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My English class has been doing reports on artists and authors of the 18th and 19th century this past month, and I did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The reports are done now and I've been thinking about what I could do with the knowledge I've gained, and with the free web page I signed up for. I decided(surprise) to make a web page about his life. There's quite a few of them already, but I thought I could add a little, or at least feel like I did. I got most of my information from Encarta95(I know it's old, but it was cheap), but some came from several outdated books written in the 50's from my school library. I am going to divide it into two parts, His Life, and His Literary Career. Well, here goes.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was more than just an author. He was a knight, a soldier, a spiritualist, a whaler, a doctor, a journalist and most of all, and adventurer. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on May 22, 1859, to Charles Altamont Doyle and Mary Foley Doyle. They were fairly poor, but managed to send Doyle to a Jesuit boarding school. He wasn't a terribly good student academically, but did very well at sports like Rugby. He dicided to become a doctor and went to the University of Edinburgh. A year before receiving his degree, Doyle signed onto a whaling ship as companion to the captain. In those days it was considered improper for the Captain to eat alone or with the lowly sailors, so they hired people to be his companion. Despite his cushy position Doyle still participated in the actual chasing and harpooning of whaling and found he really enjoyed it. This exemplifies Doyle's personality. He liked to live dangerously and pitting himself against nature was his idea of a challenge. He was asked to go on a second voyage with the whalers but declined, and finally got his degree in 1881. When he tried to set up a medical practice, however, he ran into some problems. At that time the only way for a doctor to get patients was to get refferals, usually from a church. When Doyle was growing up he was Catholic, but he began to question it's philosophies and became an agnostic. Because of this no one would refer anyone to him, not even his relatives, and he was barely able to keep up his practice. In 1885 he married Louise Hawkins, and they had their first child in 1889. Louise was the sister of one of his patients, and they got to know each other while grieving. It seems like a morbid way to meet, but I guess it worked for them. His business continued to go badly and he took up writing both to pass the time and to gain a little extra cash. This is when he wrote the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet. Surprisingly it wasn't considered very interesting, and neither was the second, but the third, A Scandal in Bohemia, really caught peoples attention. It sort of started off his writing career. The Strand, which was a prominent newspaper at the time, offered him thirty pounds apeice for more Holmes stories. He wrote five more of these short stories and a novel before realizing that his writing was just supporting his medical career, so he quit medecine and moved to London to write full time in 1891. His wife promptly caught tuberculosis that same year and proclaimed by doctors to hae little time to live. Doyle disagreed, however, and took his family to a resort in Switzerland, where the cool dry helped her recover, and she lived another 13 years. Doyle served a short stretch in the Boer war around the 1900's as a doctor and a newspaper correspondent. The Boer War was a conflict in South Africa between The English and Dutch peasants who were called Boers. He wrote several papers about it. By 1901 he was experiencing great success in his writing and was paid five thousand pounds to write six Holmes stories. He had gained fame for writing not only mystery novels but also historical Romances which he considered to be his calling in life. He owned several houses and race cars and held parties for other famous people. He even traveled to America to meet celebrities. He served in WWI at first as a doctor and later as jounalist, writing patriotic propoganda back to England about the war. His son served in WWI and died later in London of pneumonia. I'm not sure how many children he had, my sources didn't specify. He may have had a daughter, too. After his son's death Doyle became interested in spirituality and the idea that a person can communicate with the dead. He distrusted some mediums for the same reason he distrusted religion, however, and often held his own seances and rallies for spiritualism. Doyle wrote many books on spiritualism, many of which are still considered authoratative today. He also went on tours lecturing about spiritualism and rallying people to the cause. On one of these tours he suffered a heart attack from which he never really recovered, and he died July 7, 1930.
Now I'll talk about his writings. His literary career was almost as diverse as his life. His first published short story was the Mystery of Sassasa Valley which he wrote in 1879. He was paid very little and didn't even get and author's byline but it gave him a feel for writing. He wrote the first Sherlock Holmes story, A study in Scarlet, in 1887, using as a model for Holmes a professor from his University who had the uncanny abilities of deduction described in the stories. The first story and and the second, The Sign of Four, recieved very little attention and were rejected by many publishers, but the third, A Scandal in Bohemia was really noticed and published in the Strand. It was about a German Duke who was being blackmailed by an English woman and enlisted Holmes for help. It was one of the few stories in which Holmes does not wholly succeed, and only manages to stop the blackmailer but not retrieve the incriminating pricture. This story brought Doyle notice and money to start his writing career. Ironically, though the Sherlock Holmes stories are what Arhtur Conan Doyle is most famous for today, he didn't consider them to be his best works. He thought he was best at writing historical novels. His first, Micah Clarke, he wrote in 1888 and was highly acclaimed by book critics. He wrote several others encompassing everything from the Puritan Era in England to Napoleonic times. Doyle actually felt that writing the Holmes stories interfered with the "real work" of writing novels because each short story took as much plot work as a full length novel and were always in demand. He tried to kill off and retire Holmes several times but was unsuccessful in keeping him out of commission. All in all he wrote 68 Sherlock Holmes stories. After serving in the Boer Wars Doyle wrote two papers, The Great Boer War and The War in South Africa: It's causes and Conduct. He was knighted for the latter in 1902. In 1909 he experimented in science fiction with a novel called The Lost World(not to be confused with the new one by Michael Chriton, this is an old one). In it he introduced Professor Chalenger who would become a frequent character in his stories. When he became interested in spiritualism he wrote several books such as The Vital Spirit. He also wrote the History of Spititualism which is considered a very important work for the spiritualist cause. I believe his final work was his Auto-biography, Memories and Adventures, which was published in 1924. That's all I have to say about that.
For a comprehensive page of links on Arthur Conan Doyle and some of his writings, click here.
Or, if you have a slightly skewed, immature sense of humor click here for a web page I built for an organization called the FDLFDWCTT. It really is pretty funny. Honest.
Please write me and tell me about this page, what you liked about it, what you didn't, how you found it, that sort of thing. My new address is percepied@hotmail.com. Thanks for listening to me. Have a nice day! Or don't, I suppose. Like I care.