Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  Conan Doyle waited more than twenty-five years before collecting this story in book form. When he did, the passage above had been stricken. Clearly the story is a dramatic exaggeration, but it suggests something of Conan Doyle’s anguish over his father’s confinement. It has been theorized, but never confirmed, that Conan Doyle himself was required to sign his father’s committal papers.

  Throughout his life, Conan Doyle kept silent about his father’s unhappy decline, preferring instead to dwell on the artistic side of this “dreamy aesthetic figure.” “The world,” he was to write, “not the family, gets the fruits of genius.” The remark reflects a generosity of spirit he probably did not feel at the time. At the age of seventeen, Conan Doyle felt a heavy pressure to assume at least some of his absent father’s responsibilities. “Perhaps it was good for me that the times were hard,” he wrote, “for I was wild, full-blooded, and a trifle reckless, but the situation called for energy and application so that one was bound to try to meet it. My mother had been so splendid that we could not fail her.”

  Full-blooded or not, Conan Doyle was keenly aware of the sacrifices his family had made, and would continue to make, so that he might receive a professional education. On his return from Austria, he found that his mother had begun taking in lodgers. This expedience, he would later write, “may have eased her in some ways, but was disastrous in others.”

  Why, exactly, this was disastrous is left unsaid. Conan Doyle was probably referring to a particular lodger, Dr. Bryan Charles Waller, who would come to assume a prominent role in the affairs of the Doyle family. Only six years older than Conan Doyle, Dr. Waller came into their lives as a lodger but soon took over paying the rent. Waller, who not only practiced medicine but also published poetry, made a powerful impression. Initially Conan Doyle warmed to the support and stability Waller offered, but his later silence is provocative. It has been suggested that Waller may have jilted one of Conan Doyle’s sisters, but if this is true it cannot have caused too serious a breach. Mary Doyle was to spend more than thirty years living in a cottage on Waller’s estate—long after her eldest son could easily have supported her.

  If Waller remains an obscure figure, it is safe to speculate that he influenced Conan Doyle’s choice of profession. Family tradition might have dictated an artistic pursuit, but instead a medical career was chosen. “It had been determined that I should become a doctor,” Conan Doyle commented, “chiefly, I think, because Edinburgh was so famous a centre for medical learning.” The fact that Waller had trained there, and could offer coaching for the entry examinations, must have had some bearing on the decision.

  With Waller’s assistance, Conan Doyle did well on his entrance examinations and won a bursary of £40, much to the relief of his hard-pressed mother. When he went to collect the money, however, he learned that the prize had been given to another student, as it was intended for study of the arts rather than the sciences. Worse yet, it was now too late to find a corresponding science prize. “It was manifest robbery,” Conan Doyle recalled, and the unhappy incident colored his feelings as he began his studies.

  “Edinburgh University,” he would write in his early novel The Firm of Girdlestone, “may call herself, with grim jocoseness, the ‘alma mater’ of her students, but if she be a mother at all, she is one of a very stoic and Spartan cast, who conceals her maternal affection with remarkable success. The only signs of interest she ever deigns to evince towards her alumni are upon those not infrequent occasions when guineas are to be demanded from them. Then one is surprised to find how carefully the old hen has counted her chickens.”

  These are not, it seems fair to say, the words of a college booster, yet Conan Doyle never offered any criticism of the education he received. However grim and gray the buildings themselves may have been, the school itself bustled with energy. James Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson were also students during Conan Doyle’s years there. “Strange to think,” he said, “that I probably brushed elbows with both of them in the crowded portal.”

  The medical faculty, too, boasted a number of famous names. These included Dr. James Young Simpson, a pioneer in the use of chloroform; Sir Charles Wyville Thomson, recently returned from his zoological expedition aboard the Challenger; and Baron Joseph Lister, of antiseptic fame, who held a chair of clinical surgery when Conan Doyle arrived on campus. Lister’s theories were not universally accepted at the time, and Conan Doyle would write of the pointed rivalry between the supporters of Lister’s antiseptic and those of the more established carbolic acid. “Shut the door,” Lister’s detractors were heard to say. “Ye’ll let the germs oot!”

  But it was Joseph Bell, the hawk-nosed master of deduction, who made the deepest impression. By the end of Conan Doyle’s second year, Bell plucked him from the amphitheater benches to serve as an assistant in his ward, giving the young student a chance to observe his methods at close quarters. “A clerk’s duties are to note down all the patients to be seen, and muster them together,” Conan Doyle recalled. “Often I would have seventy or eighty. When everything was ready, I would show them in to Mr. Bell, who would have the students gathered round him. His intuitive powers were simply marvellous. Case No. 1 would step up. ‘I see,’ said Mr. Bell, ‘you’re suffering from drink. You even carry a flask in the inside breast pocket of your coat.’ Another case would come forward. ‘Cobbler, I see.’ Then he would turn to the students, and point out to them that the inside of the knee of the man’s trousers was worn. That was where the man had rested the lapstone—a peculiarity only found in cobblers.”

  A celebrated example of Bell’s abilities—later recorded in Conan Doyle’s autobiography—involved a patient who had given no information whatsoever before Conan Doyle brought him forward.

  “Well, my man,” Bell said, after a quick glance at the patient, “you’ve served in the army.”

  “Aye, sir,” the patient replied.

  “Not long discharged?”

  “No, sir.”

  “A Highland regiment?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “A non-com officer?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Stationed at Barbados?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Bell turned to his bewildered students. “You see, gentlemen,” he explained, “the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British, and the Scottish regiments are at present in that particular island.”

  “To his audience of Watsons,” Conan Doyle said, “it all seemed very miraculous—until it was explained, and then it became simple enough.”

  For Bell, this was far more than a parlor trick. “In teaching the treatment of disease and accident,” he said, “all careful teachers have first to show the student how to recognize accurately the case. The recognition depends in great measure on the accurate and rapid appreciation of small points in which the diseased differs from the healthy state. In fact, the student must be taught to observe. To interest him in this kind of work we teachers find it useful to show the student how much a trained use of the observation can discover in ordinary matters such as the previous history, nationality, and occupation of a patient.

  “The patient, too, is likely to be impressed by your ability to cure him in the future if he sees you, at a glance, know much of his past. And the whole trick is much easier than it appears at first. For instance, physiognomy helps you to nationality, accent to district, and, to an educated ear, almost to county. Nearly every handicraft writes its sign manual on the hands. The scars of the miner differ from those of the quarryman. The carpenter’s callosities are not those of the mason. The shoemaker and the tailor are quite different.

  “The soldier and the sailor differ in gait, though last month I had to tell a man who said he was a soldier that he had been a sailor in his boyhood. The subjec
t is endless: the tattoo marks on his hand or arm will tell their own tale as to voyages; the ornaments on the watch chain of the successful settler will tell you where he made his money. A New Zealand squatter will not wear a gold mohur, nor an engineer on an Indian railway a Maori stone. Carry the same idea of using one’s senses accurately and constantly, and you will see that many a surgical case will bring his past history, national, social, and medical, into the consulting room as he walks in.”

  Conan Doyle’s own talents in this area were still far from developed. In fact, he often found himself struggling simply to understand what the patients were saying. An effective clerk, Bell had warned, must command a wide range of Scottish idioms. Would this be a problem? Conan Doyle assured him it would not. Shortly thereafter an elderly patient appeared complaining of a “bealin’ in his oxter,” which left the young clerk thoroughly baffled. “It seems,” he admitted ruefully, “the words really mean an abscess in the armpit.”

  Though Joseph Bell remembered him as one of his brightest students, Conan Doyle considered himself a mediocre student. “I took my fences in my stride and balked at none of them,” he said, “still I won no distinction in the race.” This is hardly surprising, considering the punishing schedule he set for himself. Mindful of the financial pressures at home, Conan Doyle hit on a plan to compress each year’s study into six months, leaving half the year free to work as a medical assistant. “When I first set forth to do this,” he admitted, “my services were so obviously worth nothing that I had to put that valuation upon them. Even then it might have been a hard bargain for the doctor.”

  Even if he worked for free, Conan Doyle reasoned, there would still be something of a savings involved. If the assistantships provided room and board—and perhaps the possibility of some small stipend—the strain on his mother’s pocketbook would be eased. With this modest goal in mind, Conan Doyle began advertising his services in a medical paper.

  His first position, with a Dr. Richardson of Sheffield, did not bode well. They parted “by mutual consent” after only three weeks. He fared better with Dr. Elliot of Shropshire. His duties were not particularly taxing, so he spent much of his four-month tenure reading. On one occasion, though, when an old cannon exploded during a local celebration, the untried medical student had to step into the breach. Conan Doyle arrived on the scene to find a patient with a “lump of iron” protruding from his head. “I tried not to show the alarm which I felt,” he recalled, “and I did the obvious thing by pulling out the iron.” After satisfying himself that the brain had not been injured, he “pulled the gash together, staunched the bleeding, and finally bound it up, so that when the doctor did at last arrive he had little to add.”

  Conan Doyle’s next position brought him two pounds a month with Dr. Reginald Hoare of Birmingham, whose “five-horse City practice” kept him on the go from morning to night. Hoare and his wife took a strong liking to the affable young Scot. “My position in the house,” he claimed, “was soon rather that of a son than of an assistant.”

  In all, Conan Doyle would spend three clerkships with Dr. Hoare, cultivating not only his medical skills but also his growing passion for literature. “I used to be allowed twopence for my lunch,” he wrote, “that being the price of a mutton pie, but near the pie shop was a secondhand book shop with a barrel full of old books and the legend ‘Your choice for 2d’ stuck above it. Often the price of my luncheon used to be spent on some sample out of this barrel.”

  Any number of mutton pies gave way to Tacitus, Homer, and Swift during those months in Birmingham. Conan Doyle read with an indiscriminate passion, and many of the books he fished out of the bargain barrel remained on his shelves for the rest of his life. He often said that he wouldn’t exchange his cheap edition of Macaulay for the finest leather-bound volume.

  During his second stint with Dr. Hoare, inspired by the treasures of the bargain barrel, the nineteen-year-old medical assistant decided to try his own hand at fiction. “It was in this year that I first learned that shillings might be earned in other ways than by filling phials,” he noted. “Some friend remarked to me that my letters were very vivid and surely I could write some things to sell.”

  Borrowing heavily from Poe and Bret Harte, two of his favorite writers at the time, Conan Doyle sat down and wrote a story called “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,” a treasure-hunt yarn set in South Africa. The story stands out among his early efforts for its polish and drive, with many of the Conan Doyle hallmarks already in evidence—a rich background, an engaging narrator, and a tight, neatly turned plot.

  To Conan Doyle’s delight, the story was accepted by a prominent Edinburgh magazine called Chambers’s Journal, which had published the debut of Thomas Hardy a few years earlier. Like most authors, he treasured his first publication—and the check for three guineas that came with it—and would always retain a warm feeling for the magazine. “After receiving that little cheque I was a beast that has once tasted blood,” he would tell an interviewer, “for I knew that whatever rebuffs I might receive—and God knows I had plenty—I had once proved I could earn gold, and the spirit was in me to do it again.”

  Dozens of other stories followed, along with a somewhat larger collection of rejection notices. In later years, Conan Doyle would adopt an airy tone toward his early efforts, as though the whole thing had been something of a lark. In truth, his impulse to write was anything but lighthearted. It could not have been easy to find time for literary efforts on top of his accelerated calendar of studies, but Conan Doyle was already developing the ruthless self-discipline that would mark his entire career. He needed the money desperately—“My mother had been so splendid that we could not fail her”—and he was willing to try his hand at anything.

  This sense of writing as a business, rather than a calling, never entirely left him. Like any young author, however, he took pride in his achievements. He felt a rush of satisfaction when James Hogg—who published his second story, “The American’s Tale,” in London Society—advised him to give up medicine in favor of literary pursuits. Hogg, Conan Doyle boasted in a letter to his mother, regarded him as “one of the coming men in literature.”

  Hogg’s was a minority opinion. Though Conan Doyle’s early stories showed a great deal of natural talent and imagination, most were derivative of the writers he admired—hardly a surprising trait in a writer not quite out of his teens. “Every writer is imitative at first,” he later said. “I think that is an absolute rule; though sometimes he throws back on some model which is not easily traced. My early work, as I look back on it, was a sort of debased composite photograph in which five or six different styles were contending for the mastery.” As he gained confidence, however, he began to draw on his own experiences as a medical student, rather than the exotic situations and locales he had read about in adventure tales.

  As he turned inward for inspiration, the influence of Joseph Bell and his science of deduction began to assert itself. “I used to rather pride myself on being able to spot a man’s trade or profession by a good look at his exterior,” Conan Doyle wrote in a story called “The Recollections of Captain Wilkie,” also published in Chambers’s Journal. “I had the advantage of studying under a professor at Edinburgh who was a master of the art, and used to electrify both his patients and his clinical classes by long shots, sometimes at the most unlikely of pursuits, and never very far from the mark. ‘Well, my man,’ I have heard him say, ‘I can see by your fingers that you play some musical instrument for your livelihood, but it is a rather curious one—something quite out of my line.’ The man afterwards informed us that he earned a few coppers by blowing ‘Rule Britannia’ on a coffeepot, the spout of which was pierced to form a rough flute.”

  It would be some years yet before the Edinburgh professor evolved into the Baker Street detective, but in a small way the game was already afoot. Conan Doyle probably wrote this story as a student, but he would have to wait several years to see it in print. Other stories did not sell at all. As
a means of generating extra shillings, he admitted, fiction left a great deal to be desired. His financial prospects were no brighter when he returned to Edinburgh for his third year of study. Every so often, though, he looked up from his medical texts and allowed his eyes to linger on the yellow-backed copy of Chambers’s Journal.

  * * *

  One afternoon during Conan Doyle’s third year, a fellow student named Currie broke in on his studies to make a strange proposition. “Would you care,” Currie asked, “to start next week for a whaling cruise?” This “monstrous question,” Conan Doyle recalled, made further study impossible.

  Barely one week later, he sailed for the Arctic Circle.

  3

  The Great Northern Diver

  First begin

  Taking in.

  Cargo stored,

  All aboard,

  Think about

  Giving out.

  Empty ship,

  Useless trip!

  —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “ADVICE TO A YOUNG AUTHOR”

  The Greenland whaler Hope sailed from Peterhead on the afternoon of February 28, 1880, carrying a crew of twenty-five Scottish sailors. A throng of well-wishers cheered from shore as the four-hundred-ton ship sailed out of the harbor; the fortunes of the coastal fishing town depended heavily on the success of the voyage.

  The Hope picked up twenty-five more sailors as it passed the Shetland islands, bringing the total complement of men to fifty. The crew would spend two months hunting seals off the coast of Greenland before heading farther north to track the bowhead, or “right,” whale.