Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  Whatever one’s opinion of her psychic abilities, Mrs. Roberts’s timing could not be faulted. Her announcement galvanized the audience. From the farthest reaches of the house, people strained for a better view of the empty chair.

  A serene smile spread across Lady Conan Doyle’s features. Mrs. Roberts stepped over to her side. “I have a message for you, dear, from Arthur,” she said. Lady Conan Doyle gave a nod.

  “Sir Arthur told me that one of you went into the hut this morning,” Mrs. Roberts said, referring to a building on the family’s Crowborough estate. “Is that correct?”

  “Why, yes,” said Lady Conan Doyle. “I did.”

  Mrs. Roberts nodded, and leaned forward. “The message is this: Tell Mary—”

  Just then a second blast from the pipe organ drowned out the medium’s voice, so that only those sitting nearby could hear. Mrs. Roberts spoke for some moments, while Conan Doyle’s family listened intently. Occasionally one of his sons would lean forward to add a word of explanation or clarification. Lady Conan Doyle simply sat and listened.

  For the rest of her life, Lady Conan Doyle would decline to discuss the contents of the message, saying only that she was perfectly convinced it had come from her husband. “I am as sure of that,” she told a reporter that night, “and of the fact that he has been here, as I am that I am speaking to you.”

  Her sincerity was evident as she sat listening to the words of the medium. For several moments she sat perfectly still, her features radiant, her eyes fixed on a point at the far end of the hall. She held her gaze for several moments, then brushed her cheek and looked away.

  2

  The Cobbler’s Lapstone

  “I am a medical man, and observation is everything in my profession.”

  “I thought you were a detective at first.”

  —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “THE RECOLLECTIONS OF CAPTAIN WILKIE”

  “The students were pouring down the sloping street which led to the infirmary,” wrote Conan Doyle in one of his earliest stories, “each with his little sheaf of note-books in hand. There were pale, frightened lads, fresh from the High Schools, and callous old chronics, whose generation had passed on and left them. They swept in an unbroken, tumultuous stream from the university gate to the hospital. The figures and gait of the men were young, but there was little youth in most of their faces. Some looked as if they ate too little—a few as if they drank too much. Tall and short, tweed coated and black, round-shouldered, bespectacled and slim, they crowded with clatter of feet and rattle of sticks through the hospital gate.”

  The story, called “His First Operation,” takes place at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, where Conan Doyle went to study medicine in 1876. Centered on South Bridge in the “old town” section of Edinburgh, the university was a place of dark stone and winding keeps, vaguely sinister in appearance. “The old town,” wrote Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the poet, “with its irregular houses, stage above stage, seen as we saw it, in the obscurity of a rainy day, hardly resembles the work of man, it is more like a piling up of rocks.”

  By the time of Conan Doyle’s arrival, the University of Edinburgh was already three hundred years old. Unlike the vastly wealthier Oxford and Cambridge, however, Edinburgh’s only treasures of note were a jeweled mace and the skull of George Buchanan, an eminent scholar. Early students spoke Latin—so as not to soil their mouths with common Scots—and were forbidden to go to taverns or to funerals, both of which provided much of the city’s entertainment at that time.

  In Conan Doyle’s day students no longer spoke Latin or wore academic gowns, though he might have welcomed an excuse to cover his threadbare clothing. In his first weeks, Conan Doyle would have been one of the “pale, frightened lads” making his way along the flagstone path toward the gloomy surgical amphitheater. But unlike the sensitive hero of his story, Conan Doyle probably did not faint away at the sight of a descending scalpel.

  The Royal Infirmary’s surgical amphitheater was a gaslit chamber lined with tiers of horseshoe benches, rising from floor to ceiling. The benches commanded a view of the solid wooden operating table at the center of the room, along with a long shelf of sturdy metal surgical instruments—forceps, tenacula, saws, and trocars. Below the table was a long tin tray filled with sawdust, for catching blood and debris.

  Conan Doyle probably felt some relief, during an early surgery lecture, to see that the operating table had not been dressed for a demonstration. Instead, he and his classmates fixed their attention on the lecturer, an imposing figure in a swallowtail coat, who stood at the front of the table fingering a glass-stoppered vial.

  Dr. Joseph Bell, author of A Manual of the Operations of Surgery, was only thirty-nine years old when Conan Doyle first saw him. He was a tall man with piercing gray eyes, sharp features, and an eagle-beak nose. His voice was high and strident, and like Conan Doyle he spoke in the richly accented tones of an Edinburgh native. Bell had a peculiar, jerky manner of walking, and gave off an aura of restless energy as he paced before the operating table. “He could be most impatient,” recalled one student. “Woe to the young man whose preparation was found wanting.”

  Bell waited a moment while the young men settled themselves. Then he cleared his throat and began to speak. “This, gentlemen, contains a most potent drug,” he said, holding the glass vial aloft. “It is extremely bitter to the taste. Now, I wish to see how many of you have developed the powers of observation that God granted you.”

  He folded his arms and surveyed the room. “‘But sair,’ you will say. ‘It can be analyzed chemically.’” Bell nodded, as if considering the point. “Aye, aye, but I want you to taste it—by smell and taste. What? You shrink back?” Bell pulled the stopper and waved the vial under his nose. Then he swirled the amber liquid with a finger. “As I don’t ask anything of my students which I wouldn’t do alone with myself, I will taste it before passing it around.”

  He brought his hand to his mouth and sucked his finger. Evidently the potion had a remarkably vile taste; Bell’s features contorted as though he had sampled poison.

  After a moment, he recovered himself. “Now,” he said, handing the vial to a student in the first row, “you do likewise.”

  A murmur rose from the benches as the vial was passed from hand to hand. Conan Doyle’s classmates would have been a varied and unusual group; Edinburgh’s medical school was one of the finest in the world, drawing students from as far away as eastern Europe and America. Whatever one’s background, Bell’s lecture theater had a great leveling effect. Wealthy foreign students and scruffy local boys like Conan Doyle became equals; each had to pay his four guineas to the lecturer, and each had to sample the hideous amber liquid.

  When the vial had completed its rounds, Bell looked out over the rows of students and gave a sad shake of his head. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I am deeply grieved to find that not one of you has developed his power of perception, the faculty of observation which I speak so much of, for if you had truly observed me, you would have seen that, while I placed my index finger in the awful brew, it was my middle finger—aye—which somehow found its way into my mouth.”

  Bell sighed with satisfaction as a chorus of groans went up from the assembly. His point had been made.

  Subsequent lectures would not be so frivolous. Having established the importance of developing one’s powers of observation, Bell went on to give astonishing demonstrations. In one, a woman with a small child was shown into the amphitheater. Bell had never seen the woman before, and had no information about her case or her background. He greeted her politely, and she said good morning in reply.

  “What sort of crossing did you have from Burntisland?” Bell asked.

  “It was guid,” came the answer.

  “And had you a good walk up Inverleith Row?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you do with the other wain?” Bell asked, indicating that the woman had only one child with her.

  “I left him with my s
ister in Leith.”

  “And would you still be working at the linoleum factory?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  It seemed a great deal of information to have extracted from a simple “good morning.” “You see, gentlemen,” said Bell, turning to his students, “when she said good morning to me I noted her Fife accent, and, as you know, the nearest town in Fife is Burntisland. You notice the red clay on the edges of the soles of her shoes, and the only such clay within twenty miles of Edinburgh is the Botanical Gardens. Inverleith Row borders the gardens and is her nearest way here from Leith. You observed that the coat she carried over her arm is too big for the child who is with her, and therefore she set out from home with two children. Finally she has dermatitis on the fingers of the right hand, which is peculiar to workers in the linoleum factory at Burntisland.”

  In the third row, Conan Doyle nodded slowly as he reviewed each link in the chain of reasoning. Then he opened his notebook and began to write.

  * * *

  Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in a small flat at No. 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh—about one mile from the university. He was the second of Charles and Mary Doyle’s ten children, of whom seven survived. From his great-uncle Michael Conan, a distinguished journalist, Arthur and his elder sister, Annette, received the compound surname of Conan Doyle.

  At the time of Arthur Conan Doyle’s birth, his Irish-Catholic family enjoyed a prominent position in the world of art. John Doyle, Arthur’s grandfather, had left Dublin at the age of twenty to become a celebrated portrait painter in London. Over the initials H.B., he also produced sketches of Regency notables that were thought to be “somewhat wicked.” He is remembered today as a pioneer of political caricature.

  John Doyle had four sons, three of whom also achieved notable success in the art world. (A fifth son, Francis, died at the age of fifteen.) James was a noted historian as well as an artist. Henry became director of the National Gallery of Ireland. Richard illustrated children’s books and became well known for his work in the humor magazine Punch—one of his designs served as the magazine’s cover for more than one hundred years.

  Three of John Doyle’s sons prospered; the fourth, Arthur Conan Doyle’s father, did not. Charles Altamont Doyle had come to Edinburgh at the age of nineteen to become an assistant surveyor in Scotland’s Board of Works. Initially, he met with some success—he is thought to have had a hand in the design of the fountain at Holyrood Palace, on Edinburgh’s royal mile, and also a window at Glasgow Cathedral. At one stage in the 1860s, his talents were sought by the distinguished firm of George Waterston & Sons, which had recently expanded into lithographic printing. These were isolated accomplishments; Charles Doyle was a high-strung alcoholic and never advanced to any great degree from the position he took as a teenager.

  In 1855, at the age of twenty-two, Charles Doyle had married seventeen-year-old Mary Foley, the granddaughter of his landlady. A lively, well-educated woman, Mary Doyle took a special interest in the traditions of chivalry, and captivated her children with tales of knights and their quests. Years later, in an autobiographical novel called The Stark Munro Letters, Conan Doyle drew on the memory of her “sweet face” and “general suggestion of a plump little hen” for his portrait of the title character’s mother. “Ever since I can remember her,” Mr. Stark Munro declared, “she has been the quaintest mixture of the housewife and the woman of letters, with the highbred spirited lady as a basis for either character. Always a lady, whether she was bargaining with the butcher, or breaking in a skittish charwoman, or stirring the porridge, which I can see her doing with the porridge-stick in one hand, and the other holding her Revie des deux Mondes within two inches of her dear nose.”

  In truth, it is unlikely that Mary Doyle had many occasions to break in a skittish charwoman, but her love of books made a lasting impression on her son. She had, Conan Doyle would recall, a born storyteller’s gift of “sinking her voice to a horror-stricken whisper” when she reached the crisis of a story. “In my early childhood,” her son would write in his autobiography, “as far back as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories which she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life.”

  Perhaps this was just as well, as the real facts were none too happy. In later years, Conan Doyle would recall with characteristic cheer that he had been raised in “the hardy and bracing atmosphere of poverty.” In truth, Charles Doyle gradually lost his struggle with alcohol, and as his behavior grew more and more erratic, the income from his surveyor’s post could no longer be relied upon. The Doyle family changed addresses at least seven times by the time Arthur was ten, and on at least one occasion, it appears, the boy was sent to live with friends, possibly to shield him from his father’s deterioration.

  In 1868, when Arthur was nine years old, his wealthy uncles offered to send him to a Jesuit boarding school in England. Arthur boarded the train in Edinburgh by himself, and cried most of the way to the border. For the next seven years, he would see his family only during summer holidays. Through the long absences he remained devoted to his mother, whom he called “the Ma’am,” and sent her letters almost continually—a habit that persisted for more than fifty years.

  Conan Doyle spent two years at Hodder, in Lancashire, and another five years at its senior school, Stonyhurst. It was not a period he would recall with fondness. “Corporal punishment was severe,” he wrote, “and I can speak with feeling as I think few, if any, boys of my time endured more of it. It was of a peculiar nature, imported, I fancy, from Holland. The instrument was a piece of india-rubber of the size and shape of a thick boot sole. One blow of this instrument, delivered with intent, would cause the palm of the hand to swell up and change color. When I say that the usual punishment was nine on each hand, and that nine on one hand was the absolute minimum, it will be understood that it was a severe ordeal, and that the sufferer could not, as a rule, turn the handle of the door to get out of the room in which he had suffered. To get twice nine on a cold day was about the extremity of human endurance.”

  The boys subsisted mainly on bread and hot milk, with a “joint” at lunchtime and fish on Fridays. In the afternoon a snack called “bread and beer” made its appearance—“a bit of dry bread and the most extraordinary drink,” he recalled, “which was brown but had no other characteristic of beer.”

  Even so, Conan Doyle did not resent the Spartan lifestyle half so much as the soul-deadening quality of the education. Years later he wrote angrily of the “uncompromising bigotry” of his Jesuit masters and an educational system “calculated to leave a lasting abhorrence of the subjects.”

  His happiest hours were spent at sports, where his natural athleticism began to emerge. He enjoyed cricket above all, though he took a cricket ball to the knee at one match and had to be carried to the infirmary by the batsman. The experience failed to put him off; in time he became captain of the side at Stonyhurst.

  The lonely student also came to realize that he had “some literary streak” that was not common to all. “There was my debut as a storyteller,” he would tell an interviewer. “On a wet half-holiday I have been elevated onto a desk, and with an audience of little boys all squatting on the floor, with their chins upon their hands, I have talked myself husky over the misfortunes of my heroes. Week in and week out those unhappy men have battled and striven and groaned for the amusement of that little circle.”

  Those amusements came at a price. “I was bribed with pastry,” he recalled. “Sometimes, too, I would stop dead in the very thrill of a crisis, and could only be set a-going again by apples. When I had got as far as ‘With his left hand in her glossy locks, he was waving the blood-stained knife above her head, when—’ I knew that I had my audience in my power.”

  Conan Doyle emerged from Stonyhurst at the age of sixteen. Too young to begin a course of professional training, he was packed off to Feldkirch, Austria, for another year of Jesuit schooling. This appears to have been a happie
r experience. He enjoyed the scenery and the sports, learned to play the tuba—possibly because he was the only student large enough to do it justice—and did a fair amount of reading for pleasure. One book he had with him was to exert a considerable influence: Tales of Mystery and Imagination, by Edgar Allan Poe.

  On his return from Austria, the time had come to select a career. “I found that the family affairs were as straitened as ever,” he wrote. “No promotion had come to my father, and two younger children, Innes, my only brother, and Ida, had arrived to add to the calls upon my mother. Another sister, Julia, followed shortly afterwards. But Annette, the eldest sister, had already gone out to Portugal to earn and send home a fair salary, while Lottie and Connie were about to do the same.”

  In fact, the circumstances were more dire than Conan Doyle let on. Far from receiving a promotion, Charles Doyle’s alcoholism would soon bring his working life to a close. In 1876, when his son was only seventeen, Charles Doyle entered a nursing facility to receive treatment. Later, doctors diagnosed him as an epileptic. At the time, this dimly understood ailment carried a heavy stigma. In time, Charles Doyle would be transferred to a lunatic asylum.

  In an early story called “The Surgeon of Gaster Fell,” Conan Doyle offers a hint of the unhappy circumstances of his father’s committal. In the story, a young surgeon is thought to have imprisoned an elderly man in a “sinister cage,” possibly for the purpose of some cruel experiment. It is later revealed that the prisoner is the surgeon’s own father, whose mental aberration has taken a “homicidal turn.” The surgeon has resorted to drastic measures in order to keep his father from the lunatic asylum, a prospect that terrifies the old man. “It would weary you were I to describe the terrible experiences which his family have undergone,” the surgeon declares. “Suffice it that, by the blessing of God, we have succeeded in keeping his poor crazed fingers clear of blood.”