Arthur Conan Doyle

Did You Know?

• Doyle's father, Charles Altamont Doyle, died in 1893 in the Crichton Royal, Dumfries, after many years of psychiatric illness.
• Doyle served as a volunteer physician in the Langman Field Hospital at Bloemfontein between March and June 1900 during the Second Boer War.
• None of Doyle's five children had children of their own, so he has no living direct descendants.

Medical career

Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School from 1876 to 1881, during which he worked in Aston, Sheffield, and Ruyton-XI-Towns, and studied practical botany at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. While a student, he began writing fiction; his earliest extant story, "The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe," was rejected by Blackwood's Magazine, but his first published piece, "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley," appeared in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal on 6 September 1879.

On 20 September 1879, his first academic article, "Gelsemium as a Poison," was printed in the British Medical Journal. In 1880, he served as doctor on the Greenland whaler Hope of Peterhead, and on 11 July 1880, he was photographed aboard the Eira with members of the Smith expedition exploring Franz Josef Land. After graduating with M.B. C.M. degrees in 1881, he worked as ship's surgeon on the SS Mayumba to the West African coast, and completed his M.D. degree with a dissertation on tabes dorsalis in 1885.

In 1882, he briefly partnered with former classmate George Turnavine Budd in Plymouth before setting up an independent practice in Portsmouth in June 1882 with less than £10. The practice was unsuccessful, and he returned to writing fiction. Doyle was a staunch supporter of compulsory vaccination and wrote articles advocating it.

Literary career

Doyle initially struggled to find a publisher. His first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, was written in three weeks at age 27 and accepted by Ward Lock & Co on 20 November 1886 for £25 and all rights; it appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual a year later to good reviews. Holmes was partly modelled on Doyle's university teacher Joseph Bell, a connection noted by Robert Louis Stevenson. A sequel, The Sign of the Four, was published in Lippincott's Magazine in February 1890.

Feeling exploited by Ward Lock, Doyle left them and began publishing Holmes short stories in the Strand Magazine, writing the first five from his office at 2 Devonshire Place. Doyle's attitude toward Holmes was ambivalent; in November 1891 he wrote to his mother of killing Holmes, but she dissuaded him. He raised his price to discourage publishers, but they paid the large sums, making him one of the best-paid authors of his time. Holmes was killed off in "The Final Problem" (1893), but public outcry led to his return in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901), and Doyle continued writing Holmes stories until 1927. He also wrote humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard.

Sporting career

While living in Southsea, Doyle played football as a goalkeeper for Portsmouth Association Football Club under the pseudonym A. C. Smith. He was a keen cricketer, playing 10 first-class matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club between 1899 and 1907, and also played for the amateur teams the Allahakbarries and the Authors XI. His highest score was 43 against London County in 1902; he took one first-class wicket, that of W. G. Grace, and wrote a poem about it.

He captained the Authors XI from 1899 to 1912. In 1900, concerned by British troops' poor showing in the Boer War, he founded the Undershaw Rifle Club at his home, building a 100-yard range, and championed miniature rifle clubs. He later sat on the Rifle Clubs Committee of the National Rifle Association. In 1901, he was one of three judges for the world's first major bodybuilding competition, organised by Eugen Sandow at the Royal Albert Hall.

Doyle was an amateur boxer and in 1909 was invited to referee the James Jeffries–Jack Johnson heavyweight championship fight in Reno, Nevada, but declined due to distance and engagements. A keen golfer, he was elected captain of the Crowborough Beacon Golf Club in Sussex for 1910.

Freemasonry and spiritualism

Doyle had a longstanding interest in mystical subjects and paranormal phenomena, though his belief in their reality waxed and waned. In 1887, influenced by Major-General Alfred Wilks Drayson, he began investigating psychic phenomena, attending about 20 seances and experiments in telepathy, and declared himself a spiritualist in a letter to the journal Light. On 26 January 1887, he was initiated as a Freemason at the Phoenix Lodge No. 257 in Southsea; he resigned in 1889, returned in 1902, and resigned again in 1911.

In 1889, he co-founded 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. Some claim he was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but biographer Christopher Sandford disputes this. Doyle and William Thomas Stead believed Julius and Agnes Zancig had genuine psychic powers, but the Zancigs confessed to trickery in 1924. Doyle also praised the phenomena of Eusapia Palladino and Mina Crandon, both later exposed as frauds.