Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Daniel Stashower

In fact I seldom emerge from my cell except for meals and sometimes in the evening when I petrify our small family circle by reading Poe’s Tales. I hope you will excuse the liberty I have taken in making use of the ‘university calendars’ from your room. The bursary examen is in them, and I have done last year’s for practise. I found it easy enough, my only fear is that others may find it easier still. It is indeed, as you say, a very great consolation to know that I will never more need mathematics. Classics I like, and I shall always try to keep up my knowledge of them, but mathematics of every sort I detest and abhor.

      So when the time came to create an arch villain for Sherlock Holmes, he made Professor James Moriarty a mathematician.

       ‘He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem, which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the Mathematical Chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearance, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind.’

      —‘The Final Problem’

      Conan Doyle might never have created Sherlock Holmes at all were it not for discovering Edgar Allan Poe at an impressionable age—forming a lasting appreciation of his contributions to the short-story form, and particularly the tale of detection that the American writer had invented. Thirty years later in Through the Magic Door, his book about literature and writers, he called Poe, ‘[T]he supreme original short story writer of all time’, from whom had come

      nearly all our modern types of story. Just think of what he did in his offhand, prodigal fashion, seldom troubling to repeat a success, but pushing on to some new achievement. To him must be ascribed the monstrous progeny of writers on the detection of crime… Each may find some little development of his own, but his main art must trace back to those admirable stories of Monsieur Dupin, so wonderful in their masterful force, their reticence, their quick dramatic point.

      In the first Sherlock Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet, Holmes scoffs at Poe’s detective Dupin, but that did not reflect its author’s view. Throughout his life he acknowledged his debt, insisting, ‘If every man who receives a cheque for a story which owes its springs to Poe were to pay tithe to a monument for the master, he would have a pyramid as big as that of Cheops.’

      Conan Doyle did win the bursary competition, but then was informed that it was open only to arts students—and that the money for the next one had already been given out. In the end he received a ‘solatium’ of only £7—his first experience of the College of Hard Knocks he saw in Edinburgh University. ‘It was a bitter disappointment,’ he wrote. ‘I had a legal case, but what can a penniless student do, and what sort of college career would he have if he began it by suing his University for money? I was advised to accept the situation, and there seemed no prospect of accepting anything else.’

      Nor did his subsequent medical study and practice make him more sentimental about Edinburgh University. The Romance of Medicine addressed what he felt was the short-sightedness of its professors and students alike in his day. ‘I was educated in a materialistic age,’ he told the rising generation of medical students in 1910.

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.

      Medicine was also going through great and stormy change. Anaesthesia was still relatively new; and Dr Joseph Lister of Edinburgh was revolutionizing surgery anew with a new antiseptic system not yet fully accepted by his peers, as Conan Doyle later recalled:

      [T]he wards of the infirmary were divided between the antiseptic people and the cold-water school, the latter regarding the whole germ theory as an enormous fad. One sardonic professor of the old school used to say, as he was operating, ‘Please shut that door, or the germs will be getting in.’ On the other hand, the Listerians seem to have been almost unnecessarily scrupulous in keeping the germs out. Every operation was conducted amid clouds of carbolic steam, which often made the details invisible to the spectator. We should have been very much surprised to learn that the Puffing Billy could be done away with, and yet that complete antisepsis could be maintained.

       It’s Lister’s antiseptic spray, you know, 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.

      —‘His First Operation’

      The debate could not be settled simply by judging the cleanliness-and-cold-water school silly or backward. Its adherents often achieved better patient survival rates in the face of infection than Listerians did, and one of Lister’s bitterest critics, an Edinburgh-educated surgeon named Lawson Tait, was revolutionizing abdominal surgery, which few others dared even attempt in the 1870s.

      He made it harder for himself, too, because of the family’s financial condition. ‘It was clearly very needful that I should help financially as quickly as possible, even if my help only took the humble form of providing for my own keep,’ he said in Memories and Adventures. ‘Therefore I endeavoured almost from the first to compress the classes for a year into half a year, and so to have some months in which to earn a little money as a medical assistant, who would dispense and do odd jobs for a doctor.’

      Before his second year began Conan Doyle, now eighteen years old, took several weeks’ holiday on the island of Arran (‘Scotland in miniature’) with his eleven-year-old sister Lottie and his Stonyhurst friend Jimmy Ryan, who was about to start medical school himself. His letters introduce their landlady, Miss Fullerton, first of several such women merging one day as Mrs Hudson, Sherlock Holmes’s landlady at Baker Street. They also give us another look at Charles Doyle, when Conan Doyle urges his father to join them, and subsequently reports his father’s sudden fluttery flight back to Edinburgh.

      to Mary Doyle EAST KNOWE, BRODICK, ARRAN, AUGUST 30, 1877

      We have fallen on our feet with a vengeance. When we arrived here at 6 last night, we found the Nicholl’s engaged, and every house in Brodick crammed. However after half an hour’s hunting we came upon a darling little cottage up among the hills, such a delicious place, kept by a certain buxom motherly dame called Mrs Fullerton. She fell in love with us directly, & especially Lottie, and gave us a glorious tea, and comfortable bed. She has let us a glorious parlour with a big bed, and a sofa for Lottie, awfully comfortable and splendidly furnished for fourteen shillings a week. She said she would charge us nothing for the little girl, but that we might give anything we thought fit. I think it would be nicest to present her with a shawl or something now or at the end of our stay, for the room is worth 30/ a week as Arran prices go, and she is desperately kind.

      So we have left 7 shillings, of which I have given 2/ to Mrs Fullerton to pay the carriage of the hamper, which I hope is on its way up to the house.

      It is a delightful place, I never saw anything so pretty, we are all enchanted. We go up Goatfell whenever the grub arrives.

      to Mary Doyle ARRAN, SEPTEMBER 6, 1877

      That Miss Fullerton is an awful brick; we have just been settling with her for our last week’s grub, and she would only take 6/ for a loaf of bread every day, potatoes