Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  Conan Doyle soon realized that a brass plaque and a red lamp offered no guarantee of success. “Do not think that practice will come to you,” he wrote in The Stark Munro Letters. “You must go to it. You may sit upon your consulting-room chair until it breaks under you, but without purchase or partnership you will make little or no progress. The way to do it is to go out, to mix everywhere with men, to let them know you. You will come back many a time and be told by a reproachful housekeeper that someone has been for you in your absence. Never mind! Go out again. A noisy smoking concert where you will meet eighty men is better for you than the patient or two you might have seen at home. It took me some time to realise, but I speak now as one who knows.”

  In these earliest days, with no reproachful housekeeper to trouble him, Conan Doyle went out and pumped the flesh whenever possible. His love of sports offered a natural entrée. He joined the South-sea Bowling Club—which played outdoor lawn bowling, as opposed to tenpins—and took home a silver cigar case from a tournament. He also signed up with the Portsmouth Cricket Club, eventually becoming its captain. Since the town had no official English football matches, he helped to organize a Portsmouth Football Club. Fearing that the image of brawling footballer might compromise his professional dignity, Conan Doyle occasionally played under an assumed name. When foul weather drove him indoors, he shot billiards at the Bush Hotel, two doors down from his house.

  There was one piece of Stark Munro’s advice that Conan Doyle did not follow. “Above everything, beware of drink!” his fictional counterpart warned. Conan Doyle appears to have been somewhat lax on this point, despite his temporary injunction aboard the Mayumba. “I went to a ball the other night,” he confided to his sister Lottie, “and by some mischance got drunk as an owl. I have a dim recollection that I proposed to half the women in the room—married and single. I got one letter next day signed, ‘Ruby,’ and saying the writer had said ‘yes’ when she meant ‘no’; but who the deuce she was or what she had said ‘yes’ about I can’t conceive.”

  Conan Doyle may well have embroidered the scene for his sister’s amusement, but if a drunken blackout really occurred, it is fortunate that such “mischances” did not occur often. Stark Munro understood, as his creator apparently did not, that a hard-drinking doctor had little hope of establishing a successful practice.

  In more sober moments, Conan Doyle renewed his interest in Elmo Welden, the young woman he courted before his African voyage. Their relationship proceeded at a stately pace; they toured the Isle of Wight, and traveled to London to see Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. The romance soon ran its course, but Conan Doyle, who complained of loneliness in his first weeks at Southsea, now had his brother Innes for company. The arrival of the “little knicker-bockered fellow,” then ten years old, appears to have been a practical measure for the Doyle family. The arrangement, which may have been a condition of the weekly pound note from Edinburgh, reduced Mary Doyle’s burden to the care of her two youngest daughters, Ida and Dodo. Conan Doyle, meanwhile, gained a companion to break the solitude of his eight-room house. Innes enrolled in a local school, and soon took over the plaque-polishing and step-brushing duties at Bush Villas. Having grown accustomed to his family’s straitened circumstances in Edinburgh, Innes had no difficulty adjusting to life in Southsea. He wrote cheerful letters to his mother describing a typical day of answering the door, running errands, and cooking up their meager ration of potatoes—“the only six we had in the world.”

  More than once, Conan Doyle’s funds dipped low enough to send him to the pawn shop with his watch. He tried bartering with local tradesmen, exchanging his medical services for goods, and struck up a relationship with an epileptic grocer, which provided butter and tea. Like George Budd, he was not above seizing opportunities for self-promotion. When a riding accident occurred at his doorstep, Conan Doyle not only treated the victim but also placed a self-flattering account in the local Evening News. Sometimes his compassion overcame his business instincts, as when he treated a baby for measles and then handed over his pocket change to the indigent family.

  By the end of 1882, Conan Doyle hit on the idea of letting out rooms in exchange for housekeeping services. The young doctor’s admittedly “Bohemian” establishment now took on a more civilized air. Mary Doyle and Aunt Annette sent decorative odds and ends—including a formidable bust of John Doyle—to offset the effect of Conan Doyle’s sale-price furniture.

  Patients began to arrive more regularly, but with first-year earnings of only £154, the practice was off to a rocky start. When Conan Doyle filed his tax return to show that he wasn’t liable, the assessors returned his form marked “Most unsatisfactory.” Conan Doyle added the words “I entirely agree” and sent it back again. The revenue officers, failing to appreciate the joke, called him in to explain himself. “They could make nothing, however, out of me or my ledger,” he wrote, “and we parted with mutual laughter and compliments.”

  No laughter and compliments were needed the following year, when Conan Doyle’s income rose to £250. By the end of the third year the practice was bringing in £300 annually—the amount George Budd had promised in Plymouth. Though hardly munificent, this comfortable income marked Conan Doyle as a successful practitioner; he had overcome his early misadventure in a remarkably short time. Conan Doyle is often dismissed as a poor or disinterested medical man, owing to his early struggles, his modest performance at Edinburgh, and the subsequent abandonment of his career. In fact he was a hardworking, compassionate doctor, who kept up with the advances of medicine long after he had ceased to practice. If his competence failed to manifest itself in monetary rewards, this owed less to his abilities than to his rejection of the family patronage, his involvement with Budd, and his decision to settle in an area already well supplied with doctors. Only a doctor of considerable skill and dedication could have succeeded to the extent that he did.

  While waiting for patients to arrive, Conan Doyle sat in his consulting room and wrote stories. “There was a time in my life which I divided among my patients and literature,” he once remarked. “It is hard to say which suffered most.” This sort of self-effacing humor served to enhance the impression that his doctoring cannot have been up to par, but actually Conan Doyle had energy for both. When he decided not to continue aboard the Mayumba, Conan Doyle told his mother he could easily make up the salary of £12 a month through his writing. It would take several years to make good on the claim, but an early effort called “My Friend the Murderer” brought a much-needed £10 from James Hogg, the editor of London Society, which settled his first quarter’s rent.

  The eerie “Captain of the Pole-Star,” which drew on his whaling experiences, brought him a further ten guineas—or ten and a half pounds—from Temple Bar at the end of 1882. The greatest success of those early years came the following year, when the prestigious Cornhill Magazine paid an impressive 29 guineas (more than 30 pounds) for “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.” Inspired by the real-life mystery of the Marie Celeste, a ship discovered abandoned off the west coast of Africa, the story appeared anonymously, as did all contributions to Cornhill, with the result that hundreds of readers wrote in to identify Robert Louis Stevenson as the author. Conan Doyle found the comparison flattering, but the confusion suggests the degree to which his immature work derived from other writers. Like Stevenson, Conan Doyle made canny use of known facts in his story, prompting a handful of British and American officials to mistake his fiction for a factual account. Conan Doyle expressed delight that any characters of his should be taken for living figures. This was to happen many times over the course of his career, and he would not always be so amused.

  These early successes proved difficult to repeat. “Fifty little cylinders of manuscript did I send out during eight years,” he wrote, referring to the mailing tubes in which he made his submissions. Unhappily, most of these literary parcels “described irregular orbits among publishers, and usually came back like paper boomerangs to the place that they
had started from.” Conan Doyle had high hopes for a story called “The Actor’s Duel,” which he considered the most powerful thing he had written to that point. When it drew rejections from the more prestigious magazines, he sent it to the less estimable Boy’s Own Paper, his journal of last resort. They, too, gave it a miss, but later published “Crabbe’s Practice,” about a brilliant but unscrupulous doctor, not unlike George Budd, who was prone to reckless experimentation.

  In later years, Conan Doyle would try to suppress many of these early efforts—some of which, he complained, had been written when he was “little more than a boy.” He found it especially galling when his early stories began to appear in pirated anthologies in America, where copyright laws did not yet protect foreign authors. “It is rough on me,” he was to tell a newspaper interviewer, “having these youthful effusions brought out in this catchpenny fashion, but I have no legal redress.” In his autobiography, he offered a piece of hard-won advice to writers just starting out: “Have a care, young authors, have a care, or your own worst enemy will be your early self.”

  In these early days, Conan Doyle had few literary ambitions apart from supplementing his income. The process of building his practice absorbed most of his attention, and he constantly sought out opportunities to raise his profile in the Southsea community. In November of 1883 Conan Doyle became a member of the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, which met on alternate Tuesdays during the cold winter months to discuss matters of intellectual interest. The following month, he gave an address on “The Arctic Seas” before an audience of two hundred and fifty people. To illustrate his lecture Conan Doyle borrowed numerous animal specimens from a local taxidermist, some of which, technically speaking, may not have been indigenous to the Arctic Circle. The mounted animals made an impressive display nonetheless, and when the audience concluded that Conan Doyle had bagged them all himself, he suddenly found himself with an enviable reputation as a hunter.

  The Society became the cornerstone of Conan Doyle’s social life. He contributed further lectures on some of his favorite authors—Edward Gibbon, Thomas Carlyle, and George Meredith—and listened to talks on subjects ranging from astronomy to military history. Intriguingly, on one occasion Conan Doyle entertained the society by devising an ending for Charles Dickens’s unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. On another occasion, Arthur Balfour, the future prime minister, traveled down from London to give a speech on Ireland. A pair of “notorious partisans of the other side” waited outside the meeting hall to jeer at the politician, so Conan Doyle made it his business to greet the visitor as his carriage drew up. “However, the moment Balfour appeared one of them opened a huge mouth with the intention of emitting a howl of execration,” Conan Doyle recalled. “But it never got out, for I clapped my hand pretty forcibly over the orifice.” The other heckler promptly smashed Conan Doyle’s hat with his walking stick, but Balfour passed unmolested.

  At this stage, Conan Doyle preferred sidewalk scuffles to speech-making. He had no natural facility for public speaking—his manner of speech is said to have been clipped and hesitant—and had to overcome a serious case of nerves whenever he addressed the Society. “I have been told,” he wrote, “that the signal that I was about to join in the discussion was that the whole long bench on which I sat, with everyone on it, used to shake with my emotion.”

  Over time, Conan Doyle’s dogged self-promotion began to bear fruit. Dr. William Royston Pike, a fellow member of the Southsea Bowling Club, began referring patients to him, and Conan Doyle became a consultant to the Gresham Life Insurance Company, whose local manager was also a fellow bowler. In March of 1885, Dr. Pike sought Conan Doyle’s advice on a case involving a young man named Jack Hawkins, who suffered from a series of increasingly violent seizures. Conan Doyle confirmed his colleague’s grim diagnosis—Hawkins had contracted cerebral meningitis, an inflammation of the brain lining for which there was then no cure. The unhappy news placed Hawkins in a seemingly hopeless situation, as he had arrived in town only a few months earlier with his widowed mother and elder sister. No hotel or lodging would keep them once the illness reached its final stages, and Mrs. Hawkins and her daughter could not provide the care required. Motivated by compassion rather than self-interest, Conan Doyle offered a solution; he would fix up a room in his house and take Jack Hawkins on as a resident patient.

  No sooner had Conan Doyle brought Hawkins to Bush Villas than the patient’s condition took a downward turn. Conan Doyle did what he could to ease the young man’s suffering, but Hawkins died within a few days. Fortunately, Dr. Pike had seen the patient shortly before his death, and could confirm that Conan Doyle had done everything possible. Otherwise, Conan Doyle would likely have come under official scrutiny. As matters stood, the sight of a coffin emerging from the house did little to bolster the young doctor’s practice, but Conan Doyle’s concern now rested with Mrs. Hawkins and her daughter, Louisa. He rode with them in the modest funeral procession that conveyed the dead man from Bush Villas to the local cemetery. “There is great promise, I think, in the faces of the dead,” Conan Doyle wrote. “They say it is but the post-mortem relaxation of the muscles, but it is one of the points on which I would like to see science wrong.”

  By all accounts, Louisa Hawkins, the sister of Conan Doyle’s unfortunate patient, was a sweet-natured young woman with a pleasant, open face and captivating blue-green eyes. Her plight aroused protective feelings in Conan Doyle, who, even under the difficult circumstances, had not failed to note her attractions. Miss Hawkins, for her part, greatly admired the young doctor’s decency and compassion, and regretted the professional distress her brother’s condition had caused. After a decent interval, Conan Doyle asked for permission to call at the rooming house where she and her mother remained after the funeral. “Touie,” as he came to call her, joined him on his evening walks and listened with undisguised admiration as he told stories of his travels and interests.

  As the relationship progressed, Mary Doyle traveled to Southsea to meet the new young woman in her son’s life. For the timid Louisa, the prospect of meeting this formidable figure must have suggested something on the order of a military tribunal. To everyone’s relief, the Ma’am found nothing objectionable in her prospective daughter-in-law, noting with evident satisfaction that the kindly, round-faced Louisa bore a passing resemblance to herself. Once the Ma’am’s approval had been secured, no further obstacles remained. It was agreed that the wedding would take place in August.

  In his autobiography, written nearly forty years later, Conan Doyle dispenses with his courtship and wedding in the space of a single page. He twice describes his bride as “gentle and amiable,” but fails to mention her first name—leaving a lasting confusion as to whether it was Louise or Louisa. By that time he had long since remarried, and it is possible that his reticence stemmed from consideration for his second wife’s feelings. Another possibility suggests itself, however. Three years earlier, Mary Doyle and her two youngest daughters left Edinburgh to take up residence at Masongill Cottage, near Yorkshire, on an estate belonging to Bryan Waller, the Doyle family’s longtime benefactor. Waller himself also took up residence at Masongill that year, in the family manor house he inherited at the time of his father’s death five years earlier. The reasons for the move remain obscure. For Waller, it meant abandoning a none too prosperous medical career for the life of a country squire, which may well have been reason enough. Mary Doyle’s presence is more difficult to explain. Waller charged her no rent for the use of Masongill Cottage, and must also have contributed to the family’s support. His generosity surpassed all reasonable expectations of a well-meaning tenant toward his kindly landlady. The move separated Mary Doyle from her husband, which may also have been a motivation for the change of scene. Just a few months before his son’s wedding, Charles Doyle smashed out a window in an attempt to break free of Fordoun House. For the next few years, he would be held under a detention order at the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum.

 
Mary Doyle would remain on Waller’s estate for more than three decades. In time Waller would marry a local governess, but he remained devoted to his former landlady and often took his meals with her at Masongill Cottage, to the reported distress of his wife. Clearly Bryan Waller and Mary Doyle enjoyed each other’s company and had forged an enduring bond during the Spartan years when he lodged with the family in Edinburgh. The exact nature of that bond has excited considerable speculation over the years. Inevitably, it has been implied that at some stage their relationship progressed beyond mere friendship. There have also been suggestions that Mary Doyle’s youngest daughter, whose given name was Bryan Mary Julia Josephine, was in fact the child of Bryan Waller rather than Charles Doyle. While not impossible, the surmise is highly improbable. Though Waller had a grave, self-important manner that made him appear older than his years, he was in fact fifteen years younger than Mary Doyle—and only six years older than Conan Doyle. If this objection could conceivably have been overcome, Mary Doyle’s nature could not. Such a liaison would have been an affront to the strong sense of family honor she had so successfully instilled in her son. In later years, Conan Doyle would come to know the frustrations of being bound to an infirm spouse. His sense of probity, learned from his mother, precluded any possibility of violating his marriage vows.

  It seems more plausible, then, that Mary Doyle’s feelings for Bryan Waller were maternal, rather than romantic, which could well have inspired resentment on the part of Conan Doyle. As a boy, he promised her a life of comfort in her old age: “When you are old,” young Arthur had said, “you shall have a velvet dress and gold glasses and sit in comfort by the fire.” He grew up to be a rich man and was able to shower his mother with gifts and finery, but she remained at Bryan Waller’s fireside.