Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters

Oh I nearly forgot, when I was coming here my boat stopped six hours in Dublin so my choice lay between my old CB of an uncle & Heylesbury Street. Away I went for the latter but to save my life I couldn’t remember the number. I knocked up a few landladies without success, & was despairing when I raised my eyes and lo I saw Muggins* (#ulink_b545172a-658a-5c29-847c-3f6ebc2ceca4) while he was yet far off. I walked quickly up to him in the street keeping my head down, and then pulled up right in front of him. If you had heard the yell he gave—he sprang into the air—‘Oh Murther—Oh Great God—Is it yourself? Sure it’s not now, is it?’ We had a great day together.

to Mary Doyle LISMORE, JULY 1881

I suppose dear old Tottie is with you by this time, and that Lottie is knocking around. I am beginning to get in the fidgets to come over to them. As you supposed my silence was due to the copying of my yarn. 40 foolscap pages, closely written it covered. You are right about the ‘murders’. I decided on calling it ‘The Gully of Bluemansdyke’ a true Colonial story. I sent it in yesterday with an appropriate letter to the editor. I think it very good but he may think otherwise. It has more individuality of style about it than any of my former lucubrations.

I am jogging along here very happily. I don’t like Mary at all. She is very selfish, cold & generally objectionable. Miss A is a puddingheaded idiot in spite of her bursaries &c. She is the greatest fool in petticoats that ever I met, so help me Bob! The old lady is a darling but rather inclined to yield to Mary’s absurd whims & tempers. Letts is an angel I’d marry her as soon as look at her if I was older or she was younger. I am thinking of performing the same cheerful ceremony with a splendid creature. By Jove! Such a beauty! Miss Elmore Weldon. We have been flirting hard for a week so that things are about ripe. There are two or three other girls about who I am longing to marry also, so that I am in a pitiable condition—perfectly demoralized. There’s a Miss Jeffers from Kilkenny, a little darling with an eye like a gimlet who has stirred up my soul to its lowest depths. I am to meet her & Elmore today and they are to show me the beauties of the ‘New Walk’.

The holiday’s end forced him to think hard about his future again. He visited George Budd in Bristol in September, and turned their ‘joyous riotous’ time into a hilarious short story, ‘Crabbe’s Practice’. But he found Budd’s practice there on the rocks, and suddenly a medical life at sea looked more realistic.

That idea was scuppered by a second cruise as a ship’s surgeon, from October 1881 to January 1882, this time on the steamship Mayumba, carrying cargo and passengers to and from Madeira and West Africa.

It was another big adventure, and also gave him welcome time to read, recording in a diary impressions of Carlyle (‘a grand rugged intellect [but] I fancy Poetry, Art and all the little amenities of life were dead letters to him’) and Oliver Wendell Holmes (‘a man after my own heart. He talks about Pathological Piety and Tuberculous Virtues—rather good’).

But he later called it the four most miserable months of his life. The heat sapped his energy for writing (‘Oh for a pair of skates and a long stretch of ice’). And at Lagos, in present-day Nigeria, a tropical fever brought ‘nightmare fog from which I emerged as weak as a child.…I had barely sat up before I heard that another victim who got it at the same time was dead.’

It’s no joke when the doctor of one of these isolated gunboats himself falls ill. You might think it easy for him to prescribe for himself but this fever knocks you down like a club, and you haven’t strength left to brush a mosquito off your face. I had a touch of it at Lagos, and I know what I am telling you.

—‘A Medical Document’

In the dim light of a foggy November day the sick room was a gloomy spot, but it was that gaunt, wasted face staring at me from the bed which sent a chill to my heart. His eyes had the brightness of fever, there was a hectic flush upon either cheek, and dark crusts clung to his lips; the thin hands upon the coverlet twitched incessantly, his voice was croaking and spasmodic. He lay listlessly as I entered the room, but the sight of me brought a gleam of recognition to his eyes. ‘Well, Watson, we seem to have fallen upon evil days, ‘said he in a feeble voice, but with something of his old carelessness of manner.

—‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’

He liked little that he saw in West Africa, and returned home convinced that it was better to be a poor man in England than a rich one there. His letters home went not only to his mother, but also to Amy Hoare and yet another ‘second mother’ of his, Mrs Charlotte Drummond of Edinburgh, with whose daughter Jessie, slightly older than him, and son Tom, slightly younger, he had grown up.

to Mary Doyle LIVERPOOL, OCTOBER 1881

It is very late and I am very lazy tired (amendment of the Doctor’s) so excuse brevity. Have paid debts and ordered £5 to be sent you in a few days, after the ship sails. Mrs H & the Doctor have come down to see me off, like bucks they are, and Mrs Dawe like another buck has put up the lot of us. My hat left very little change out of a pound, but thank heaven I hadn’t to get brass buttons—they are very expensive. Then I had to pay 6/ for cartridges for a splendid little revolving rifle the Doctor has given me. The Captain’s name is Duncan Henderson Wallace so there is not much question about his nationality. The officers seem decent fellows and the ship looks a bit of a tub and very dirty but a good sea-going craft—which is sadly needed in these troublesome times. Goodbye, old lady, take care of yourself—you will hear from me sooner than you think. Publishers owe you something like this

This is an approximation but it is under rather than over the mark. So glad you wrote to Elmore.

Goodbye Sweetheart Goodbye. I am not going to catch anything, but will bring my liver back as I took it out.

to Amy Hoare ‘DE PROFUNDIS, OCTOBER THE SOMETHING OR OTHER 1881’

A light blue sky and a dark blue sea—a groundswell from the Sou’west, and Madeira bearing S.S.E. and three hundred miles off. My carcase is in the saloon of the good ship Mayumba and my heart is away over the seas with a little woman in Aston—I am afraid I am very disloyal to Ireland for my first letter and my first thoughts go to your husband and yourself—my best of friends. Ah well—I mustn’t get lugubrious over it, what do you think?

Here goes for an account of all we have done, said and suffered—more particularly the last, though really it all amounts to very little—I could write a large and interesting book about what we have not seen, and done. We have not seen shoals of porpoises or flying fish, which are the proper things to see on such voyages, neither have we seen sea serpents or water-spouts, or drifting wood from wrecks—in fact we have been done out of all our amusements. We started as you know in half a gale of wind—I felt bad enough I assure you in spite of my cigarette, and we steamed away to Holyhead, where as the wind freshened to a whole gale we lay to for the night. Hardly any of those people on the tender came with us, I’ll tell you who we had aboard. There is a parson, his wife and two kids bound for Madeira, Fairfax his name is. He is so thin that he disappears from sight almost when he gets his thin edge towards you, but if you turn him round and hold him up against the light you can make him out distinctly. You never saw such a theological skeleton, his real mission on earth was to be a billiard cue, but he is a very gentlemanly fellow, with ritualistic propensities which I foster for your sake. His mind is a hothouse plant, however, and I think very little frost would change his opinions. His wife is of another stamp however, a bustling plucky little woman, too anxious about her kids to be seasick even. We next come to Miss Fox, a dark girl (brunette I mean, not negro) going out to her father at Sierra Leone, she is very well educated, but of doubtful age, comes from Paris, and is rather good fun. Then there is a frightful horror (Mrs McSomething) going to Madeira for her lungs—straight in the hair, and long in the face—she wouldn’t let me examine her chest—‘young doctors take such liberties, you know, my dear’—so I have washed my hands of her. Then there is Mrs Rowbotham, a pretty lively little English woman going to her husband in Sierra Leone, she is game for any amount of flirtation, and I expect we will have her indignant ‘Charley’ boarding us with a double barreled shotgun at the end of our voyage—of course I am not like these publicans who are also sinners—I stand by, like God at the bar fight (you know that anecdote, don’t you?). Our other passengers are a negro Wills (the Doctor was quite right, he is rolling in money—he is an unmitigated cad though, fancy pressing a lady to take a toothpick after dinner)—and a brute of a negress, bearing the aristocratic old name of Smith, a vile dirty woman. She is to marry a black missionary when she gets out if I don’t poison her first—fancy anyone kissing those thick cracked purple lips—ugh! There you have the lot of us photographed, with a very decent set of jolly young Britons as officers.

Well we started from Holyhead in the morning with one of those delicious sea breezes which seem to dislocate your stomach and disarrange your lights—(to use Sykes’ expression). Everybody, bar myself, was taken grievously ill, and the Stewardess announced that she was going to die, so you may imagine we wobbled. They were a merrie family, they were. There was a pleasant want of pride about them. When they couldn’t get a basin they put up with a bucket. That evening we sighted the Tuskar light on the Waterford coast—ah, the dear old country, excuse a pensive tear,

(there is a tear)—next day were sailing down channel—passengers all assumed a lively pea green colour, which was a pleasant contrast to the blue of the basin which each one hugged. Nothing of interest was observable either from the starboard or larboard bow as Mr McCawber says in David Copperfield. We had a cock forward who swore at the weather, until the ship was perfectly putrid with blasphemy. Indeed he and I seemed to be the only lively people aboard. Next day was decently fine for the Bay of Biscay, but towards evening it blew a terrible blow, and by 10 pm it was a hurricane with seas running like mountains. It was a lovely sight, I was up on the saloon deck half the night watching it, but I had to hang on like Billy—the water was very phosphorescent, and when we shipped a sea, which we did about twice a minute, the decks were like liquid fire. When I went to bed a great wave came washing into my cabin, and floated all my property over the floor, so the cock and I spent the rest of the night in heartfelt blasphemy. We lost some sails but next day the wind died away and now we are close to Madeira with a tropical sun, and a favourable wind. My ‘merrie family’ are all on deck, except that odious negress, and they seem to be pretty lively to judge from the laughter I hear. We started a game of whist last night which is the first approach to liveliness we have manifested.

I have been teatotal, bar one glass of brandy and a cocktail, since I saw you, and have only smoked half a dozen pipes. My love to the Doctor, I shall never forget his kindness in coming to Liverpool—it made a difference to my whole voyage I am sure.

to Charlotte Drummond BONNY RIVER, NIGERIA, NOVEMBER 22, 1881

This is the most blackguardly country that ever was invented, I am counting the very days until we turn our prow homewards once again—Alas it is a long time yet. Never was there such a hole of a place, it is good for nothing but swearing at. I am just recovering from a smart attack of fever, and am so weak that the pen feels like an oar though I was only on my back for three days. It is our summer here, and while you are having crisp frosty mornings (it makes my feet tingle to think of them) we have an apoplectic looking sun glaring down at us in a disgusting manner, while there is never a breath of air, save when a whiff of miasma is bourne off the land. Here we are steaming from one dirty little port to another dirty little port, all as like as two peas, and only to be distinguished by comparing the smell of the inhabitants, though they all smell as if they had become prematurely putrid and should be buried without unnecessary delay. We have come 2000 miles down the coast now, and a hundred yards might stand for the lot—a row of breakers—a yellow strip of sand and a line of palm trees—never any [page missing]* (#ulink_5ce836e9-c5f7-5d3e-a321-c0a4bbbda89a)

…closer together. She [Elmore Weldon] has £1300 and I have nothing except my brains, so how on earth we are going to knock it up I don’t know. I hate long engagements, but I have to wait like Mr Micawber for something to turn up.

Give my love to Jessie—I believe those days when she taught me to dance, and I helped to teach her to play lawn tennis, were about the happiest I ever had in my life. Believe me, I often think of you both, and of all the old Glee Club—Alas how is our glory fallen & our members scattered, & I the most scattered of the lot. Give my kind regards to the Websters—or perhaps you had better not, as it might come round to Mama’s ears I had written, & I don’t want her to see a grumbling letter, else she would begin hunting up a coffin for me & writing obituary notices.

to Mary Doyle LIVERPOOL, JANUARY 1882

Just a line to say that I have turned up all safe, after having had the African fever, been nearly eaten by a shark, and as a finale the Mayumba going on fire between Madeira and England, so that at one time it looked like taking to our boats and making for Lisbon. However we got it out, and here we are safe and sound. I intend to get away to Edinburgh by the train which leaves here at 2 tomorrow. I believe it comes in about 8 at the Caledonian. Connie had better come down and superintend. I never got your Sierra Leone letter but I got the others, and was so glad to hear from you, dear.

I don’t intend to go to Africa again. The pay is less than I could make by my pen in the same time, and the climate is atrocious. The only inducement to go to sea is that you may make some fees out of passengers, but these boats have hardly any passengers—we had only one coming back. You can’t write at sea, either, and particularly you can’t write in the tropics. If I can’t get a S. American boat, I will apply for a house surgeoncy I think. I want to improve myself in my profession and get more practical experience before I launch out for myself. I have written a couple of articles which will do, I think, and I have the germs of several in my head, which only need a literary atmosphere to make them hatch.

I trust you will not be disappointed at my leaving the ship—believe me I have eye enough for the main chance to stick to a good thing when I am in it—but this is not good enough. The Captain himself was saying to me just now that he wondered medical men could ever be induced to go. I would do anything rather than cause you pain or disappointment—however we can talk it over together.

His harsh impressions were leavened in the end by some time with a celebrated American abolitionist, Henry Highland Garnett. His diary for December 24th recorded:

American consul came as a passenger with us. Rather a well read intelligent fellow, had a long chat with him about American and English Literature, Emerson, Prescott, Irving, Bancroft & Motley. He was as black as your hat however. He told me what I myself think, that the way to explore Africa is to go without arms and without servants. We wouldn’t like it in England if a body of men came armed to the teeth and marched through our country, and the Africans are quite as touchy. Thats why they begin getting their stewpans and sauces out when they see a Stanley coming.

It was a revelation for Conan Doyle. ‘This negro gentleman did me good,’ he declared in Memories and Adventures: ‘My starved literary side was eager for good talk, and it was wonderful to sit on deck discussing Bancroft and Motley, and then suddenly realize that you were talking to one who had possibly been a slave himself, and was certainly the son of slaves.’ And he was no longer glib about Garnett’s advice regarding exploration: ‘[T]he method of Livingstone as against the method of Stanley,’ he summed up, ‘takes the braver and better man.’

‘I vowed that I would wander no more,’ he remembered long afterwards, ‘and that was surely one of the turning-points of my life.’ But his letters indicate that he continued looking for medical vacancies far away after returning to the Hoares.

to Mary Doyle BIRMINGHAM, JANUARY OR FEBRUARY 1882

I am being bullied in this house. They are taking advantage of a simple visitor and making him lose his valuable time writing letters to a distant relative. My Birmingham mother has collared me, stolen my novel, dragged me to a table and confronted me with a sheet of notepaper so that I am in for it. I have not had a single letter here except your enclosure so I have absolutely no news for you. Oh yes I have by the way. On the evening that I arrived here the Boss and I were standing at the door smoking our evening pipe when a cab drove up to the door out of which stepped Claud Augustus Currie. He had come up to apply in propria persona. We have put him up at Aspinal’s in Gravelly Hill* (#ulink_cbdadba2-4aa2-5a01-a3a8-e250de871e08) for a month when the berth will be vacant for him. Everyone here is as jolly as ever. Mrs D gave me a grand frame to put Elmore’s likeness in—by the way I have not heard from that young lady for six days. The cheques for L.S. will be payable to you and sent to you. I want you to pay McLaren & Williamson first if it is all the same to you, as it is just as well to keep up the credit of the rising generation. I am still full of the S. American scheme. Poor Elmore wants me to take £500 from her and start there but I don’t see it—unless I fail by my own unaided exertions.

[P.S.] By the way I have no money.

That Elmore Weldon had money of her own did not make her less attractive to Conan Doyle, but his comments, and what followed, make clear that he was determined to win his own way in the world.

to Mary Doyle THE ELMS, GRAVELLY HILL, MARCH 1882

You must think that I have given up writing letters entirely judging from my long silence. I have been working very hard, and that is the reason.

I called on Hogg in London, he was very polite and flattering, said that ‘he and many of his friends looked upon me as one of the coming men in literature’. ; (#ulink_e4a8ae43-649c-5aac-9ef4-c47053798020) His chief editorial fault is an utter want of sense of humour. In this story which I regard as my chef d’oeuvre, ‘The Actor’s Duel—a legend of the French Stage’, there is a very amusing passage—one which Uncle Dick said was most excellent, and which has amused everyone I have read it to. The situation is a simple old mother living apart from the world reading a slangy sporting letter from her son, and coming to most ridiculous conclusions & making endless blunders over what she regards as ‘modern refinements of speech’. Hogg was utterly ignorant that it was even meant to be funny. It was something entirely beyond his comprehension. He wanted me to change this which I refused to do. He then asked me to write him a story about a fool for next months number—I am sending it off today—46 pages of closely written manuscript. I think it is not bad ‘Bones’ or ‘The April Fool of Harvey’s Sluice’. The first real love story which I have attempted. I am to have another commission to write a story about the Derby.

It is a pleasant place to stay in, this, & I am very comfortable & quiet. Writing all day, and reading with Aspinal after supper. The reading is doing me a good deal of good too. By the way there is a very great demand for photos. You positively must send me down half a dozen of the small—I am getting into disgrace all round about them. What a curious thing that none of those hospitals have answered my application. The more I think of it the more convinced I am that that is the thing for me. It is the only way of aiming high. If I could get an appointment in London I should go in for my FRCS Eng.* (#ulink_977ed862-df49-5296-b1f6-ee752a20c734) I need another year matric—to be 25 years old—and a few more classes, but it wd be very well worth it. You seem to be having high jinks at home—I wish I was with you.

[P.S.] Do write soon. I’m not in love again yet—at least not to any great extent.

to Mary Doyle BIRMINGHAM, MARCH 1882

How is it that you never make any allusion to the Doctor in your letters now? Pray give him my love if he is about. We have had the deuce and all to pay here. First the Missus went and had a miscarriage (tho’ that is a secret) and then she developed Rheumatism and has been in bed ever since. Miss Joey got a sore throat with some scarlatinal symptoms, and finally the poor old Boss was taken with a very painful, and at one time serious attack of intestinal inflammation and colic. He has been down with it four days now, but is coming round nicely. The result of all this was that I was drafted from Gravelly Hill to Aston with the double duty of being on the spot to see dangerous cases, and of doctoring the invalids. The doctor lies in the red room where you used to be and the others next door, so I have Ward 1 & Ward 2 chalked up on the doors. It shows the confidence they have in my professional opinion that tho’ they might have had any man in Birmingham gratis, they were contented with me.

You’ll get the 200 right enough. If I can cooperate or assist by word or pen let me know and you will find me a fearless champion. I believe if you had sent in a claim for half we should have got it. The only real opposition would come from Mrs James.* (#ulink_57a7c076-ca98-5d92-aec4-1fa3bb76b32b) I am so glad you liked ‘Bones’. My own opinion of it was that it was weak at the beginning but grew very strong indeed as the plot culminated. It was written to order, which makes it the more creditable, as it is hard to pump up originality about a given theme. ‘Write a story bearing on fools & All fools day’ were my directions. I also got an order to write one about ‘a Derby Sweepstakes’ for May. I finished it yesterday and am beginning to copy it for the press. It is quite a different style to any I have written yet—more playful and Rhoda Broughtonesque; the ladies here think it is good. ; (#ulink_d1c13e19-18ed-5d1f-9825-670bf8cf8ba3)

Have you seen my article in this week’s ‘Lancet’ on leucocythemia. They have put that infernal Cowan again. What can I do? I am very careful in forming my ‘n’ always, but they won’t see it. I saw in acknowledging the contribution that they put Cowan, so I wrote up at once sending a card with the ‘n’ underlined—however all to no purpose as you see. It reads very learnedly, don’t it? By the way I will test your power of correcting proofs. Did you observe that in one part of Bones I described the young lady’s eyes as being violet & in another as hazel—at least I think I did.

I am going in for the Charles Murchison Scholarship in Clinical Medicine—exam in London April 22

, value 20 guineas. Open to all London & Edinburgh graduates, students & FRCSs. A goodly competition but I shall read hard & stand as good a chance as my neighbours. If I fail it is only the fare lost—if I get it the look of it in the Directory would be worth more than the money. I am also going to send in for the Millar Prize (£50) for an essay on some surgical subject open to Licentiates & Fellows of the college of P & S Glasgow.* (#ulink_103b7ee6-12d2-545f-8b56-d5584c8dae46) I don’t think there can be many good men among the L & F so I shall write a rattling essay on ‘Listerism—a success or a failure’, and send it in in Hoare’s name. If it is good I shall use it for my MD thesis also. Not a bad idea is it? It has to be in by the end of the year.