Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Daniel Stashower

Holmes method.

*The Scotsman, Sept. 12, 1877: ‘those on board Lord Glasgow’s steam yacht Valetta observed a strange sea monster about half a mile distant. The Valetta was steered for the monster, and ran close alongside it, whereupon it dived… The fish was again seen about an hour and a half afterwards, near the same spot, just off the Sannox Rock, on the north-east side of Arran.’

*Paraphrasing from Byron’s poem ‘The Sea’.

;Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, commander in chief of the British Army for some forty years, would review Conan Doyle in 1900 before the latter’s departure for the Boer War.

;A man named Max Hoedel had attempted to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm I in Berlin only two weeks before. The crown prince was the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, Britain’s foe in World War I.

*It is not clear who Dr Quin is. Frederick F. H. Quin, an Edinburgh graduate who died in 1878, pioneered homoeopathic medicine in Britain.

*Conan Doyle’s copy of The Essentials of Materia Medica and Therapeutics by Alfred Baring Garrod (London: Longmans, 1877), now at the Humanities Research Center in Texas, contains marginalia in his handwriting about the effects of various drugs—making use again of his father’s trick of composing verses about things he needed to remember; e.g., for quinine: ‘In ears a sound, in eyes a flash, / Vomit, headache, nausea, rash, / Thirst, no hunger, heart goes slower, / Then if he goes and swallows more, / He’ll die from cardiac paralysis, / Shown by a post mortem analysis.’ See ‘Doyle’s Drug Doggerel’ by Donald C. Black, M.D., Baker Street Journal, June 1981.

;Evocative names like Grimesthorpe, and their permutations, appealed to Conan Doyle. In the case of this one, he titled one of his earliest stories ‘The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe’; in the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’, the murderous villain is Dr Grimesby Roylott.

*Major (later Major General Sir William) Butler was already a distinguished soldier at this time, and his wife, Elizabeth Thompson, a celebrated painter of battle scenes.

*The reference is to the fictive play The Murder of Gonzago performed in Hamlet.

*Author of Scripture Testimony Against Intoxicating Wine, notorious for insisting that the wine that Christ made in the miracle at Cana was nonalcoholic.

*A slang term for money.

*Licentiate of the King’s and Queen’s College of Ireland, a degree which Conan Doyle would have regarded as inferior to the one he was earning at Edinburgh. Bourchier had certainly fallen out of favour by now.

;A joke on the name of Dr Sampson Gamgee, a well-known Birmingham surgeon, and, with Dr Joseph Lister in Edinburgh, a pioneer in aseptic surgery.

‘A goose weighs seven pounds and one-half its own weight.’

*The British Medical Journal published ‘Gelsemium as a Poison’ in its issue of September 20, 1879. Tincture of gelsemium, distilled from jasmine, was used at the time to treat neuralgia, a complaint from which Conan Doyle frequently suffered.

;The Lancet for June 28, 1879, noted receipt of a letter from a Mr Hughes, but did not print it. Given what medical students are like, the editors were probably old hands at spotting hoax letters.

;Meaning the solution to the mathematical puzzle that he posed to thirteen-year-old Lottie in his earlier letter; ‘the calculation is a simple one,’ as Sherlock Holmes said of another problem in the story ‘Silver Blaze’.

*Joseph Cook was a well-known American divine whose ‘Boston Monday Lectures’ included, among other subjects, harmony between religion and science, and which were now being heard by enormous audiences in an around-the-world tour.

*The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe was neither published nor returned by Blackwood’s Magazine, and the manuscript is now in the magazine’s archives at the National Library of Scotland. The story was finally published by the Arthur Conan Doyle Society in 2000.

*This photograph was previously believed to have been taken aboard the Hope. ‘As I was smoking a cigar,’ Conan Doyle’s diary for July 18th says, ‘I am afraid I’ll be rather misty,’ and the cigar is visible in the picture. Leigh Smith, an English explorer of the Arctic, lost the Eira (though not his life, nor his crew’s) on the second of two voyages to Franz Josef Land that year.

;Intriguing, but unknown.

;Porter’s identity is unknown, but belies a joke that Conan Doyle liked to make about himself, after giving up medicine for literature, that no living patient of his had ever been seen.

*See Georgina Doyle, Out of the Shadows, op. cit., pages 42-44.

;The Land League, founded with nationalist overtones by Charles Parnell in 1879, took the side of tenants against landlords in Ireland’s Land War of the early 1880s. The Foleys were among the landlords, hence Conan Doyle’s sympathies in the mutual exchange of acts of intimidation.

*Presumably the Irish assistant, Bourchier, who had been with Dr Hoare when Conan Doyle came to Birmingham for the first time. The ‘old CB [Companion of the Bath] of an uncle’ was Henry Doyle, founding director of the National Gallery of Ireland.

*Memories and Adventures says: ‘Whether it is the Ivory Coast or the Gold Coast, or the Liberian Shore, it always presents the same features—burning sunshine, a long swell breaking into a white line of surf, a margin of golden sand, and then the low green bush, with an occasional palm tree rising above it. If you have seen a mile, you have seen a thousand.’

*A satellite station of Hoare’s practice, outside Birmingham a distance, run by a Dr Aspinal.