Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is one of the
most famous figures in English literary history.
He was born on 22 May 1859 into a large
Irish-Catholic family in Edinburgh. His
father was an alcoholic and the family
lived in difficult financial circumstances.
At boarding school he developed a passion
for story-telling after lights out, and from
a young age dreamed of becoming a writer
of historical fiction.
Conan Doyle trained as a doctor, gaining
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
his degree from Edinburgh University in 1881.
After spending time as a surgeon on a whaling ship,
Conan Doyle moved to Portsmouth, where he set up his own medical
practice. He married for the first time in 1885 and with his family to
support, Conan Doyle turned to writing to supplement his income.
The first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in
Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887. It was first published in America by
J. B. Lippincott in 1890. Holmes and Watson were seized upon by the
public and were an instant hit. Soon they were appearing regularly in
The Strand Magazine, which went on to commission 56 short stories
between 1891 and 1927.
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Sherlock Holmes was inspired by Professor
Joseph Bell, who Conan Doyle met while
studying in Edinburgh. He later wrote to Bell
acknowledging the similarities between him
and Holmes, telling him that “round the centre
of deduction and inference and observation
which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to
build up a man”.
Conan Doyle hoped the success of Sherlock
Holmes would enable him to retire from
The first edition of
medicine and become a full-time writer of
A Study in Scarlet
his beloved historical fiction. But much to his
frustration, his other writing never brought him the same commercial
or critical success as his famous detective stories. In the public’s mind,
his name was for ever associated with that of his sleuth. In desperation,
Conan Doyle even tried to kill Holmes off in 1893. In The Final Problem,
after a tussle with his arch-enemy, Professor Moriarty, Holmes plunged
to his death from the Reichenbach Falls. But public outcry, and a desire
for more money, eventually forced him to ingeniously resurrect Holmes.
To this day Holmes remains Conan Doyle’s most important legacy and a
treasured cultural icon.
In 1900 Conan Doyle served in the Boer War in a field hospital. On
his return to England, he grew increasingly interested in spiritualism and
became one of the public faces of the new movement. He wrote widely on
the subject. He also passionately fought against miscarriages of justice,
perhaps most famously in the case of the wrongly accused George Edalji.
Conan Doyle died of a heart attack in 1930, aged 71, having become one
of the most famous men of his age.
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