Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Daniel Stashower

am getting into disgrace all round about them. What a curious thing that none of those hospitals have answered my application. The more I think of it the more convinced I am that that is the thing for me. It is the only way of aiming high. If I could get an appointment in London I should go in for my FRCS Eng.* I need another year matric—to be 25 years old—and a few more classes, but it wd be very well worth it. You seem to be having high jinks at home—I wish I was with you.

      [P.S.] Do write soon. I’m not in love again yet—at least not to any great extent.

      to Mary Doyle BIRMINGHAM, MARCH 1882

      How is it that you never make any allusion to the Doctor in your letters now? Pray give him my love if he is about. We have had the deuce and all to pay here. First the Missus went and had a miscarriage (tho’ that is a secret) and then she developed Rheumatism and has been in bed ever since. Miss Joey got a sore throat with some scarlatinal symptoms, and finally the poor old Boss was taken with a very painful, and at one time serious attack of intestinal inflammation and colic. He has been down with it four days now, but is coming round nicely. The result of all this was that I was drafted from Gravelly Hill to Aston with the double duty of being on the spot to see dangerous cases, and of doctoring the invalids. The doctor lies in the red room where you used to be and the others next door, so I have Ward 1 & Ward 2 chalked up on the doors. It shows the confidence they have in my professional opinion that tho’ they might have had any man in Birmingham gratis, they were contented with me.

You’ll get the 200 right enough. If I can cooperate or assist by word or pen let me know and you will find me a fearless champion. I believe if you had sent in a claim for half we should have got it. The only real opposition would come from Mrs James.* I am so glad you liked ‘Bones’. My own opinion of it was that it was weak at the beginning but grew very strong indeed as the plot culminated. It was written to order, which makes it the more creditable, as it is hard to pump up originality about a given theme. ‘Write a story bearing on fools & All fools day’ were my directions. I also got an order to write one about ‘a Derby Sweepstakes’ for May. I finished it yesterday and am beginning to copy it for the press. It is quite a different style to any I have written yet—more playful and Rhoda Broughtonesque; the ladies here think it is good. ;

      Have you seen my article in this week’s ‘Lancet’ on leucocythemia. They have put that infernal Cowan again. What can I do? I am very careful in forming my ‘n’ always, but they won’t see it. I saw in acknowledging the contribution that they put Cowan, so I wrote up at once sending a card with the ‘n’ underlined—however all to no purpose as you see. It reads very learnedly, don’t it? By the way I will test your power of correcting proofs. Did you observe that in one part of Bones I described the young lady’s eyes as being violet & in another as hazel—at least I think I did.

I am going in for the Charles Murchison Scholarship in Clinical Medicine—exam in London April 22^nd, value 20 guineas. Open to all London & Edinburgh graduates, students & FRCSs. A goodly competition but I shall read hard & stand as good a chance as my neighbours. If I fail it is only the fare lost—if I get it the look of it in the Directory would be worth more than the money. I am also going to send in for the Millar Prize (£50) for an essay on some surgical subject open to Licentiates & Fellows of the college of P & S Glasgow.* I don’t think there can be many good men among the L & F so I shall write a rattling essay on ‘Listerism—a success or a failure’, and send it in in Hoare’s name. If it is good I shall use it for my MD thesis also. Not a bad idea is it? It has to be in by the end of the year.

      My present funds are 6/. I have not drawn a penny from Reg yet. I want very much to let it accumulate and have something substantial at the end, when once you break into a sum it soon flies away. If you can possibly do without my assistance therefore, do so, if however it is absolutely necessary write by return, and I shall ask the boss. I think it behooves me whenever I see a chance now to try and store away a little nucleus in the bank—my bank of course shall be yours too, but a pound laid by now & ready to hand when I want it, may breed ten in a few years. There is no mistake I must get a house surgeonship, and if possible in a large town. I am beginning to see that I have certain advantages which if properly directed & given a fair chance might lead to great success, but which it would be a thousand pities to nullify aboard ship or in a country practice. Let me once get my footing in a good hospital and my game is clear—observe cases minutely, improve in my profession, write to the Lancet, supplement my income by literature, make friends and conciliate everyone I meet, wait ten years if need be, and then when my chance comes be prompt and decisive in stepping into an honorary surgeonship. We’ll aim high, old lady, and consider the success of a lifetime, rather than the difference of a fifty pound note in an annual screw.

      Ever your loving

      Arthur ‘Cowan’

      His question about Dr Waller glosses over the discord that broke out about this time. Biographers have speculated about tensions between the young man and the senior, but not so much older, man, some of them believing that Conan Doyle, now reaching his majority, must surely have felt that Dr Waller was usurping his father’s position, and his own. So it may have been, for in April he wrote to Lottie that he had ‘put the finishing touch upon Waller. I nearly frightened his immortal soul out of him; he utterly refused to fight. I made such a mess of him that he did not leave the house for 23 days. I fancy it will make him a better fellow. We have had a sort of nominal reconciliation since then but I don’t think we love each other very much yet.’

      It is hard to know exactly what to make of these comments. If there had been actual physical violence—even without the sort of incapacitation that the young Conan Doyle seems to be boasting of—it seems unlikely that his mother would have left Edinburgh two years later to rent a cottage on a Yorkshire estate that Waller had inherited, raising her youngest daughters Ida and Dodo there; or that Conan Doyle, when he married in 1885, would have had his wedding at Masongill Cottage with Dr Waller as his best man.

      For now he bragged, ‘Waller has cleared out of Edinburgh and I don’t think we shall look upon the light of his countenance any more.’ But his own future was still uncertain. He admitted to Lottie that he had ‘been “begging to offer myself” for every vacancy’ (one of them as far away as Buenos Aires) ‘while the vacancies have been “begging to refuse me” with a perseverance worthy of a better cause.’

      To make things worse, his on-again off-again romance with Elmore Weldon was off once more, seemingly for good this time, and not at his but at the young lady’s initiative. ‘She chucked me up as coolly as if it was the most usual thing in the world,’ he told Lottie: ‘It will be some time before I fall in love again I can tell you.’

      He was now primed to take a desperate step.

*Nothing more is known of his tutor, Mr Walker, whose advice and help has been unsuspected through many years of Conan Doyle biography, or whether he was recommended by Dr Waller, who had influenced Conan Doyle’s decision to pursue medicine as a career.

*The brutal villain of Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist.

*Playing on the homily by Isaac Watts (1674-1748): ‘How doth the little busy bee / Improve each shining hour, / And gather honey all the day / From every opening Flower!…In works of labour or of skill / I would be busy too: / For Satan finds some mischief still / For idle hands to do.’

*An Edinburgh medical celebrity under whom Conan Doyle would later serve