| Arthur Conan Doyle |
Article Index for Arthur |
Website Links For Arthur Conan |
Information AboutArthur Conan Doyle |
|
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, DL ( 22 May , 1859 – 7 July , 1930 ) was a Scottish author most noted for his stories about the Detective Sherlock Holmes , which are generally considered a major innovation in the field of Crime Fiction . He was a prolific writer whose other works include Science Fiction stories, Historical Novel s, plays and romances, poetry, and non-fiction. ''Conan'' was originally a Middle Name but he used it as part of his Surname in his later years. LIFE Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859, in Edinburgh , to Charles Altamont Doyle and Mary Doyle. He was sent to the Jesuit Preparatory School Stonyhurst at the age of nine, and by the time he left the school in 1875 he rejected Christianity to become an Agnostic . From 1876 to 1881 he studied Medicine at the University Of Edinburgh , including a period working in the town of Aston (now a district of Birmingham ). Following his term at university he served as a ship's doctor on a voyage to the West Africa n coast, and then in 1882 he set up a practice in Plymouth . He achieved his Doctorate in 1885. His medical practice was very successful; while waiting for patients he began writing stories. His first literary experience came in '' Chambers's Edinburgh Journal '' before he was 20. It was only after he subsequently moved his practice to Southsea that he began to indulge more extensively in literature. His first significant work was '' A Study In Scarlet '' which appeared in ''Beeton's Christmas Annual'' for 1887 and featured the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes who was modelled after Doyle's former university professor, Joseph Bell . Interestingly, Rudyard Kipling congratulated Doyle on his success, asking "Could this be my old friend, Dr. Joe?". While living in Southsea he helped form Portsmouth Football Club and played as the club's first Goalkeeper . In 1885 he married Louisa Hawkins, who suffered from Tuberculosis and eventually died in 1906. He married Jean Leckie in 1907, whom he had first met and fallen in love with in 1897 but had maintained a Platonic Relationship with her out of loyalty to his first wife. Doyle had five children, two with his first wife (Mary and Kingsley), and three with his second wife ( Jean , Denis, and Adrian ). In 1890 Doyle studied the Professor Moriarty . They apparently plunged to their deaths together down a waterfall in the story "The Final Problem". Public outcry led him to bring the character back—Doyle returned to the story in "The Adventure of the Empty House", with the ingenious explanation that only Moriarty had fallen, but, since Holmes had other dangerous enemies, he had arranged to be temporarily "dead" also. Holmes eventually appears in a total of 56 Short Stories and four Doyle novels (he has since appeared in many novels and stories by other authors). Following the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of the 20th century and the condemnation from around the world over the United Kingdom's conduct, Doyle wrote a short pamphlet titled ''The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct'' which justified the UK's role in the Boer war, and was widely translated. Doyle believed that it was this pamphlet that resulted in his being knighted and appointed as Deputy-Lieutenant of Surrey in 1902. He also wrote the longer book ''The Great Boer War'' in 1900. During the early years of the 20th century Sir Arthur twice ran for Parliament as a Liberal Unionist , once in Edinburgh and once in the Border Burghs , but although he received a respectable vote he was not elected. Conan Doyle was involved in the campaign for the reform of the Congo Free State , led by the journalist E. D. Morel and the diplomat Roger Casement . He wrote The Crime Of The Congo in 1909, a long pamphlet in which he denounced the horrors in Congo. He become acquainted with Morel and Casement, taking inspiration from them for two of the main characters of the novel The Lost World (1912). He broke with both when Morel (who was rather left-wing) became one of the leaders of the Pacifist movement during the First World War , and when Casement committed Treason against the UK during the Easter Rising out of conviction for his Irish Nationalist views. Doyle tried, unsuccessfully, to save Casement from the Death Penalty , arguing that he had been driven mad and was not responsible for his actions. Doyle was also a fervent advocate of justice, and personally investigated two closed cases, which led to two imprisoned men being released. The first case, in 1906, involved a shy half-British, half-Indian lawyer named George Edalji , who had allegedly penned threatening letters and mutilated animals. Police were set on Edalji's conviction, even though the mutilations continued even after their suspect was jailed. It was partially as a result of this case that the Court Of Criminal Appeal was established in 1907, so not only did Conan Doyle help George Edalji, his work helped to establish a way to correct other Miscarriages Of Justice . The story of Conan Doyle and Edalji is told in fictional form in Julian Barnes 's 2005 Novel , '' Arthur & George ''. The second case—that of Oscar Slater , a German Jew and gambling-den operator convicted of bludgeoning an 82-year-old woman in Glasgow in 1908 —excited Doyle's curiosity because of inconsistencies in the prosecution case and a general sense that Slater was framed. In his later years, Doyle became involved with Spiritualism , to the extent that he wrote a Professor Challenger novel on the subject, ''The Land of Mist''. One of the odder aspects of this period of his life was his book ''The Coming of the Fairies'' (1921). He was apparently totally convinced of the veracity of the Cottingley Fairy photographs, which he reproduced in the book, together with theories about the nature and existence of fairies and spirits. In his ''The History of Spiritualism'' (1926) Doyle highly praised the Psychic phenomena and spirit materializations produced by Eusapia Palladino and Mina Crandon , Margery, based on the investigations of scientists who refused to listen to well informed conjurors. Ironically, or understandingly, after the death of Doyle's wife, Louisa, in 1906, and the tragic deaths of his son Kingsley, his brother, his two brothers-in-law, and his two nephews in World War I , sinking into depression, the creator of Sherlock Holmes lost his creation's penchant for skepticism and found solace in his support of spiritualism and its alleged scientific proof of existence beyond the grave. His work on this topic was one of the reasons that one of his short story collections, The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes , was banned in the Soviet Union in 1929 for supposed Occult ism. This ban was later removed. Doyle was friends for a time with the American magician Harry Houdini , a prominent opponent of the Spiritualist movement. Although Houdini insisted that Spiritualist mediums employed trickery (and consistently attempted to expose them as frauds), Doyle became convinced that Houdini himself possessed supernatural powers, a view expressed in Doyle's ''The Edge of the Unknown''. Houdini was apparently unable to convince Doyle that his feats were simply magic tricks, leading to a bitter, public, falling-out between the two. Richard Milner , an American historian of science, has presented a case that Doyle may have been the perpetrator of the Piltdown Man hoax of 1912, creating the counterfeit Hominid Fossil that fooled the scientific world for over 40 years. Milner says that Doyle had a motive, namely revenge on the scientific establishment for debunking one of his favourite psychics, and that '' The Lost World '' contains several encrypted clues regarding his involvement in the hoax (see {Link without Title} ). Samuel Rosenberg 's 1974 book '' Naked Is The Best Disguise '' purports to explain how Doyle left, throughout his writings, open clues that related to hidden and suppressed aspects of his mentality. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died of a Heart Attack in 1930, aged 71, and is buried in the Church Yard at Minstead in the New Forest , Hampshire , England . A statue has been erected in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's honour. It may be seen at Crowborough Cross in Crowborough , East Sussex , England , where Sir Arthur lived for 23 years. There is also a statue of Sherlock Holmes in Picardy Place, Edinburgh , Scotland - close to the house where Conan Doyle was born. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Sherlock Holmes Stories
Professor Challenger Stories
Historical novels
Other works
SEE ALSO
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|