The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [5]
So powerful is the Holmes persona that even tangential connections attract viewers. In 2000 and 2002 the Public Broadcasting System aired a joint British-American series of mysteries that featured Conan Doyle and his teacher, Dr. Joseph Bell, on whom Holmes was partly modeled, as characters solving crimes in the manner of Holmes and Watson. Called Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes, the episodes weave incidents from Conan Doyle’s life into fictional plots that foreshadow the great stories to come. But clearly the draw for the series is the name of the immortal detective.
So how did this all begin? While the springs of creation are always ultimately mysterious, they are never entirely hidden. As with every mystery, there are clues. The most promising sources, as with most writers, are biographical.
Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859. He was a healthy, athletic lad, who appeared to have a happy childhood. He grew up in a middle-class family with a keen sense of its place in society and history. His family was originally from Ireland. His grandfather, John Doyle, like many gifted Irishmen, had moved to London, where he made his name as a political cartoonist. His four sons all became artists of one sort or another. Conan Doyle’s Uncle Richard knew Dickens; a warm letter from the great novelist survives in the family archives. Richard was also a friend of William Thackeray, whose works he had illustrated. The author of Vanity Fair once bounced young Arthur on his knee while paying a visit to Conan Doyle’s father, Charles, who worked as a young architect in the Government Office of Works. He carried on the family’s artistic tradition by painting in his spare time. Arthur’s mother, Mary, also of Irish parentage, traced her descent back to the Plantagenets on one side and Sir Walter Scott on the other, both sources of considerable pride. Arthur Conan Doyle grew up in a stable society well worth valuing. Nothing in his early life gave him any reason to be a reformer. His great detective would one day uphold the values of this social order, acting as a mainstay of the status quo.
Arthur had a very good education. His thorough knowledge of both ancient and modern classics is clear from reading the Holmes stories. His parents sent him to Jesuit boarding schools, where he initially rebelled against their harsh discipline, as well as the dullness of his studies. His outlook changed when he discovered the essays of English historian and poet Thomas Macaulay, who died the year Conan Doyle was born. Though hardly anyone reads Macaulay today, he was immensely influential in the nineteenth century. Conan Doyle was entranced by his language and his sharp, colorful pronouncements. Macaulay made history a source of wonder and romance. He was also an unapologetic believer in the superiority of British life. It is not as if there weren’t a thousand springs from which any young British boy could drink in this notion, but Macaulay supplied a river of it to Conan Doyle. He carried a volume of the essays around with him the rest of his life, claiming Macaulay had influenced him more than anyone else.
After graduation from boarding school, it was time to choose a career. Since it appeared that Conan Doyle did not inherit the family’s artistic genes, he decided on a career in medicine. It was at the medical school in Edinburgh that he met the two men who would have the most influence on his conception of Holmes. The first was the surgeon Dr. Joseph Bell; Conan Doyle later claimed he was the model for Sherlock Holmes. Bell regularly amazed his students by deducing facts about his patients from minute observations