Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I am including a brief biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for two reasons. First, since my students need to establish background knowledge, it is essential that I provide them with this new information; and secondly, as a reminder to myself of the importance of this information and its relevance. Asking my students the question, "Why is it important to examine the life of an author?" would be my starting point. I would also have them underline the aspects of his life that might contribute to his work as a writer. After reading the stories, I will have my students return to this biography and ask them to journal about what aspects of Doyle's life appear in each of the stories. The following is a sample of the graphic organizer I would ask them to set up.
(table 07.02.04.01 available in print form)
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland to Roman Catholic parents, Charles and Mary Doyle. To supplement their income, Charles painted, drafted book illustrations, and sketched at criminal trials. He was a chronic alcoholic, suffered from epilepsy, and was finally institutionalized. His mother was a highly educated woman and a master storyteller, using her voice as an added dimension when she spoke. As an educated woman, she greatly encouraged Arthur's studies. Because money was tight, she ran a boarding house and it has been suggested that she had a long affair with a boarder, Charles Waller, a pathology student, who sparked Arthur's interest in medicine (Arthur Conan Doyle 1)
Doyle attended a boarding school run by Jesuit priests and several characters in his Holmes' stories are fashioned after fellow classmates, Moriarty to name but one. It is here that he realized his talent for storytelling always enthralling his classmates. It was assumed that he would pursue a career in the arts but instead he turned to medicine, perhaps because of Charles Waller. It was his father's commitment to a home for the insane that provided Arthur with material for his story, The Surgeon of Gaster Fell. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate 2)
As a student at the University of Edinburgh, he met Robert Louis Stevenson and James Barrie, who later became writers like himself. It was here also that Arthur met Dr.
Joseph Bell, whose powers of observation, logic, deduction, and diagnosis are mirrored in
the persona of Sherlock Holmes. Influenced by the work of Edgar Allen Poe and Bret Harte, he continued to write and finally his works were published. In his third year at the University, Doyle had adventure knock on his door when he was offered a position as surgeon on a whaling boat, Hope. He witnessed the brutality of whale hunting and this journey was the impetus of another of his stories. He unenthusiastically returned to Edinburgh and finished his medical degree. In 1885, he married Louisa Hawkins. After a journey to Africa and a brief partnership with a doctor that went wrong, Doyle opened his own practice but continued to write (2)
Surprisingly, he was more widely known in the United States than in England. Joseph Marshall Stoddart, who published the Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in Philadelphia commissioned him to write his first novel, The Sign of Four. Sherlock Holmes made his cameo debut in this piece, along with his partner in crime, Dr. Watson. Two years later, Doyle wrote A Study in Scarlet, which catapulted him to fame. His doppelganger, mirror image, and chief nemesis showed himself in the character of Moriarty, who, along with Holmes, was killed off in The Final Problem. Because of pressure from his readers, Doyle was forced to resurrect his dead logician in The Empty House and continued writing short stories about Holmes and Watson (5) "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gained universal fame as one of the greatest writers of detective stories through the criminological feats of his master sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps Holmes himself was even better known than his creator and the fictional address of the formers chambers on Baker Street in London have been sought out by countless visitors to London who were bitterly disappointed when they were informed that Sherlock Holmes had never existed in the flesh."(On This Day, Obituary 1)
In 1906 Doyle ran for Parliament but was not elected. His wife, long ill, died in 1907. Shortly after her death, Doyle married Jean Leckie. Regrettably, World War II took his son's life and this tragedy so greatly affected Doyle that he dedicated the rest of his life to "spiritualist" causes. On July 7, 1930, Doyle died of heart disease.
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