth. He was a member of the renowned supernaturalist organization The Ghost Club.
In 1919, the magician P.
T. Selbit staged a séance at his flat in Bloomsbury, which Doyle attended.
Although some later claimed that Doyle had endorsed the apparent instances of
clairvoyance at that séance as genuine, a contemporaneous report by the Sunday Express quoted Doyle as saying "I should have to see it again before
passing a definite opinion on it" and "I have my doubts about the whole thing". In 1920, Doyle
and the noted skeptic Joseph McCabe
held a public debate at Queen's Hall in London, with Doyle taking the position
that the claims of spiritualism were true. After the debate, McCabe published a
booklet Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud?, in which he laid out evidence refuting
Doyle's arguments and claimed that Doyle had been duped into believing in
spiritualism through deliberate mediumship trickery.
Doyle also debated the psychiatrist Harold Dearden, who vehemently disagreed with Doyle's belief that
many cases of diagnosed mental illness were the result of spirit possession.
In 1920, Doyle traveled to Australia and New Zealand on
spiritualist missionary work, and over the next several years, until his death,
he continued his mission, giving talks about his spiritualist conviction in
Britain, Europe, and the United States.
Doyle wrote a novel The
Land of Mist centered on spiritualist themes and featuring the character Professor Challenger. He also wrote many
non-fiction spiritualist works. Perhaps his most famous of these was The Coming of the Fairies (1922), in
which Doyle described his beliefs about the nature and existence of fairies and
spirits, reproduced the five Cottingley
Fairies photographs, asserted that those who suspected them being faked
were wrong, and expressed his conviction that they were authentic. Decades
later, the photos—taken by cousins Frances
Griffiths and Elsie Wright—were
definitively shown to have been faked, and their creators admitted to the
fakery, although both maintained that they really had seen fairies.
Doyle was friends for a time with the American magician Harry Houdini. Even though Houdini
explained that his feats were based on illusion and trickery, Doyle was
convinced that Houdini had supernatural powers and said as much in his work The Edge of the Unknown. Houdini's
friend Bernard M. L. Ernst recounted
a time when Houdini had performed an impressive trick at his home in Doyle's
presence. Houdini had assured Doyle that the trick was pure illusion and had
expressed the hope that this demonstration would persuade Doyle not to go
around "endorsing phenomena"
simply because he could think of no explanation for what he had seen other than
supernatural power. However, according to Ernst, Doyle simply refused to believe
that it had been a trick. Houdini became a prominent opponent of the
spiritualist movement in the 1920s, after the death of his beloved mother. He
insisted that spiritualist mediums employed trickery, and consistently exposed
them as frauds. These differences between Houdini and Doyle eventually led to a
bitter, public falling-out between them.
In 1922, the psychical researcher Harry Price accused the "spirit
photographer" William Hope
of fraud. Doyle defended Hope, but further evidence of trickery was obtained
from other researchers. Doyle threatened to have Price evicted from the National Laboratory of Psychical Research
and predicted that, if he persisted in writing what he called "sewage" about spiritualists,
he would meet the same fate as Harry Houdini. Price wrote: "Arthur Conan Doyle and his friends abused me for years for
exposing Hope." In response to the exposure of frauds that had been
perpetrated by Hope and other spiritualists, Doyle led 84 members of the Society for Psychical Research to
resign in protest from the society on the ground that they believed it was
opposed to spiritualism.
Doyle's two-volume book The
History of Spiritualism was published in 1926. W. Leslie Curnow a spiritualist contributed much research to the
book. Later that year, Robert John
Tillyard wrote a predominantly supportive review of it in the journal Nature. This review provoked
controversy: Several other critics, notably A. A. Campbell Swinton, pointed out the evidence of fraud in
mediumship, as well as Doyle's non-scientific approach to the subject. In 1927,
Doyle gave a filmed interview, in which he spoke about Sherlock Holmes and spiritualism.
Doyle and the
Piltdown hoax
Richard Milner,
an American historian of science, argued that Doyle may have been the
perpetrator of the Piltdown Man hoax
of 1912, creating the counterfeit hominid fossil that fooled the scientific
world for over 40 years. Milner noted that Doyle had a plausible motive—namely,
revenge on the scientific establishment for debunking one of his favorite
psychics—and said that The Lost World
appeared to contain several clues referring cryptically to his having been
involved in the hoax. Samuel Rosenberg's
1974 book Naked Is the Best Disguise
purports to explain how, throughout his writings, Doyle had provided overt
clues to otherwise hidden or suppressed aspects of his way of thinking that
seemed to support the idea that Doyle would be involved in such a hoax.
However, more recent research suggests that Doyle was not
involved. In 2016, researchers at the Natural
History Museum and Liverpool John Moores University analyzed DNA evidence
showing that responsibility for the hoax lay with the amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson, who had originally "found" the remains. He had
initially not been considered the likely perpetrator, because the hoax was seen
as being too elaborate for him to have devised. However, the DNA evidence
showed that a supposedly ancient tooth he had "discovered" in 1915 (at a different site) came from the
same jaw as that of the Piltdown Man,
suggesting that he had planted them both. That tooth, too, was later proven to
have been planted as part of a hoax.
Chris Stringer,
an anthropologist from the Natural
History Museum, was quoted as saying: "Conan
Doyle was known to play golf at the Piltdown site and had even given Dawson a
lift in his car to the area, but he was a public man and very busy, and it is
improbable that he would have had the time [to create the hoax]. So there
are some coincidences, but I think they are just coincidences. When you look at
the fossil evidence, you can only associate Dawson with all the finds, and
Dawson was known to be personally ambitious. He wanted professional
recognition. He wanted to be a member of the Royal Society and he was after an
MBE. He wanted people to stop seeing him as an amateur".
Architecture
Another of Doyle's longstanding interests was architectural
design. In 1895, when he commissioned an architect friend of his, Joseph Henry Ball, to build him a home,
he played an active part in the design process. The home in which he lived from
October 1897 to September 1907, known as Undershaw
(near Hindhead, in Surrey), was used as a hotel and restaurant from 1924 until
2004 when it was bought by a developer and then stood empty while
conservationists and Doyle fans fought to preserve it. In 2012, the High Court in London ruled in favor of
those seeking to preserve the historic building, ordering that the
redevelopment permission be quashed on the ground that it had not been obtained
through proper procedures. The building was later approved to become part of Stepping Stones, a school for children
with disabilities and special needs.
Doyle made his most ambitious foray into architecture in
March 1912, while he was staying at the Lyndhurst
Grand Hotel: He sketched the original designs for a third-story extension
and for an alteration of the front facade of the building. Work began later
that year, and when it was finished, the building was a nearly exact
manifestation of the plans Doyle had sketched. Superficial alterations have been
subsequently made, but the essential structure is still clearly Doyle's.
In 1914, on a family trip to the Jasper National Park in
Canada, he designed a golf course and ancillary buildings for a hotel. The
plans were realized in full, but neither the golf course nor the buildings have
survived.
In 1926, Doyle laid the foundation stone for a Spiritualist Temple in Camden, London.
Of the building's total £600 construction costs, he provided £500.
Crimes Club
The Crimes Club
was a private social club founded by Doyle in 1903, whose purpose was
discussion of crime and detection, criminals and criminology, and continues to
this day as "Our Society",
with membership numbers limited to 100. The club meets four times a year at the
Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, London,
where all proceedings are strictly confidential ("Chatham House rules"). Its logo is a silhouette of
Doyle. The club's earliest members included John Churton Collins, Japanologist Arthur Diósy, Sir Edward Marshall
Hall, Sir Travers Humphreys, H. B. Irving, author (Thou Shalt Do No Murder) Arthur
Lambton, William Le Queux, A. E. W. Mason, coroner Ingleby Oddie, Sir Max Pemberton, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, George R.
Sims, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Sir P. G. Wodehouse, and Filson Young.
Death
Doyle was found clutching his chest in the hall of Windlesham Manor, his house in Crowborough, Sussex, on 7 July 1930. He
died of a heart attack at the age of 71. His last words were directed toward
his wife: "You are wonderful."
At the time of his death, there was some controversy concerning his burial
place, as he was avowedly not a Christian, considering himself a Spiritualist. He was first buried on 11
July 1930 in Windlesham rose garden. In his will, he bequeathed £250 per year
to Alfred Wood, who had served as his
private secretary since 1897.
He was later reinterred together with his wife in Minstead
churchyard in the New Forest, Hampshire. Carved wooden tablets to his memory
and to the memory of his wife, originally from the church at Minstead, are on
display as part of a Sherlock Holmes
exhibition at Portsmouth Museum. The
epitaph on his gravestone in the churchyard reads, in part: "Steel true/Blade straight/Arthur Conan
Doyle/Knight/Patriot, Physician and man of letters".
A statue honors Doyle at Crowborough Cross in Crowborough, where he lived for 23 years.
There is a statue of Sherlock Holmes
in Picardy Place, Edinburgh, close
to the house where Doyle was born.
Honors and awards
Knight Bachelor
(1902)
Knight of Grace of
the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem (1903)
Queen's South Africa
Medal (1901)
Knight of the Order
of the Crown of Italy (1895)
Order of the Medjidie
– 2nd Class (Ottoman Empire) (1907)
Commemoration
Doyle has been commemorated with statues and plaques since
his death. In 2009, he was among the ten people selected by the Royal Mail for their "Eminent Britons" commemorative
postage stamp issue.
Portrayals
Arthur Conan Doyle
has been portrayed by many actors, including:
Television series
Nigel Davenport
in the BBC Two series The Edwardians,
in the episode "Conan Doyle"
(1972)
Michael Ensign in
the Voyagers! Episode "Jack's Back" (1983)
Robin Laing and Charles Edwards in Murder Rooms: Mysteries of the Real Sherlock Holmes (2000–2001)
Geraint Wyn Davies
in Murdoch Mysteries, 3 episodes
(2008–2013)
Alfred Molina in
the Drunk History (American series)
episode "Detroit" (2013)
David Calder in
the miniseries Houdini (2014)
Martin Clunes in the miniseries Arthur & George (2015)
Bruce Mackinnon
and Bradley Walsh in Drunk History (British series), in
series 2, episodes 5 and 8 respectively (2016)
Stephen Mangan in
Houdini & Doyle (2016)
Michael Pitthan
in the German TV series Charité episode
"Götterdämmerung" (2017)
Bill Paterson in
the Urban Myths episode "Agatha Christie" (2018)
Television films
Peter Cushing in The Great Houdini (1976)
David Warner in Houdini (1998)
Richard Wilson in
Reichenbach Falls (2007)
Michael McElhatton
in Agatha and the Truth of Murder
(2018)
Theatrical films
Paul Bildt in The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes (1937)
Peter O'Toole in FairyTale: A True Story (1997)
Edward Hardwicke
in Photographing Fairies (1997)
Tom Fisher in Shanghai Knights (2003)
Ian Hart in Finding Neverland (2004)
Other media
Carleton Hobbs in
the BBC radio drama Conan Doyle
Investigates (1972)
Iain Cuthbertson
in the BBC radio drama Conan Doyle and
The Edalji Case (1987)
Peter Jeffrey in
the BBC radio drama Conan Doyle's
Strangest Case (1995)
Adrian Lukis in
the stage adaptation of the novel Arthur
& George (2010)
Chris Tallman in
Chapter 10 of The Dead Authors Podcast
(2012)
Steven Miller in
the Jago & Litefoot audio drama "The Monstrous Menagerie"
(2014)
Eamon Stocks in
the video game Assassin's Creed
Syndicate (2015)
Ryohei Kimura in
the mobile game Ikémen Vampire:
Temptation in the Dark (2019)
In fiction
Arthur Conan Doyle
is the ostensible narrator of Ian
Madden's short story "Cracks in
an Edifice of Sheer Reason".
Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle features as a recurring character in Pip Murphy's Christie and Agatha's Detective Agency series, including
A Discovery Disappears and Of Mountains and Motors.
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