Born at Edinburgh, in 1859, Conan Doyle commenced writing tales of adventure when he was about six, and it was natural that he should illustrate these with drawings of his own, for he was born into a very atmosphere and world of art. His grandfather, John Doyle, was the well-known political caricaturist who for over thirty years concealed his identity under the initials “H. B.”; his father, Charles Doyle, and three of his uncles were artists, one being that Richard Doyle whose name is inseparably associated with the early days of Punch. The remarkable water-colors of Charles Doyle, which I have seen, have a graceful fantasy that remind one of the work of Richard Doyle, but at times they have a grimness, a sense of the eerie and the terrible that lift them beyond anything that the Punch artist ever attempted; and you find this same imaginative force, this same bizarre sense of the weird and terrible in certain of the stories of Charles Doyle’s son—in “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” in some of the shorter Sherlock Holmes tales, in many of the “Round the Fire” stories and in some of those in “Round the Red Lamp.”
In 1881, by five years of medical studentship at Edinburgh University, Doyle secured his diploma and, after a voyage to West Africa, started as a medical practitioner at Southsea. But all through his student days he was giving his leisure to literary work, and in one of the professors at Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph Bell, a man of astonishing analytical and deductive powers, he found the original from whom, in due season, Sherlock Holmes was to be largely drawn. His first published story, a Kaffir romance, appeared, like Hardy’s, in Chambers’s Journal. That was in 1878, and it brought him three guineas; but it was not until nine years later, when “A Study in Scarlet” came out in Beeton’s Annual for 1887, that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson made their first appearance in print, and laid the foundation of his success.
During ten years of hard work as medical student and practitioner Doyle had gone through the usual experience of the literary beginner; he had suffered innumerable rejections, had contributed short stories to Cornhill, Temple Bar, Belgravia and other magazines, never in any year earning with his pen more than fifty pounds. His first long novel, that brilliant romance of the Monmouth rebellion, “Micah Clarke,” after being rejected on all hands, was sent to Longmans and accepted for them by Andrew Lang, whom Sir Arthur looks upon as one of his literary godfathers, James Payn, who encouraged him in Cornhill being the other.
“Micah Clarke” was followed in the same year (1889) by another Sherlock Holmes story, “The Sign of Four.” In 1890 Chatto & Windus published “The Firm of Girdlestone,” and “The White Company” began to run serially in Cornhill. Then it was that, taking his courage in both hands, Sir Arthur resigned his practice at Southsea and came to London. He practised there for a while as an eye specialist, but the success of those two last books decided him to abandon medicine and devote himself wholly to literature.
He has written a score or so of novels and volumes of short stories since then; one—and an admirable one—of literary criticism, “The Magic Door”; two of verse; a History of the Boer War, and three or four volumes embodying his gospel and experiences as a spiritualist. This is to say nothing of his plays—“A Story of Waterloo,” the Sherlock Holmes dramas, and the rest.
“Sir Nigel” and “The White Company” are, in his own opinion, “the least unsatisfactory” of all his books, which is to put it modestly. I would not rank the latter below such high English historical romances as “The Cloister and the Hearth” and “Esmond,” and think it likely Doyle will be remembered for this and “Sir Nigel,” and perhaps “Micah Clarke,” long after the sensational, more resounding popular Sherlock Holmes books have fallen into the background. Howbeit, for the present, there is no getting away from the amazing Sherlock; not only is he the most vivid and outstanding of all Sir Arthur’s creations, but no other novelist of our time has been able to breathe such life and actuality into any of his puppets.
Not since Pickwick was born has any character in fiction taken such hold on the popular imagination, so impressed the million with a sense of his reality. He is commonly spoken of as a living person; detectives are said to have studied his methods, and when it was announced that he was about to retire into private life and devote himself to bee-keeping, letters poured in, most of them addressed to “Sherlock Holmes, Esq.,” care of Conan Doyle, expressing regret at this decision, offering him advice in the making and managing of his apiaries, and not a few applying for employment in his service. It is on record, too, that a party of French schoolboys, sight-seeing in London, were asked which they wished to see first—the Tower or Westminster Abbey, and unanimously agreed that they would prefer to go to Baker Street and see the rooms of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
As for the imitators who have risen to compete with him—there are so many there is no guessing off-hand at their number; their assiduity has brought into being a recognized Sherlock Holmes type of story, and though some of them have been popular, none of them has rivaled the original either in popularity or ingenuity.
Obviously, then, for his own generation Doyle is, above everything else, the creator of that unique detective. But with him, as with Ulysses, it is not too late to seek a newer world, and he may yet do what nobody has done and fashion from his latter-day experiences a great novel of spiritualism.