Arthur Conan Doyle
From Philosopedia
Doyle, Arthur Ignatius Conan [Sir] (22 May 1859 - 7 July 1930)
Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, to an English father, artist Charles Altamount Doyle, and an Irish mother, Mary Foley. They had married in 1855.
He attended St. Marys Hall, Stonyhurst, a Roman Catholic Jesuit preparatory school at the age of 9, then went to Stonyhurst College, leaving in 1875.
From 1876 to 1881 he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, then practiced in Portsmouth as well as on a ship that traveled to the West African coast. His doctorate in 1885 was on the subject of tabes dorsalis, a condition caused by untreated syphilis infection in which nerve cells slowly degenerate.
His marriage in 1885 to Louisa "Touie" Hawkins ended in 1906 when she died of tuberculosis. In 1907 he married Jean Leckie. He had five children, two with the first and three with his second wife.
In 1891 in Vienna, after studying the eye, he moved to London and became an ophthalmologist. With few clients, he had more time for writing what he considered more important, his historical novels.
The Scottish author and creator of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle appeared not to believe in Biblical miracles:
- It isn’t true that the laws of nature have been capriciously disturbed; that snakes have talked; that women have been turned into salt; that rods have brought water out of rocks.
Similarly, a freethinking sentiment was expressed when he wrote,
- Dogmas of every kind put assertion in the place of reason and give rise to more contention, bitterness, and want of charity than any other influence in human affairs.
"It's elementary, my dear Watson" is not found in any of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, according to Mark Israel:
- although Holmes does exclaim "Elementary" in "The Crooked Man", and says "It was very superficial, my dear Watson, I assure you" in "The Cardboard Box". The first recorded juxtaposition is in the 1929 film The Return of Sherlock Holmes (the first Holmes film with sound). The original stories never mention an Inverness cape, a deerstalker hat, or a meerschaum pipe, either. Those props are due much later to illustrators and to actors.
At first buried under an oak tree on the Windlesham Estate in Crowborough, Sussex, England, Doyle’s remains later were removed to the Village Cemetery, Minstead, Hampshire, England.
During the later decade of his life, he abandoned writing fiction to study and lecture on spiritualism, the communication with the souls of the dead, a topic that interested the general public in the 1920s. Wikipedia includes the following:
- According to the History Channel program "Houdini: Unlocking the Mystery" (which briefly explored the friendship between the two), Conan Doyle became involved with Spiritualism after the death of his own son during the First World War. Kingsley Doyle died from pneumonia in October 1917, which he contracted during his year plus convalescence after being seriously wounded during the disastrous 1916 Battle of the Somme. The elder Doyle became involved with Spiritualism to the extent that he wrote a Professor Challenger novel on the subject, The Land of Mist.
- One of the odder aspects of this period of his life was his book, The Coming of the Fairies (1921). He was apparently totally convinced of the veracity of the Cottingley fairy photographs, which he reproduced in the book, together with theories about the nature and existence of fairies and spirits.
- In his The History of Spiritualism (1926) Conan Doyle highly praised the psychic phenomena and spirit materialisations produced by Eusapia Palladino and Mina "Margery" Crandon, based on the investigations of duped scientists and conjurers who deeply desired to encounter psychic phenomena and refused to listen to sceptical and well-informed scientists and conjurers. [See William Kalush's and Larry Sloman's The Secret Life of Houdini.]
- His work on this topic was one of the reasons that one of his short story collections, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, was banned in the Soviet Union in 1929 for supposed occultism. This ban was later lifted. Russian actor Vasily Livanov later received an Order of the British Empire for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes.
- Conan Doyle was friends for a time with the American magician Harry Houdini, who himself became a prominent opponent of the Spiritualist movement in the 1920s following the death of his own beloved mother. Although Houdini insisted that Spiritualist mediums employed trickery (and consistently attempted to expose them as frauds), Conan Doyle became convinced that Houdini himself possessed supernatural powers, a view expressed in Conan Doyle's The Edge of the Unknown. Houdini was apparently unable to convince Conan Doyle that his feats were simply magic tricks, leading to a bitter, public, falling-out between the two. Doyle was totally stunned when Houdini pulled off his thumb and then replaced it.
Richard Milner, an American historian of science, has presented a case that Conan 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 says that Conan Doyle had a motive, namely revenge on the scientific establishment for debunking one of his favourite psychics, and that The Lost World contains several encrypted clues regarding his involvement in the hoax. [Roger Highfield, "The mysterious case of Conan Doyle and Piltdown Man," The Daily Telegraph, 20 March 1997]
Samuel Rosenberg's 1974 book, Naked is the Best Disguise, purports to explain how Conan Doyle left, throughout his writings, open clues that related to hidden and suppressed aspects of his mentality.
On September 23, 2007, Chris Redmond reported the following:
- Andrew Lycett's hefty new biography, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, has been published in Britain, and will be out in North America in a few weeks. I haven't had the opportunity to read it yet, but a quick glance at a copy suggests that Lycett relies on some sources that have not been available to earlier biographers, with interesting results. A review in The Guardian observes that Lycett "knows just how far to take the imaginative extensions of fact necessary for good biography".
- Meanwhile, coming soon in American and British editions is Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, a collection of ACD's own hitherto unpublished correspondence. Jon Lellenberg, editor of the book along with Daniel Stashower and ACD great-nephew Charles Foley, says the book is expected to be 608 pages and "draws from over a thousand" of the letters ACD wrote to his mother, Mary Foley Doyle, between 1867 and 1920. Kate Hyde, editor of the book for HarperCollins, talks about it (audio clip).
