Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on May 22, 1859 to Charles and Mary Doyle. His mother instilled in him a love of storytelling. She would dramatically tell stories to little Arthur as a way to distract from his alcoholic father’s erratic behavior.
At the age of nine, he was sent to a Jesuit boarding school at Hodder Place, Stonyhurst. He then attended Stonyhurst College from 1870-1875. Corporal punishment and bullying made Doyle’s time at boarding school unpleasant, but it was there that he found his love for sports (especially cricket) and his talent for storytelling. He would make up stories to amuse audiences of younger students, who were enchanted by his tales. His mother was his motivation for doing well in school, because he did not want to let her down. Despite his family’s background in art, Doyle decided to pursue a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh beginning in 1876. This proved to be a time that would lead to great inspiration for him– he met fellow authors J.M. Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson and his mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell, who would become the inspiration for his famous character Sherlock Holmes.
While at medical school, Doyle’s first works began to be published. In his third year of school, he joined the crew of a whaling ship in the Arctic Circle in the surgeon’s post, and in 1881 he graduated with his medical degree. He took a medical job on a ship traveling between Liverpool and Africa called the “Mayumba.” These adventures would eventually inspire many of his future writings. Doyle relocated to Plymouth, England for a short time, then opened his own medical practice in Portsmouth while spending time writing. In 1885, Doyle married Louisa Hawkins, one of his patient’s sisters. They had a daughter and a son, but Hawkins died later in their lives. Shortly after, he married Jean Leckie, and the two had two sons and a daughter.
By 1886, Doyle was starting to write a novel called A Tangled Skein. While his medical practice was doing well, he was still struggling to make it as an author until his book was published in 1888 under the famous name we know it as today– A Study in Scarlet. The adventures of Detective Sherlock Holmes and his assistant, Doctor Watson, quickly made Doyle a world-famous author. He had an interest in spiritualism and published several stories and books that were more obscure than his well-known works. In 1893, to focus on his other writings, he even attempted to kill Sherlock Holmes. In The Final Problem, he falls to his death, but Doyle resurrected the detective and went on to create other famous works like The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in 1894 and The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901.
In 1900, Doyle enlisted in the Boer War. From his experiences, he wrote a five-hundred page chronicle titled The Great Boer War. It was upon his return from war that he took a prolonged stay at the Devonshire Moors, which inspired his famous The Hound of the Baskervilles. He was knighted in 1902 by King Edward VII for his services during the war. He tried his hand at play writing, but none were successful until The Speckled Band in 1910, which featured Sherlock Holmes. He wrote a novel, The Lost World, in 1912; it was a science-fiction novel that predated the genre and became his first wildly successful, non-Sherlock Holmes work.
In 1929 he embarked on a spiritual tour through the Netherlands, despite being diagnosed with a heart problem. His return home from the trip was painful. He was bedridden for the rest of his life, until he famously rose one last time to visit his garden, where he died surrounded by his family on July 7, 1930.
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Post by Tylie Olson
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