by Michael Sims
The next year he edited Stonyhurst’s college magazine, wrote a lot of poetry, and astonished himself by passing the matriculation exam of the University of London, the usual ending of the Stonyhurst curriculum, with honors—and Arthur’s surprised friends carried him around a playground in celebration. His view of his own prospects was changing. He had begun to feel that he had potential.
Not all his masters were impressed, however. Arthur had too long balked at the restrictions of school. When he told one professor that he was considering becoming a civil engineer, the blunt reply was “Well, Doyle, you may be an engineer, but I don’t think you will ever be a civil one.”
Despite being surrounded by the grim Church of Scotland, the Irish Doyles—originally the Anglo-Norman name D’Oil—had remained Catholic. Arthur’s father was fervent, his mother sincere while compassionately rejecting the concept of eternal hellfire. Yet, when Stonyhurst offered to remit Arthur’s tuition fees if his parents committed him as a Jesuit, his mother refused. Arthur was grateful. As a child, of course, he had accepted his parents’ religion without question. But gradually the judgmental ferocity and narrow-mindedness of his professors, along with his reading of philosophical and scientific books and articles, helped steer Arthur away from Catholicism. When he heard a prominent priest proclaim that everyone outside the Church was damned for eternity, he found himself horrified and disgusted. Gradually he was turning away from organized religion’s claustrophobic and newly minted cosmos, from its many doctrines he considered irrational and unfair. He could admire some of the church’s hallowed traditions, its incense and music, its role in ethics and upholding orderly behavior. But he could not embrace its dogma.
There followed a year at another Jesuit school, Stella Matutina, near Feldkirch, in the beautiful Vorarlberg province of western Austria, amid the snow-capped Tyrolese Alps high above the Bodensee. A measure of kindness from masters at Feldkirch began to help tame Arthur’s rebellion and anger. Here he read German until, as he told his mother jokingly, he stopped reading English books. True, when speaking quickly he might accidentally modify a neuter noun with a feminine adjective, but he progressed rapidly.
Students were required to walk three abreast during their semiweekly hikes, with every foreigner accompanied by two Germans to encourage learning the language; by the spring of 1876, Arthur found that he could make himself understood during a three-hour ambulatory chat. He claimed in a letter to his mother that he had read an eight-hundred-page German history of Europe. While stumbling often, he found himself fluent enough to perceive the occasional error in this tome—such as when the author split Admiral Hyde Parker into two admirals, one named Hyde and one named Parker.
In the school band, Arthur proved strong enough and strong-winded enough to play the bombardon, a bass tuba so large that his classmates once stuffed his pillow and sheets into its throat. Rejoicing in outdoor activity, as always, he hiked forty-two miles in the Alps with a heavy iron-tipped alpenstock on his shoulder. Back indoors, he founded and edited a handwritten school “newspaper” he titled The Feldkirchian Gazette, which he wrote in his own school notebooks in violet ink. Onto these ambitious pages he slapped the bold motto “Fear not, and put it in print,” but immediately he learned the consequences of such ambition. Thanks to his scrawled editorial protesting that the masters often read students’ letters before distributing them, the school banned Arthur’s first venture into periodicals after only two issues.
Arthur had always been not only a reader but also a writer. By the age of five, he was writing a thirty-six-word saga in large childish letters in his foolscap notebook—illustrated with marginal scrawls by the author—recounting a battle between a tiger and a man. It ended badly for the latter. A surviving fragment of this scrawled story indicates how well Arthur armed his characters: “each man carring a knife gun pistle.” The family liked to quote Arthur’s remark upon finding his protagonist vanquished so quickly: “It is very easy to get people into scrapes, and very hard to get them out again.”
On the way home in August 1876, after glimpses of Strasbourg and Basel and elsewhere, Arthur stopped in Paris. He arrived with twopence in his pocket and immediately spent one of them on a reviving drink of licorice and water. Unable to afford a cab, he left his trunk at the train station and tramped the hot summer streets along the stinking Seine toward the home of his great-uncle and godfather, Michael Conan, from whom he had inherited a middle name and a love of learning. At the foot of the Champs-Élysées, he saw the Arc de Triomphe some distance away, oriented himself, and walked until he found his uncle’s flat on the Avenue de Wagram.
Although they had never met, Michael had encouraged Arthur for years. “I shall look to his development with great interest,” Michael had written to his sister before her precocious boy had even reached his fifth birthday. He advised her to teach Arthur multiplication, division, maps, and geography before sending him to school. “As to Arthur’s future development, that, apart from Nature’s endowments, will much depend upon the mother who cherishes him and at once secures his love and respect.” Following his eighth birthday, Michael had sent Arthur a children’s history of France—enlivened with color illustrations of queens and kings in their grand robes and crowns—and assured him that, with his mother’s fluency in the language, he would soon be reading the book’s text. It had sparked the boy’s imagination.
Michael Conan turned out to be a fiery, broad-shouldered Irish intellectual, a former editor of the Art Journal, who spent the sweltering summer days in his shirtsleeves. He and Arthur got along famously. Conan encouraged his obviously intelligent grandnephew to read the American short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe, who had died in 1849 at the age of forty. Apparently he didn’t know that Arthur had admired Poe since boyhood and had kept a copy of his Tales of Mystery and Imagination at Feldkirch. In fact, back home in Edinburgh in September, Arthur was taking breaks from pre-enrollment medical study with a tutor to read Poe aloud and terrify his younger siblings.
CHAPTER 5
Athens of the North
Travellers who have searched the whole world round have found no fairer view.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE FIRM OF GIRDLESTONE
Arthur turned seventeen in the summer of 1876, about the time he returned to the picturesque city of his childhood. Edinburgh nested atop three hills in the narrow valley between the Pentlands to the south and the Firth of Forth two miles to the north and east. It was rich in adjectives for the winds that bedeviled it—scowthering and blae, nirly and snell. From some vantage points, a watcher gazing northeast across the Firth, toward where it opened into the German Ocean (as locals called the North Sea), could glimpse a beacon from the Gothic tower of a lighthouse five miles off on the Isle of May. Warning shipmasters since 1816, it had been updated twenty years later with a refractor lens that made its flame visible from afar.
Dawn mists rose from the valley until they dwindled to a plume above medieval Edinburgh Castle. Perched on a craggy basalt cliff, the castle rose several stories from the summit, which towered four hundred feet above the base. On the inland side rose a turret from whose crown of lancet windows archers had rained arrows upon besieging armies since the twelfth century.
The castle was so high that its time gun could be heard far in every direction. This civic reminder had been fired at one P.M. every day but Sundays since early 1861, before Arthur turned two, alerting Leith ship captains and New Town shop owners to set their clocks, while every man on Princes Street reached for a waistcoat pocket to check his watch. The sound carried so far from the castle that its instigator, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Scotland’s Astronomer Royal, prepared a concentric map showing the number of seconds it took the gun’s boom to reach each distance, for even more accurate timekeeping.
Prior to the invention of modern cannon, this fortress had been considered almost impregnable—and because it controlled Edinburgh, and thus Scotland, it had weathered many a siege. The castle stood so high that shepherds in
Fife to the north could turn from shearing to glimpse it like a mirage on the horizon. Mariners sailing in from the northeast could peer up at its battlements long before they reached the shore. It provided an unparalleled view of the region—northward to the jagged peaks of the Grampians, eastward across a thousand dirty rooftops toward the storied height of Arthur’s Seat, southward to the Pentlands. A travel guide to Scotland published in 1859 boasted that the view from the castle combined “in one vast expanse the richest elements of the beautiful and the sublime.” The view of the city from the sea, the mountainous terrain, and Greek Revival architecture had earned Edinburgh the nickname “Athens of the North.”
The castle cast its royal shadow across a bustling market down in the city. The drum and bugle accompanying a changing of the guard could be heard above the clatter of carriage wheels, the taunts of street urchins, the rumble of passing trains. Dense with public houses and shops, bristling with turnpike stairs and crow-stepped gables, the Grassmarket had been a public site since the fifteenth century. In Arthur’s time it was still renowned for its cattle and horse trading. The venerable White Hart Inn was there, and the Black Bull, with its marble relief columns framing the entrance, and above them the words SPIRIT J. WILKINSON MERCHANT. Next door stood the Carriers Warehouse, where one-horse wagons clustered out front, piled with goods covered in tightly stretched tarpaulins against the frequent rain. To proclaim that their wares had traveled from exotic climes, the Tobacco & Snuff Manufactory featured above its sign a bust of a turbaned man, perhaps formerly the figurehead on a ship’s prow. Beneath it, wagons uncoupled from their horses projected handy rails on which loungers could lean to smoke and gossip.
The Grassmarket had once been home to Edinburgh’s public executions, including most famously that of a fishwife named Maggie Dickinson. Hanged in 1724 for murdering her own baby, she woke during transportation of her body home. Her attendants were astonished to realize that she had passed out rather than died. Judged to have served her sentence—and possibly to have been rescued by God—she was freed. Afterward, however, hanging sentences in Scotland were revised to read “until dead.”
With the town reduced to ashes more than once, only the castle itself, and Holyrood Palace at the other end of the slanting ridge now called the Royal Mile, had withstood the flames—to be plundered later by Cromwell’s army. By the late 1870s, as Arthur attended his classes, Holyrood’s crumbled abbey stood amid gasworks and breweries, as if its Gothic entrance fronted a stage set across which the red-uniformed guard paced mechanically back and forth.
Between the Castle and the University, in hilltop Greyfriars Kirkyard, orange-breasted robins and a clowder of plump cats wove among the chiseled names of Scottish history and the iron mortsafes that had protected graves from “resurrection men” such as William Burke and William Hare, who robbed graves and murdered the poor back in the 1820s.
Clustered below and east of the castle, the dark streets of Old Town sprawled in medieval disarray—poorly bracketed upper stories bulging above greasy streets so narrow that a man walking could stretch out his arms and touch a grimy wall on either side. Once Edinburgh’s tall buildings had housed aristocracy, until crowding and plague had driven them to the suburbs. By the 1870s, however, soot-flecked washing fluttered on clothes poles jutting from the windows of once proud houses that bore above their door a scutcheon with a tarnished coat of arms.
The view from many windows was a dreary prospect of slate roofs topped with red chimneys spouting eye-smarting clouds of smoke—with now and then the rooftop scrabble of a blackened urchin sweeping a chimney. Not surprisingly, the city had held on to its Middle Scots nickname, “Auld Reekie” (Old Smokey). Not only the smoke stank. So did the foul breath of tanneries and glue factories, and the effluvia from chamber pots emptied into street carts or into the streets themselves. At least the winds that buffeted the high elevation helped to dispel the stench.
There was so little space for the city to sprawl horizontally that it had instead climbed vertically. After their social betters fled, the poor were crowded into stacks of filthy flats—on the lower floors, sometimes two abreast with pigsties or stables. By the time Arthur first toddled down the cobblestones beside his mother, many of the former slums—tottering buildings locally called lands—had fallen. The Great Fire in 1824 had burned for five days, gutting or bringing to the ground such monuments as Old Assembly Hall, as well as more than two dozen tenements—some as tall as fourteen stories, said to be the tallest in Europe—from the High Street to Borthwick’s Close, including the birthplace of James Boswell in Parliament Close. Many hovels and tenements were torn down and replaced with safer and cleaner modern housing, but poverty and crowding still defined the Old Town.
He could stand high on the wind-plagued North Bridge, which joined Old Town to the cleaner streets and neoclassical buildings of New Town, and see the monuments to civic progress and mercantile ambition that had helped turn Edinburgh into a world-renowned center of intellectual labor. He was studying medicine in part because the university boasted one of the finest medical departments in the world. In the eighteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment had flowered in this center of research and publishing—philosopher and mathematician Dugald Stewart, economist Adam Smith, geologist James Hutton, and many others. Walter Scott, Arthur’s favorite novelist in his later youth, had been born in College Wynd, by the Cowgate, not far from Arthur’s own birthplace; had lived in George Square by the university that Arthur attended every day; and had died only a generation before Arthur’s birth. Ambition and artistry were in the very air of Edinburgh.
But Edinburgh was not a refuge in which Arthur could forget his troubles. His father’s financial unreliability and the end of his career at the Office of Works placed an ever greater financial burden upon Mary. Finally, considering the limited alternatives available to a genteel woman, she decided to take in boarders. In 1875, a twenty-two-year-old medical student who was in the last half of his senior year had rented a room. Literary, poetic, but practical enough to study medicine, Bryan Charles Waller came from a respectable family in Yorkshire. He was only six years Arthur’s senior, but he seems to have soon developed a curious relationship with Mary Doyle—one about which family records later remained silent. At first Arthur liked him, and “Dr. Waller,” as Arthur called him, advised the eager young man to pursue medicine. By May 1876, just before Arthur left Feldkirch, he was telling his mother that surely Dr. Waller would agree that Arthur would have “hard work getting up the subjects” for medical school, considering his ignorance of trigonometry and the later books of Euclid. But a tutor was found and Arthur was accepted at the university.
When Arthur returned to Edinburgh in September, fresh from his last year of boarding school and eager to see his beloved Mam, he learned that she was not going to be at home. Mary would be visiting at Massongill House, Bryan Waller’s family manse in Yorkshire. Arthur was either too innocent to consider the implications or too private to mention them to anyone. For reasons that remain mysterious, it wasn’t long before Waller rose above the level of lodger to the point of paying the entire Doyle family’s rent.
Meanwhile, facing a forced retirement, Charles tried sporadically to create artwork. In 1876 he painted one of his more cheerful (and least bizarre) works: a watercolor of many colorful skaters on the frozen white Duddingston Loch. Situated under the steep southern promontory of Arthur’s Seat, the loch offered boating among swans in summer and skating by torchlight at dusk in winter. Scotland was said to be the home of ice skating as a sport, and the Edinburgh Skating Club was already over a century old. Arthur enjoyed the Edinburgh region’s football and golf, hills to be climbed, trails to be hiked, and lochs on which to curl and slide and skate. When Arthur learned from his mother that his father had left the Office of Works, he remarked that perhaps this change would permit Charles to complete his skating picture soon. But if the family had dreams of a rise in Charles’s artistic reputation following this change, th
ey were disappointed.
CHAPTER 6
No Man of Flesh and Blood
I do not think that life has any joy to offer so complete, so soul-filling as that which comes upon the imaginative lad, whose spare time is limited, but who is able to snuggle down into a corner with his book knowing that the next hour is all his own.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “JUVENILIA”
Daily, on his way to classes and the clinic, Arthur walked past a den of temptation at 54 and 55 South Bridge, in the shadow of the university: James Thin, Bookseller. Although Thin sold new books as well, the majority of his many rooms were devoted to the diverse plunder of auctions and estate sales—shelf after groaning shelf boasting the kind of serious volumes that Thin’s tradition-minded, classically trained scholars sought or were pleased to stumble upon. Only strict organization could prevent chaos among such plenty. Thus one entire room was devoted to medicine, another to theology, another to law. Thin sold few novels.
An Edinburgh institution since 1848, Thin’s shop had seen Macaulay and Carlyle browse and gossip. Diminutive, skittish Thomas de Quincey had prowled its shelves, mostly after sunset, his opium-ravaged teeth looking caved in and making his lower lip jut when he spoke with his usual fine manners. The university’s eccentric Professor John Stuart Blackie would dash across Bridge Street to inquire about books, weaving between carriages and shoppers, his black gown flapping around his knees.
The intent expressions and occasional exclamations of delight from Thin’s patrons—often whiskery old men tottering atop ladders, from which they browsed fat arcane volumes—reminded one observer of Dominie Sampson, a schoolmaster in Walter Scott’s 1815 novel Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer. Scholarship was revered in Edinburgh. The fictional Sampson was one of sixty-plus figures capering on the two-hundred-foot-tall Scott Monument, whose Gothic Revival excesses on Princes Street celebrated Edinburgh’s favorite contemporary writer.
