The Many Lives of Arthur Conan Doyle

What to do when your medical practice doesn't have enough patients? You could sail the world, campaign on behalf of psychics, run for a seat in Parliament... and, of course, pioneer the mystery genre.

Nov 14, 2024

Photograph of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Walter Benington ca. 1914. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Arthur Conan Doyle was in a serious pickle.

He had done everything right! He dutifully completed his education, received several medical degrees from the University of Edinburgh, studied botany at the Royal Botanic Garden, and gained experience as a doctor aboard two different ships. At the tender age of twenty-three, he had traveled the world, published a short story, and finally settled in Portsmouth to open a private practice.1

There was just one problem: doctors need patients, and Doyle hardly had any.

The young Arthur couldn’t fail now. He had known the turbulence of poverty as a child, and his inability to establish a private practice could not stand in the way of the bright future that surely belonged to him. Doyle2 returned to his writing, pushed past numerous rejections, and at the age of twenty-seven, he invented the most famous detective in the world.

Along the way, he launched (and lost) political campaigns, started a rifle club, received a knighthood, and became a leading figure in the Spiritualist movement. He played cricket and football; he boxed and skied. In his words, “I have known what it was to be a poor man and I have known what it was to be fairly affluent. I have sampled every kind of human experience.”3

Today, he is best remembered as the author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries and an early architect of the mystery genre. Not as many readers know how truly varied his life was, and how all of his escapades informed his beloved detective stories.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859. His home was a small apartment at No. 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, where he lived with his parents and nine other siblings (three of whom did not survive childhood). His family was Irish, and many of his relatives were affluent, influential figures. His grandfather, John Doyle, left Dublin for London at the age of twenty and eventually became a successful artist; John Doyle was a major pioneer of political cartoons in Regency England. Arthur’s uncles also found success in the arts both in Ireland and England.4

Unfortunately for Arthur, his father was incapable of building the same security for his family. Charles Doyle was an alcoholic, and his children grew up bouncing from flat to flat, living in either squalid tenement housing or bunking with relatives.

When Arthur was nine, his wealthy uncles intervened and offered to send him to a Catholic boarding school. It was a grueling experience riddled with physical abuse, meals of mainly bread and milk, and worst of all (in Doyle’s view), a very old-fashioned curriculum. The school only taught rhetoric, algebra, geometry, classics, and basic skills. An older Doyle would later reflect that his school’s approach was “calculated to leave a lasting abhorrence of the subjects.”5

“Holmes gave me a sketch of the events.” Illustration by Sidney Paget for *The Adventure of Silver Blaze*, a Sherlock Holmes tale that appeared in *The Strand Magazine* in December 1892. Via Wikimedia Commons.

But it was at boarding school where he nurtured his love of creative writing and sports. When he graduated at sixteen, his uncles sent him to a more laid-back Catholic school in Austria, and Doyle continued cultivating his interest in storytelling. Meanwhile, his immediate family’s situation deteriorated further, and his father Charles was shortly after interred in an asylum.

With this pressure to secure financial stability for his family, Doyle applied to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh—at the time, one of the best medical schools in the world. It was there that he met the lauded Joseph Bell, a Scottish surgeon and professor who chose Doyle to be his assistant at the Royal Infirmary. Bell was a master of deductive reasoning, and his lessons would inspire Doyle when he later crafted the character of Sherlock Holmes.6

In addition to receiving three medical degrees (Bachelor of Medicine, Master of Surgery, and finally, Doctor of Medicine), Doyle studied botany at Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden. His examinations of poisonous plants would help him formulate the murder plots in his mysteries.7

It was also at this time that he managed to publish a short story, “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,” in the Chambers Journal—the Edinburgh magazine in which Thomas Hardy also made his debut. Even as Doyle continued apprenticing with various doctors, he continued publishing tales of mystery and adventure. The rejections outweighed the acceptances, but he persevered.

It was writing that would save him later, after he came to the conclusion that operating a private practice wasn’t going to provide him the security he needed. One has to imagine that the slow and steady life of a Victorian town physician paled in comparison to the years that proceeded. After finishing his studies, Doyle served as the ship’s surgeon on a whaler, just when the whaling industry reached its twilight and petroleum-based products took its place. Doyle soon discovered the brutality of the industry—a “murderous harvest,” in his words.8 His journey with the whaling crew took him to the Arctic circle and introduced him to equal-parts thrill and danger.

His next appointment aboard the Mayumba, a passenger and shipping vessel that sailed down the West African coast, provided more adventures—and crucially, just enough savings to start his own practice in Portsmouth. Fiction was supposed to supplement his main income as a doctor. Instead, fiction would become his greatest source of revenue. He continued publishing short stories at the encouragement of his new wife, Louisa Hawkins. After his failure to find a publisher for his first novel, he managed to find one willing to take on his second: A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes tale.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, portrait by spirit photographer Ada Deane ca. 1922. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The reviews were positive enough to warrant a sequel, this time in Lippincott’s Monthly, an American periodical that hoped to expand overseas. Doyle was invited to dinner with its editor and another up-and-coming writer, Oscar Wilde. By the end of their meal, Wilde had agreed to write the novel that would become The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Doyle would write The Sign of Four.

With this new contract, Doyle found his audience. He followed up The Sign of Four with numerous short stories featuring his brilliant detective, which were published in the Strand Magazine. His fame (and his fortunes) skyrocketed. “Sherlock Holmes” became a household name, and Doyle’s other writing projects increasingly fell in the detective’s shadow.

Doyle’s influence eventually stretched to the realm of politics. He served as a volunteer physician in the Second Boer War and later received a knighthood, partially for his public defense of Britain’s role in the deeply controversial conflict—over 20,000 Boer civilians and 20,000 Black Africans died in British concentration camps during the war. Interestingly, Doyle later campaigned fiercely against Leopold II of Belgium’s colonial regime, penning the influential Crime of the Congo in 1909. He was also a staunch supporter of the First World War.

The part of his legacy that continues to perplex readers was his leading role in the Spiritualist movement. (Last month, I published an essay about the origins and development of Spiritualism.) I myself am not so mystified. Spiritualism attracted a wide range of thinkers, including Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the day.9 The theory of evolution shattered the public’s worldview, but Spiritualism offered a home for those who had grown distanced from traditional religion. Doyle’s early negative experiences at his Catholic boarding school likely didn’t help. His commitment to Spiritualism strengthened as he aged, and he wrote extensively in support of psychics and the existence of supernatural phenomena.

It would be impossible to detail the sheer extent of Doyle’s passions. What stands out to me, personally, is that he created a character of such mythic proportions that Holmes has taken on a life of his own. I knew who Sherlock Holmes was before I knew of Doyle. Holmes occupies an archetypal role in the public’s imagination. He is the ultimate detective, as emblematic of the mystery genre as King Arthur is for medieval romance. In film and television adaptations, Holmes has been portrayed by actors ranging from Basil Rathbone and Peter Cushing to Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Despite the fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived until the year 1930, it is difficult to visualize him outside of the late Victorian period. It is even harder to separate him from his famous creation—upon his death, newspapers headlined his obituary as the “Creator of Sherlock Holmes,” or “of Sherlock Holmes fame.” The Daily Herald noted, “One might well express his passing in the phrase, ‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is dead! Long live Sherlock Holmes!’”10

But Doyle deserves to be remembered in his own right: for his curiosity, his intrepid spirit, and his role in bringing the mystery genre to new heights. Authors today can learn from his adventurous life—to produce memorable stories, even the most devoted writers must find time in the open air, away from their desks.