Product Description

Though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's name is recognized the world over, for decades the man himself has been overshadowed by his better understood creation, Sherlock Holmes, who has become one of literature's most enduring characters. Based on thousands of previously unavailable documents, Andrew Lycett, author of the critically acclaimed biography Dylan Thomas, offers the first definitive biography of the baffling Conan Doyle, finally making sense of a long-standing mystery: how the scientifically minded creator of the world's most rational detective himself succumbed to an avid belief in spiritualism, including communication with the dead.

Conan Doyle was a man of many contradictions. Always romantic, energetic, idealistic and upstanding, he could also be selfish and fool-hardy. Lycett assembles the many threads of Conan Doyle's life, including the lasting impact of his domineering mother and his wayward, alcoholic father; his affair with a younger woman while his wife lay dying; and his nearly fanatical pursuit of scientific data to prove and explain various supernatural phenomena. Lycett reveals the evolution of Conan Doyle's nature and ideas against the backdrop of his intense personal life, wider society and the intellectual ferment of his age. In response to the dramatic scientific and social transformations at the turn of the century, he rejected traditional religious faith in favor of psychics and séances -- and in this way he embodied all of his late-Victorian, early-Edwardian era's ambivalence about the advance of science and the decline of religion.

The first biographer to gain access to Conan Doyle's newly released personal archive -- which includes correspondence, diaries, original manuscripts and more -- Lycett combines assiduous research with penetrating insight to offer the most comprehensive, lucid and sympathetic portrait yet of Conan Doyle's personal journey from student to doctor, from world-famous author to ardent spiritualist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #152718 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-18
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 576 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Lycett, biographer of Rudyard Kipling and Dylan Thomas, turns his attention to the father of detective stories in this enjoyable if densely packed biography. From his early years in Edinburgh to his life at boarding school, Conan Doyle developed a love of storytelling and mythology. After finishing medical school, he turned to writing as a way to explore his paradoxical interest in spiritualism and science. While writing his first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, published in 1886, Conan Doyle continued to practice medicine and tend to his growing family. Lycett shows that Conan Doyle often viewed his laconic detective's stories as inferior to his other work, which included everything from the social novel to a history of Britain's involvement in WWI. With his detailed descriptions of the Doyle family tree, Lycett often overwhelms the reader with names and dates, but fans won't be disappointed with his unearthing of the origins of the famous detective's name (fellow student Patrick Sherlock and Oliver Wendell Holmes) or Conan Doyle's associations with everyone from Oscar Wilde to Harry Houdini. Those looking for a close reading of the Holmes canon should look elsewhere, but fans of the in-depth literary biography will find this a satisfying read. (Dec.)
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Review
"[An] excellent biography.... Comprehensive and authoritative, it is undoubtedly the best account of Doyle to date, and the best we are likely to get." -- The Sunday Times (London)

"Lycett excels in unearthing the sources from which Doyle drew to endow Holmes with unique skills.... [A] brilliant analysis." -- Sunday Herald (Scotland)

"In Andrew Lycett's hugely enjoyable new biography, the sheer breathtaking dynamism of [Conan Doyle] shines through.... [An] impeccably researched book." -- The Sunday Telegraph (London)

"It is the precise and intelligent appreciation of the differences by which Conan Doyle was composed that makes Lycett's diagnosis of his subject so thoroughly satisfying. Using previously unseen archives, Lycett gives us Conan Doyle as a late Victorian and definitive Edwardian, battling with the uncertainties of his own age, weary of the uncertainties of the next one."-- The New Statesman (London)

"Conan Doyle has found a biographer of distinction in Andrew Lycett.... Lycett's brilliant piece of detective work on the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories now allows us to judge his literary worth against that of his peers and properly to set him in the context of his times.... [A] splendid biography." -- The Guardian, Book of the Week selection (London)

"[A] sympathetic new biography...shrewd and thorough...entertaining." -- The Independent on Sunday (London)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

One

Two Irish Families

Molten lava and packed ice: even the natural forces that created Edinburgh's jagged landscape came in contrasting pairs. More than 300 million years ago one of the smouldering volcanoes that dotted the surrounding countryside erupted, making a series of crags, the tallest of which, serendipitously known as Arthur's Seat, now towers over the city. Later, vast glaciers ground their way through the lava-rich earth, shaping these contours and forming deep basins where today railways run instead of dinosaurs.

This was the ribbon of soaring pinnacles and perpendicular drops that Robert Louis Stevenson fondly recalled as his "precipitous city." For the full vertiginous effect, he probably also envisaged the steepling, overcrowded tenements or "lands" that spread upwards over what little space the cramped "crag and tail" topographical features permitted, so creating the high-rise skyline of Edinburgh's Old Town.

At ground level, a network of alleys or "wynds" led off the main Royal Mile. By the mid-eighteenth century, the stench, squalor and sheer numbers had become so insufferable that the professional classes leading the pragmatic intellectual movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment wanted somewhere more salubrious to live. After deciding on a solid sandstone ridge a mile away, they drained and bridged Nor'Loch, the inland lake that lay between, and hired a young architect, James Craig, to design a well ordered New Town, full of classical terraces and leafy squares.

As with the Old and New Town, so with Edinburgh in general. It is a city of dramatic contrasts, made tolerable by thoughtful accommodation. Here the ferocity of the outlying Highlands and Lowlands was blunted by the civilizing achievements of the Athens of the North. Here a Scottish fascination with witchcraft and the supernatural came under the skeptical gaze of scholars such as David Hume who congregated at the university. With his home city in mind, Stevenson wrote his classic fictional portrayal of schizophrenia, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, drawing on Edinburgh's real-life Deacon Brodie -- respectable shopkeeper by day, infamous body theif by night. The only thing that remained constant was the bitter cold.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born at a slight tangent to this polarized world in Picardy Place, a quiet enclave off the main road out of town to Leith. Taking its name from the colony of linen-weavers who came there from France in 1729 to start a local industry, it played host to newer arrivals such as Arthur's parents, whose families hailed from Ireland and who enjoyed the security of living across the way from their co-religionists in the Roman Catholic church of St. Mary's.

Arthur himself came into the world early on May 22, 1859. His horoscope later put the exact time as 4:55 a.m., confirming that, in astrological terms, he was a Gemini, born under the sign of the twins, which was doubly appropriate, given the contrary nature of the city and his own future as a figure whose lifelong struggle to find some middle ground between the opposing nineteenth-century forces of spirituality and reason would provide such a fascinating commentary on his times.

In "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter," Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson discuss the hoary question of "nature versus nurture." When Watson attributes his colleague's remarkable powers of observation and deduction to his "early systematic training," the detective agrees, but only up to a point, arguing that the real reason lies in his veins. Although his family were mainly country squires, "who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class," Holmes believes his special skills come from the artistic genes he inherited from his grandmother, a sister of the real-life French painter Horace Vernet. And "art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms."

So it was with Arthur himself. His family was a source of pride and inspiration, particularly to a déclassé Celt anxious to position himself securely in socially stratified Anglo-centric society. But there were skeletons in the cupboard that were worrying to a scientist schooled in murky Victorian concepts of heredity.

Both sides of his family came from Ireland. But lineages are often hazy there, since so many records were lost in the civil war. At one stage Arthur was so convinced the Doyles were descended from Dubgall, King of Ulster, that he had a stained-glass window built at Undershaw, his house in Hindhead, showing several putative crests, including the Red Hand of Ulster. In fact, his surname meant little more than "dark stranger" or "foreigner," a reference to the king's Viking origins. He later dropped this idea and settled for the Doyles being a cadet branch of the Staffordshire family of that name who went to Ireland with the English invasion and spawned a large clan in County Wexford.

So far as the record extends, Arthur's grandfather John Doyle was a tailor's son who started professional life as an equestrian artist in Georgian Dublin. He won commissions from aristocratic patrons, including Lord Talbot, Lord Lieutenant during a politically turbulent period from 1817 to 1821, and the Second Marquess of Sligo.

One thing is indisputable -- the Doyles were devout Roman Catholics. Both John Doyle's sisters became nuns, and his brother James trained as a priest. As the Catholic journal The Month noted, John was the only child of the family who remained "in the world," and with this situation came a certain austerity -- a character trait emphasized by his height, bearing and angular patrician features. But his daunting demeanor was offset by a good nature and gentle Irish sense of humor.

In 1820 he married Marianna Conan, whose father also worked as a tailor in the Dublin rag trade. Again her antecedents are blurred, purportedly stretching back to the ancient ducal house of Britanny. Within a short time she had borne him a daughter, Annette. The start of a family was a signal for John Doyle to think seriously about his career. Following the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, educated Irishmen of his type began to look to London as a cultural as well as political capital. At the same time Irish Catholics were making inroads into the discriminatory legislation that barred them from political office.

Ambitious and pragmatic, Doyle made the logical move to London where, with his wife and infant child, he rented a house in an artists' enclave in Berners Street, north of Oxford Street. As mementos and statements of intent, he took some heirlooms with him. According to family tradition, these included silverware, engraved with the Doyle crest and motto "Patientia Vincit" (he conquers through patience); a pestle and mortar; and a portrait, supposedly by van Dyck, of Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford. This was an odd choice since Strafford, in the early seventeenth century, had been a leading perpetrator of the despoliation of the Catholic landed gentry, which had cost the Doyles their estates. While suggesting that John bore few grudges, it also pointed to the type of commission he hoped to obtain from high-born patrons.

Initially business was slow, and John was forced to move several times with his growing family, spending two years south of the river Thames in Lambeth. A change of artistic direction came after he visited the House of Commons. He found that his combination of wit and draftsmanship was well suited to producing caricatures of the participants in the mother of Parliaments. Making good use of modern techniques of lithography, he began in 1827 to publish a regular series of political sketches, which he signed with the initials HB, a composite representation of his initials. With obsessive secrecy, he managed for sixteen years to keep his identity secret. During that period his sarcastic, well observed and usually benevolent cartoons of Britain's political elite provided a graphic bridge between the angry Regency satires of Gillray and Cruikshank and the more respectful High Victorian output of Leech and Tenniel.

John was soon earning a comfortable living, enough to move in 1833 to a large, new house at 17 Cambridge Terrace (now Sussex Gardens), north of Hyde Park. By then Marianna had produced seven children, all of whom showed varying degrees of artistic talent. His daughter Annette was a gifted musician, and a pious one, who later became a nun. James, born in 1822, was a scholarly youth, whose adoption of his father's more severe traits earned him the nickname "the Priest." Fascinated by the past, he would make a name illustrating and writing about history. Richard, or Dicky, born in 1824, was the most naturally gifted, and would follow "HB" in a successful career, principally as an illustrator. Henry, born in 1827, was also a promising cartoonist, before later finding his métier as an arts curator. Then there were Francis and Adelaide, who both died young without making a mark, and, finally, on March 25, 1832, came Arthur's father, Charles Altamont, his second name a nod to HB's early patron, the Marquess of Sligo, who held the subsidiary title Earl of Altamont.

The atmosphere at Cambridge Terrace was politically and culturally conservative, as might be expected from an Irish Roman Catholic family making its way in late Georgian society. The children were taught at home, since John was skeptical about English education. As was evident from his choice of the French Chapel off Baker Street as his place of worship, he was Francophile in matters of mind and spirit -- a throwback perhaps to his wife's French origins. His son Henry spent a short period at a Jesuit school in the Marylebone Road but, otherwise, the Doyle boys and girls grew up with their own private tutor, Mr. Street, whose services were supplemented by both a fencing and a dancing master. As part of this privileged upbringing, they were expected to devise their own entertainments, centered around a play or a concert every Sunday. With an artist as father, they were also encouraged to go out and observe the world. After visit...

Customer Reviews

Satisfying Biography, But Perhaps Not for Sherlockians
A biographer looking to paint the full life of the subject must necessarily dig into areas of the subject's life that may not be of much interest to the typical reader. In the case of Arthur Conan Doyle, who quickly moved beyond medicine to become one of the more prolific of Victorian-era writers, and one of the most successful, there is a lot of ground to cover.

Yet, for most of us today, all we really care about is Doyle's great creation, Sherlock Holmes. Doyle's many historical novels, books about spiritualism, plays and poetry are today generally forgotten. Without Holmes, Doyle would have been a cipher in the history of literature.

Andrew Lycett's biography is thorough-going, clearly well-researched and, for someone trained at Oxford, well-written. Its critical fault, for me at least, is that it treats Doyle's great creation as just another part of the author's large output.

Who cares about The Story of Mr. George Edalji (1907)? Who cares about The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921)? Who cares about The History of Spiritualism (1926)? Or about a dozen or two other now-forgotten tomes?

We want to know all the juicy Sherlockian details. We want to know every detail about how Dr. Doyle came up with one of the most original characters in literature. We want to know what he thought of his creation. We want to know how each story evolved. This Andrew Lycett fails to give us.

This is a biography that covers everything about the long and generally happy life of Arthur Conan Doyle without, despite the title, fully satisfying our sweet tooth for information about Holmes and Watson, the only thing that really matters in the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

--Lan Sluder

More About the Man Than His Work
If you're looking for the creative process that Conan Doyle employed in memorializing perhaps the most famous fictional character in literary history, this book will disappoint. Other than the well-known fact that Joseph Bell was the real-life model for Sherlock Holmes and that Conan Doyle needed to supplement his meager medical practice with additional funds, this book is more of the chronolgy of the life of a man who lived a rather mundane, if somewhat, typical Victorian existence.

True, his father was an alcoholic and Conan Doyle's first wife was practically an invalid the last ten years of her life causing him to initiate an adultrous affair with a woman who would later become his second wife; however, much of the book simply relates the travels, associations, business ventures, family squabbles and misunderstandings that were conventional to that period. Andrew Lycett, the biographer, admits in the Afterword that getting to know Conan Doyle up close and personal was difficult due to the heir's reluctance to release certain documents and letters. Following Conan Doyle's death, there was a real donneybrook over who got what from the estate. Greed and jealousy ruled and posterity and Conan Doyle's legacy has suffered because of it.

For my part the image of the man is forever tarnished by his obsession with the occult, paranormal, and spiritualism. Apart from Sherlock Holmes, he failed to live up to what he could have achieved in his lifetime as an author of great promise had he not been fixated with contacting the dead. His misguided intentions to divest himself of the true Christian faith marred a life that brought untold satisfaction to tens of thousands of devoted readers.

With that as a personal aside, Lycett from all accounts has written the most definitive biography to date on the life and times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Man Who Was Wanted
Lycett takes complete advantage of recently released family papers, and although at first glance they seem largely like household account books that reveal how much money was spent on this and that in any given period, soon this accumulation of data grows a fascination of its own. We can see through a myriad of details how Conan Doyle, by his own literary labors, started out with nearly nothing and wound up one of the wealthiest writers of his day, living life in a nearly baronial fashion with everything he could dream of. Was this affluence worth the price he paid for it? In some ways, Lycett argues, he was completely happy and very much a man of his time, but his growing spiritual instincts show, some have argued, a guilt consciousness overtaking him, making his soul restless as those whose peregrinations through ectoplasm he studied night after night, the victim of some of the worst frauds the world has known.

I enjoyed the biography, though it is superlong and at the same time, rushed during the second half of Doyle's life, where so many things happened to him that Lycett's chapters devolve into mere laundry lists of "And then he," "and then he," without much analysis. But by then he has given us ample evidence with which to judge Doyle's character. I suppose no biography of the man could fail to examine his mysterious second marriage, and when the love affair between ACD and Jean Leckie began. They always put up a public front, as did their children, that no way did anything untoward occur between them while the first wife, tubercular Louise, was still alive. Lycett takes a middle ground, referring to Jean as Conan Doyle's "mistress" even while accepting that perhaps there was no sexual activity between them. It must have been a trying time for Jean, not to mention Louise! And much of ths strain fell on Louise's two children, Mary and Kingsley, whom Jean seems to have resented terribly and who she made sure were always being sent away to school or to spend their vacations far away from wherever she was. Conan Doyle comes off as sort of a man torn in two, but Jean seems just horrid in every way.

Lycett finds echoes of this central conflict in many of Conan Doyle's stories and novels, pointing to the way that the author of the Sherlock Holmes tales withdrew "The Cardboard Box" from a proposed volume of "Memoirs," even after it had been published in periodical form, because its tangle of illicit love affairs reflected too much of the lustful drives he himself was feeling but had, as a Victorian paterfamilias, to keep a dark secret.

Lycett ignores the current controversy about the authorship of THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES and does not so much as refer to the possibility that Conan Doyle had Fletcher Robinson "bumped off," though he does spend a lot of time, particularly in what is otherwise a very rushed account of Doyle's final 20 years, on his putative involvement in the Piltdown Man hoax. In his analysis of the George Edalji case, he shows us rather humorously that Conan Doyle's championing of the wrongfully imprisoned Edalji had many roots, not just the simple one of wanting justice done, including the fact that a fellow clubman had managed to clear a wrongfully accused man just the previous year and perhaps ACD wanted some of the glory too! All in all, a splendid book and one that will be much discussed in the years to come.