There is great promise, I think, in the faces of the dead. They say it is but the post-mortem relaxation of the muscles, but it is one of the points on which I would like to see science wrong.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE STARK MUNRO LETTERS
In December 1883, Arthur’s lighthearted short story “Selecting a Ghost” appeared in London Society, which over the preceding couple of years had also published “The American’s Tale,” “The Gully of Bluemansdyke,” and others of his stories. This time, rather than trafficking in spooks of his own, Arthur mocked the claims of spiritualist mediums that they could summon ghosts on demand. The narrator, Silas D’Odd, has grown wealthy in the grocery business and as a consequence has bought a castle, Goresthorpe Grange, but he is shocked to learn that the moldering corridors lack a ghost: “As the presence of a kennel presupposes that of a dog, so I imagined that it was impossible that such desirable quarters should be untenanted by one or more restless shades.”
D’Odd and his wife turn to her cousin, who has already furnished the castle with a crest and fake family portraits. Eventually, under the influence of a drug, D’Odd finds several ghosts applying to him for work at Goresthorpe. “I am the invisible nonentity,” sighs one. “I am electric, magnetic, and spiritualistic. I am the great ethereal sigh-heaver.” Other ghosts appear—an old woman who says, “Sir Walter was partial to me”; a cavalier who boasts, “There is a blood stain over my heart . . . I am patronised by many old Conservative families”; a vague presence who quavers, “I snatch letters and place invisible hands on people’s wrists.” Finally a horrific vision of rotting bones in a shroud murmurs, “I am the embodiment of Edgar Allan Poe . . . I am a low-caste spirit-subduing spectre . . . Work with grave-clothes, a coffin-lid, and a galvanic battery.” In the end Silas D’Odd discovers that he was hallucinating under the influence of chloral.
Arthur may have been mocking himself in part, because during this time he began to explore spiritualism, the belief that after death disembodied spirits can communicate with the living. During his years in Southsea, Arthur read dozens of books about spiritualism, which in its alleged physical manifestations claimed to provide demonstrable evidence—rather than demanding a leap of faith—that the human spirit survives death. His earliest memory was the sight of his dead maternal grandmother in June 1862, before his fourth birthday. In 1881, while still in Edinburgh, he had attended a spiritualist lecture entitled “Does Death End All?” Now, in Southsea, he thought obsessively about this topic. In 1876, the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had recognized the importance of natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin, published a collection of three long essays about spiritualism, On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism. Arthur read this book attentively, along with dozens of other volumes exploring the question of whether some part of a human being’s personality and character—some essence or distillation—might survive and even transcend the death of its vehicle.
In early 1885, a Southsea colleague and friend, Dr. William Roylston Pike, consulted with Arthur about a patient—a young man named John (inevitably nicknamed Jack) Hawkins, who suffered from seizures that seemed to be growing steadily worse. Arthur accompanied Pike and examined the pale and feeble patient, who was twenty-five, only a month older than himself. Sadly, he confirmed the older doctor’s diagnosis of the seizures’ cause—cerebral meningitis, an inflammation of the tissues surrounding the brain. Usually it was fatal.
When examining Jack, Arthur met the rest of the Hawkins family. A Gloucestershire widow, Emily Hawkins had moved to Southsea only a few months earlier with her son Jack and her daughter Mary Louisa. Nicknamed “Touie,” Jack’s sister was almost twenty-eight. The family rented a terraced flat not far away, overlooking the sea and Southsea Common. Soon Jack grew worse, and apparently because of conflicts at their lodging, Arthur offered his own spare bedroom at Bush Villas to Jack. This way he could attend the boy himself at a moment’s notice. Emily Hawkins already had one son in a Gloucester mental asylum, and naturally preferred that Jack not go to a hospital—the last resort for the sick because of the mortality rate in such institutions.
Although it was a generous and romantic gesture, apparently Arthur expected to also get paid for this on-site medical work. In his autobiographical novel The Stark Munro Letters, the patient’s family asks the narrator to recommend lodging and Munro offers his own house. “Both ladies thanked me a very great deal more than I deserved,” he remarks; “for after all it was a business matter, and a resident patient was the very thing I needed.” When he offered to take in Jack Hawkins, Arthur was in financial straits. Again unable to meet his bills in Southsea, he had recently forwarded some to his faithful mother, knowing that she would pay them, as she had in the past.
Jack’s condition had been steadily worsening, and he died on the twenty-fifth of March, only a few days after moving into Arthur’s house. Two days later, Arthur rode with the Hawkins family as Jack’s coffin was conveyed from Bush Villas—a hearse parked outside must have been a poor advertisement for a physician—to the relatively new Highland Road Cemetery. During this time 40 percent of the burials at Highland Road were of children. Many had not dodged illness and accident to reach adulthood, and their small gravestones stood in solemn rows with the larger stones of their kin as Arthur’s patient was laid to rest.
Hardly had Arthur returned to Bush Villas when a policeman arrived to interrogate him about Jack’s death. There was a question about whether anyone might profit from it, especially this little-known young physician, in whose house the patient had quickly expired. Fortunately, Dr. Pike had examined Jack, at Arthur’s request, only the night before his death. Pike’s professional opinion of the case, along with his established reputation, freed Arthur from suspicion.
Arthur found the death of his young patient traumatic, professionally and personally. But there were larger philosophical implications. For some years, Arthur had described himself as an agnostic and skeptic. Gradually, however, he had begun to yearn for greater spiritual satisfaction than he found in a materialist’s view of life. Now and then he even attended a table-rapping session, in which a medium in a darkened parlor claimed to communicate with the spirits of those who had “crossed to the other side,” as spiritualists liked to say. Arthur struggled to accept the mediums’ oracular ambiguity and theatrical table-rapping as evidence. The death of Jack Hawkins prompted further speculation along these lines.
* * *
Arthur’s father was not dead, but his absence from the family was almost as final. In early 1885 Charles Doyle, while still an inmate at Blairerno, somehow got his hands on a bottle and, furiously drunk yet again, began to believe that God was ordering him to escape. In struggling to obey, he broke a window. When he tried to leave, staff restrained him, and he fought back, striking everyone within reach.
As a consequence, in May, Charles left the facility aimed at helping peaceable alcoholics. He was moved to where a professional staff was better prepared to deal with volatile behavior—not far south, to the Royal Lunatic Asylum in the village of Hillside, north of Montrose. Founded in 1781 as the Montrose Lunatic Asylum, Infirmary & Dispensary, largely through local private subscription, it had received its first royal charter in 1810, and was the oldest such institution in Scotland. It had grown in both quality of treatment and accommodations for inmates during its century of existence. In 1858 new buildings were built on nearby Sunnyside Farm, primarily a long three-story hospital in the Tudor revival style. Locally the entire institution came to be called Sunnyside. The old buildings remained part of the hospital, and it was in these that a befuddled Charles found himself.
His behavior at Blairerno had been so alarming that the authorities took action even before notifying Mary or Arthur. Admission of a patient on an emergency basis, according to the lunacy laws in Scotland, required examination by two physicians, both of whom had to submit their medical evaluation to a sheriff. Charles was quick to supply Sunnyside with just cause. Immediately he informed one of the doctors, James Ironside, that he was receiving messages “from the unseen world.” With his growing interest in spiritualism, Arthur may have been impressed by this remark. When the other doctor, James Duffus, began questioning Charles, the patient began swearing and calling the doctor and his staff devils.
Charles also maintained that he had been to Sunnyside before, which was untrue, and claimed first that his brother was dead and then that he was living. He was unable to summon the names of his children. Both doctors certified Charles’s inability to function on his own, and the sheriff authorized his incarceration. Charles joined the five hundred or so patients at Sunnyside, the great majority of whom were paupers cared for out of charity, with about eighty patients whose family paid their way.
Charles seemed to be in good overall physical health. But Dr. Duffus wrote of the new patient, “Has been weak minded & nervous from his youth, and from his own account took refuge in alcoholics very early to give him courage &c.. . . Is, or was a clever draughtsman, & is the brother of the Doyle connected with Punch in its early days.” Charles also confessed to Duffus that while drunk he had attacked a servant girl at Blairerno.
Apparently the Doyle family accepted the admitting physicians’ assessment of Charles, for he remained at Sunnyside. Mary began to worry that if Charles were free he would quickly kill himself with drink, and possibly harm someone else along the way. However sad it was for Arthur that his father was institutionalized, Sunnyside was an alternative that the family could contemplate without shame. Dr. James Howden, the superintending physician, rejected the barbarism of the past and wanted his institution to remain in the vanguard of compassionate treatment. “We must not . . . lose sight of the great principle of non-restraint . . . which has revolutionised the treatment of the insane,” he wrote, “so that the modern asylum has the character and aims of a Hospital and a Sanitorium rather than of a Prison or a Poorhouse.” Reform in such arenas was a growing movement. Novelist Charles Reade had also written Hard Cash, an exposé of the abuse and exploitation of inmates housed in private insane asylums—a novel that, like the crusading works of Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others, had effected real change in the world.
Thus Sunnyside was not a place of punishment. Entertainments ranged from magic lantern shows to picnics and dances. The constantly touring D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, a collaboration between theater impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte and the comic opera team of lyricist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan, even brought its troupe to Sunnyside.
At first Charles was so confused he didn’t understand where he was or how he had gotten there. “Does not remember in the afternoon,” wrote one physician of him, “whether he was out in the morning.” In mid-July a physician at Sunnyside wrote that during the preceding week Charles had been weak and confused, complaining “of an overpowering presentiment that he was going to die, that he would die in 48 hours.” Charles consulted twice with a priest, prayed often, and read his prayer book. From Blairerno, David Forbes informed the Sunnyside physician that Charles had often behaved in this way. More than once, Forbes had seen Charles lie down as if to die, only to gradually “come to life again.”
Although he was generally considered an equable patient, his troubles grew worse rather than better. In mid-November, an attending physician wrote of Charles, “This morning took an epileptic attack of general convulsions, the first fits we have known him have.” There had been no record of epilepsy before, but the disease sometimes had been known to follow other traumatic damage to the body—such as toxic levels of drink. Afterward Charles did not recall the seizure. Gradually such attacks occurred more frequently, and his memory declined until he could not be expected to recall even the most recent events. He was hidden away from society and family. For Charles, it was not the afterlife so much as his own daily life that became the unseen world.
The next year, in his story “John Barrington Cowles,” which was published in Cassel’s Saturday Journal, Arthur described a character with telling details: “As I supported him towards his lodgings I could see that he was not only suffering from the effects of a recent debauch, but that a long course of intemperance had affected his nerves and his brain.”
The death of Jack Hawkins at Bush Villas naturally precipitated a greater intimacy between the Hawkins family and Arthur. Even as they grieved, Touie and her mother felt guilty that Arthur had unwittingly invited such trauma into his life. Soon Arthur found himself drawn to the quiet but amusing Touie. Petite, with childishly small hands and feet, Touie radiated quiet poise. She had a glint in her eye suggesting that she was ready for humor, but she refused to laugh at insults or at jokes performed at someone else’s expense. Quickly their interest blossomed into romance. Although there is no record of dramatic passion on either side, Arthur confessed later that quiet little Touie inspired his most protective masculine urges.
On the sixth of August, four and a half months after Jack’s death, the Reverend S. R. Stable united Arthur and Touie as husband and wife in the Thornton-in-Lonsdale parish church, in Yorkshire—near Bryan Waller’s estate at Masongill, where Arthur’s mother had been living since about 1883, paying a nominal rent to Waller.
A. Conan Doyle, MD, wrote Arthur precisely on the register. The license noted that he was the son of Charles Doyle, artist. Touie signed as Louise Hawkins, revising as usual her birth name, Mary Louisa. She would have still been mourning the death of her brother, and probably there were few guests. Although Arthur may not have been happy about it, Bryan Waller was present; he signed as witness to Touie’s signature. Arthur’s sister Conny, home from Portugal, was present, as was Innes, now a rambunctious twelve-year-old.
Several of Touie’s siblings had died already, and as a consequence she received a larger share of her father’s estate than otherwise would have been the case. For one thing, she received a greater percentage of profits from businesses and rents from properties. Her father’s will had also insisted upon no hearse to convey his coffin but rather that it be carried to the gravesite on the shoulders of honest, sober workingmen, each of whom was to be paid £1.
With no family money of his own to add to the equation, soon Arthur responsibly signed up for life insurance policies. But his new legal situation meant that thenceforth he would be in charge of Touie’s income, which came to £100 per year. Thus from the date of their wedding he faced fewer worries about money. Arthur wrote little in his letters and elsewhere about the early days of the marriage, and at first it seems to have had little overall effect on his life. During their honeymoon in Ireland, he often played cricket.
Gradually, as he settled into marriage, and as he accepted Touie’s legacy as a part of their combined income, Arthur began to devote more time to writing. His short stories had built up a small reputation within the publishing world, but he needed to write a novel. He thought he had a good idea for a book-length adventure in the flourishing genre of detective stories. He began to imagine how a mind such as Dr. Joseph Bell’s would sparkle if turned to the solving of crimes.