by Michael Sims
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At first he could not afford to have the gas turned on, but soon it was available in his bedroom and kitchen and hall; downstairs the consulting room was fitted for gas but the waiting room was not. Once it was on, Arthur rigged a platform above the jet on the wall so that it would support a small pan. He cooked many a slice of bacon this way, and felt that with tea and bread it made a quite acceptable meal. Now and then he splurged on a saveloy, a spicy sausage originally made from pig brains. Preoccupied with language, history, and medicine, he probably knew that the word saveloy had descended from the Latin word cerebellum.
Desperate to attract patients, Arthur peered down at the street through wooden Venetian blinds, counting passersby who stopped to read the brass nameplate he had hung on the railing before his entryway. One day twenty-eight people paused in twenty-five minutes, the next day twenty-four in only fifteen. He put up a second plate, this one confiding that he offered free consulting hours from ten to one on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—“to get,” he wrote to his mother, “the good will of the poor.”
It wasn’t long, however, before he discovered that few patients dropped in during free hours. And he worried that offering such a discount might lower his professional status in the neighborhood. A friendly fellow physician nearby, William Roylston Pike, advised Arthur—perhaps self-servingly—to take down the sign, arguing that such a ploy might prove helpful in some areas but that it could be counterproductive in an exclusive neighborhood such as Southsea.
Arthur also became friends with Dr. William Henry Kirton, a young dentist whose office was across the street, and Kirton recommended him to patients. Fledgling dentists had an easier time attracting business because, unlike physicians, they were legally permitted to advertise. One Southsea dentist paid every week to have his name run in large type along the margins of the local directory’s advertisement pages. Arthur could not employ such lures. He had been at Bush Villas for six days before his first patient appeared—a woman seeking a vaccination. He spent two shillings and sixpence purchasing the requested vaccine from London, but the woman could pay only one and six. Realizing the irony in this transaction, he confided to a family friend that many more such patients would result in his selling his newly acquired furniture.
On his first evening in Southsea, Arthur had been out strolling when he came upon a rough lout kicking a woman. Arthur intervened and later reported that he “emerged from the fray without much damage.” To his surprise, one of his first patients was this man, who clearly did not recognize his former opponent. Arthur doctored him, charged him a pittance, and sent him on his way.
Gradually other patients trickled in. The first were either too poor to pay their usual doctor or simply curious about the newcomer. Most physicians earned a high percentage of their income by selling drugs to patients, and Arthur counted upon this tradition. From shelves in the back room, stocked with medicaments bought wholesale on tick, he dispensed enough to pay for his groceries—if not enough to contribute substantially to his rent.
At times patients fell into his lap. “A man had the good taste to fall off his horse the other day just in front of the window,” he wrote his mother, “and the intelligent animal rolled on him.” He quickly doctored the victim, and soon the story was in the local papers—a useful flurry of free advertising.
Usually confident, even cocky, Arthur was discovering in himself a talent for self-promotion, and he knew that most of all he needed to get into the community and let his prospective patients see him as their neighbor. He enjoyed meeting new people. Fond of colorful characters—and quick to turn them into anecdotes for his letters and even fictional characters for the stories he was beginning to write—he came to know many of the local oddballs.
One tall old neighbor whose haughty scowl reminded Arthur of a horse would sit grandly in her window, as still as a cameo, until one of her unpredictable fits inspired her to skim a china plate out the window at an innocent passerby on the street. Whenever she experienced one of these outbursts, she would bestow some of her prized pottery upon Arthur—only to demand it back when she calmed down. Once he kept a pottery jug for his troubles, although she complained. With other neighbors he sometimes bartered medical care for food. Arthur felt guilty knowing that when the epileptic grocer had a new seizure, it meant afternoon tea and butter for Dr. Conan Doyle.
Arthur also faced many sad experiences as a young doctor. Once a poor woman begged him to tend her daughter, whom he found lying on a rickety cot in their modest sitting room. Holding a candle, he bent over the bed, shocked to find by the flickering light that the patient was a young woman—she turned out to be nineteen—with pained brown eyes and tormented-looking, unnaturally thin arms and legs.
“Oh, if God would only take her!” moaned her mother.
Arthur later recalled how such painful experiences helped turn him away from the traditional religion of his upbringing and boarding school. He lost any sense that life in this world is a spiritual obstacle course leading to the next, and as a result, he found himself no longer able to believe the hoary old stories about a benevolent God.
CHAPTER 11
A Wealth of Youth and Pluck
I found that I could live quite easily and well on less than a shilling per day, so I could hold out for a long period.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES
Arthur’s brother, Innes, arrived in mid-July 1882, traveling with the rolled-up carpet that Mary Doyle had sent to smarten up her elder son’s bare consulting room. Only nine years old, dark-haired, clad in knickers, Innes lit up the eight-room house with energy and enthusiasm. Arthur had invited him, offering to take over the cost of supporting him, with the idea that his little brother would help around the house and office. Eager to circumvent his mother’s doubts, Arthur assured her that Portsmouth was a “far healthier town” than Edinburgh.
He had first requested that his mother send his fourteen-year-old sister Constance. He agreed with the common idea that a physician lost face with patients if he answered the office door himself, and he was eager to assign this task to one of his siblings. When Mary Doyle vetoed the idea of sending her young daughter, Arthur badgered her into sending Innes instead. Although he was fond of his siblings and hoped to reduce his mother’s financial burden, he also wanted help in presenting himself from the first as a successful physician. Always sensitive to how others perceived him, he didn’t even want to be seen polishing his own brass nameplate out front, so he sneaked out to do it late at night. Hoping to look older and more impressive, he had grown a mustache.
The morning after the boy’s arrival, while Arthur got the teakettle boiling over a reluctant fire and prepared cold salmon and bread with butter and marmalade, Innes rushed out to buy a newspaper. The government of Egypt was in turmoil and Britain had dispatched troops to guard the Suez Canal, which had connected the Red Sea and the Mediterranean since its decade of construction was completed in 1869. Perhaps imitating his big brother, Innes was already preoccupied with the fortunes of Britain’s sprawling empire. Some days they waited outside a newspaper office for the day’s issue, with its fresh news of the bombardment of Alexandria. Innes found the parading soldiers at the Victoria Barracks stirring and inspiring. Some days he wandered down to the beach on his own, volunteering to help fishermen on their boats.
Arthur enjoyed the company of his siblings, and of children in general. In the summer of 1877, he had taken his sisters Lottie and Conny along on a holiday ramble with his Stonyhurst friend Jimmy Ryan to the Isle of Arran, in the Firth of Clyde on the western coast of Scotland. There he was surprised to encounter, of all people, Dr. Joe Bell from Edinburgh. Two years later, while working in the Midlands as assistant to Dr. Reginald Hoare, he had spent his spare time entertaining the physician’s six- and ten-year-old children by making paper cutouts of French Zouave soldiers—distinctive and colorful in baggy trousers and short jackets—and the more familiar English Guardsmen with their sas
hes and tall fur hats. His imagination leapt quickly to military images. At Hodder at the age of nine, he had mailed home toy French foot soldiers as gifts for his sisters.
Arthur and Innes had a good time together. “I am very happy to know that I have a little brother,” Arthur had written home from Stonyhurst, at the age of fourteen, in response to his mother’s letter about Innes’s birth, and he had grown ever more fond of the boy’s company. Most evenings in Southsea, the beautiful warm weather lured Arthur and Innes outdoors. Arthur led treks for miles down winding streets, along docks where foreign ships’ oddly colored flags snapped in the wind, past both recent artillery fortifications and antique long-barreled cannon called sulverin. The military history of Britain cast its shadow over the island—and, to Arthur’s patriotic and imaginative eyes, lent it glamour. Founded in the twelfth century by a Norman merchant, Portsmouth had grown slowly for three centuries. Then Southsea had grown up around, and been named for, one of Henry VIII’s “device forts,” built in the mid-1500s to protect the southern coast, like Pendennis Castle in Cornwall or Yarmouth guarding the western end of the Solent on the sloping shores of the nearby Isle of Wight. For centuries Portsmouth had been a center of royal shipbuilding. Everywhere Arthur and Innes turned, history flavored the town.
Arthur enrolled Innes at Hope House Day School in Green Road, under master Thomas Henry Vickery. Rudyard Kipling, who was six years Arthur’s junior, had attended the same institution, which he later described as “a terrible little dayschool.” But the good-humored lad settled into his new routine. Whenever he was home from school, Innes brought life and humor into the house. From the beach he brought home crabs that scuttled from room to room until Arthur or Innes didn’t see one and accidentally stepped on it with a sickening crunch.
Although it seems to have had little effect on his energy, Innes arrived with a lump in his neck along his throat. Probably a temporary glandular problem, it quickly improved. Arthur thought that spending much of his time outdoors—the boy soon glowed with ruddy health—contributed more to Innes’s recovery than did the doses Arthur administered of syrupus ferri iodidi, a greenish iron-rich medicament that physicians and druggists concocted for a variety of ailments.
By the middle of August, Innes was writing to their mother, “We have vaxenated a baby and got hold of a man with consumtion.” He also recounted how a Gypsy pulled his cart, loaded with chairs and baskets, up to their door and began urgently ringing the bell. Later Arthur thought that this farcical experience epitomized his chaotic early days in Southsea.
“Go away!” Arthur shouted downstairs toward the door, but the man kept ringing.
Innes went to the door, lifted up the flap of the letter box, and yelled out a repetition of Arthur’s command.
The man swore at Innes and demanded to see the doctor.
Innes ran upstairs to tell Arthur that the Gypsy was a patient. Abruptly changing his tone, Arthur hurried downstairs to open the door. It turned out that the poor man was so determined because his child was suffering from measles.
“We got sixpence out of them,” Innes wrote to his mother.
Under the circumstances, Innes naturally absorbed his older brother’s preoccupation with money. Always looking over his shoulder at creditors, Arthur kept careful tallies of income and expenses; in letters to his mother he often itemized his parsimonious budgeting. Sometimes, when Mary Doyle tried to send money, Arthur refused, once writing, “Lord knows I am as poor as Job but have a wealth of youth and pluck.” During the same time, he confidently declared to her, “There is nothing I put my mind to do that I have not done most completely.”
Despite his swagger, often he accepted her contributions or even requested help. Prior to his arrival in Portsmouth, he had insisted that she lend him £5 by return mail, but he was optimistic that soon he would not need to beg for help. He prophesied that within five years his annual income would rise to £1,000. During his first difficult months in Southsea, however, he went so far as to answer an advertisement he saw for a physician who would be willing to move to the Terai, in Nepal south of the Himalayas.
Ashamed of his poverty, and still a volatile young man, Arthur was quick to turn shame into anger when presented with a bill—as when he swore at a clothes cleaner and threw money at him. To his mother he confessed that his indignation at being dunned was exceeded only by his outrage when a patient dared to object to his own demand for prompt payment. Once he ended a letter to a friend by remarking that he saw a “taxgatherer” coming and needed to bid her farewell so that he could hide under a table.
During his first year in Southsea, Arthur earned only £154, too little to even require a tax payment, as he noted on a form to the government. The form was returned with a scrawled commentary: Most unsatisfactory. Arthur wrote underneath those words I entirely agree and mailed it back. Inevitably such cheek led to an audit, but Arthur’s scribbled ledger of evidence resulted in a draw, and he departed on good terms with the laughing auditors.
However low his income, Arthur had to have access to books, so he joined a circulating library. Libraries had come a long way since the chained tomes of Renaissance Oxford. By the 1880s many kinds of libraries had sprouted to meet the growing demand during a century of rising literacy: subscription libraries, reading societies, circulating libraries, collections for medical schools and botanical gardens, book clubs devoted to poetry or fiction. Arthur read a great deal of history and science—not limited to medicine—but he also had an almost insatiable appetite for fiction.
After centuries in which poetry had represented the summit of literary achievement, fiction had climbed in the nineteenth century to a position as the most popular form of literature. It was also ever more critically esteemed, especially after the publication of such monumental works as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace in 1869, George Eliot’s Middlemarch a couple of years later, and Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now in 1875. “We have become a novel-reading people, from the Prime Minister down to the last-appointed scullery maid,” Trollope had observed in 1870, at a lecture in Edinburgh. “Poetry we also read and history, biography and the social and political news of the day. But all our other reading put together hardly amounts to what we read in novels.”
By Arthur’s time, all but the wealthiest readers joined libraries and borrowed novels rather than purchased them. Earlier major writers such as Charles Dickens and his primary rival, William Makepeace Thackeray, had issued most of their novels in monthly (or sometimes weekly) installments, and Trollope’s angry and satirical The Way We Live Now had been one of the last significant publications in that form. Periodical publication also had its faults. But most British writers of book-length fiction in the 1880s targeted the market dominated by Charles Edward Mudie and his vastly popular Mudie’s Lending Library and Mudie’s Subscription Library. The library trade was dominated by what had long been known as “three-decker” novels, after the three decks of seventeenth-century warships. The preceding century had seen popular novels such as Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield issued in two volumes and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa in seven. But such variety had been boxed into uniformity by the powerful libraries, which now all but insisted upon the three-volume format that had dominated the fiction market throughout Arthur’s youth.
Digressions and subplots proliferated not because of a particular taste for literary corpulence but out of authors’ need to fill the space that Mudie demanded. Many novelists conceived and planned their tales with the requisite format in mind. When Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy’s fourth novel and first commercial success, was published in 1874, the American novelist and critic Henry James complained, “The work has been distended to its rather formidable dimensions by the infusion of a large amount of conversational and descriptive padding.” In a private letter, Charles Reade, the author of Arthur’s favorite novel, The Cloister and the Hearth, had complained of the “childish egotism” motivating writers such as “the Tri-Volumniors.”
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Arthur worked hard but was not entirely deprived of a social life. He joined the Literary and Scientific Society and attended its meetings and dances. He played cricket. Friends who visited included Claud Currie, whose inability to ship out on the Hope had opened the door for Arthur’s great Arctic adventure a couple of years earlier. One friend pronounced number 1, Bush Villas, to be “palatial” and “charming,” and called the consulting room “swagger”; another was surprised by the shortage of cutlery but impressed with the site’s potential as a medical practice.
As he settled into a new routine in Southsea, Arthur began to concentrate spare time on writing. Late into the night he scrawled stories—imitative at first, clearly beginner’s work, but stories. Carefully he copied them onto fresh foolscap, rolled them up, inserted them into mailing cylinders, and entrusted them to the postal service, which promptly returned them—like, he thought, paper boomerangs. Still, now and then he tasted success, enough to encourage him. He crafted some stories to order—one about a Derby sweepstakes, which he wrote in imitation of the style of the popular Welsh writer Rhoda Broughton, author of novels such as Not Wisely, but Too Well and the popular supernatural story “The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth.”
Arthur sent a brief story called “That Veteran” to All the Year Round. This legendary weekly could still honestly run atop every double-page spread of its two-column pages the heading Conducted by | Charles Dickens, twelve years after the beloved author’s death, because his son, Charles Junior, had inherited the editorship. Finally, after months of waiting, Arthur received a check for £2.50, about half what he expected. Even after all this time, the magazine postdated the check by four days—a practice, a bank clerk informed Arthur when he went to deposit it, not only illegal but also a howling alarm of bad credit. It did not seem a good omen for his writing career.
