Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle's Backstory

Early life

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh on May 22, 1859, the second of the ten children of Charles Altamont Doyle, a civil servant, and Mary Foley Doyle; his parents were Irish Catholics.⁴⁵ From the age of nine he boarded at Stonyhurst, a Jesuit school in Lancashire, where he was a strong cricketer and often in trouble for his temper.⁷⁴

Medicine

He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh from 1876 to 1881.⁶ One of his teachers, Dr. Joseph Bell, impressed him with how much he could deduce from close observation, and Bell became the model for Sherlock Holmes’s methods.⁷⁴ As a student he sailed as doctor on the whaler Hope to the waters off Greenland, and after graduating he was ship’s surgeon on a voyage to West Africa.⁸⁶ In 1882 he set up a practice in Southsea, near Portsmouth; patients were few, and he began writing to bring in money.⁶⁴

Sherlock Holmes

A Study in Scarlet, which introduced Holmes and Dr. Watson, appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887, and The Sign of Four followed in 1890.⁴ In 1891 he began a series of Holmes stories in The Strand Magazine and left medicine to write full time.⁵ He soon tired of the detective and killed him off in “The Final Problem” in December 1893, but public demand brought Holmes back, first in The Hound of the Baskervilles (serialized 1901–02) and then in new stories through 1926.⁷⁶⁴

Other books and public life

Doyle expected to be remembered for his historical novels, among them The White Company (1891) and its companion Sir Nigel (1906), and he also wrote the Brigadier Gerard stories of the Napoleonic wars and the Professor Challenger books that began with The Lost World (1912).⁴⁹ He married Louisa Hawkins in 1885; she died in 1906, and he then married Jean Leckie.⁴ During the Boer War he worked as a volunteer doctor at a field hospital in Bloemfontein in 1900.⁸ He was knighted in 1902: Britannica connects the honour to that hospital work and other war services, while Doyle himself believed it was for his writing defending Britain’s part in the war.⁴⁸ He twice stood for Parliament without success, and he campaigned for George Edalji and Oscar Slater, two men he believed had been wrongly convicted.⁸⁷

Spiritualism and last years

The death of his son Kingsley in the First World War deepened his interest in psychic phenomena, and from The New Revelation (1918) on he wrote and lectured for spiritualism, which he considered his most important work.⁵⁴ He died on July 7, 1930, at Windlesham, his home in Crowborough, Sussex.⁴ He was buried in its rose garden and later reburied with his wife in the churchyard at Minstead, Hampshire.⁸

The Hound of the Baskervilles

At a glance