Travellers who have searched the whole world round have found no fairer view.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE FIRM OF GIRDLESTONE
Arthur turned seventeen in the summer of 1876, about the time he returned to the picturesque city of his childhood. Edinburgh nested atop three hills in the narrow valley between the Pentlands to the south and the Firth of Forth two miles to the north and east. It was rich in adjectives for the winds that bedeviled it—scowthering and blae, nirly and snell. From some vantage points, a watcher gazing northeast across the Firth, toward where it opened into the German Ocean (as locals called the North Sea), could glimpse a beacon from the Gothic tower of a lighthouse five miles off on the Isle of May. Warning shipmasters since 1816, it had been updated twenty years later with a refractor lens that made its flame visible from afar.
Dawn mists rose from the valley until they dwindled to a plume above medieval Edinburgh Castle. Perched on a craggy basalt cliff, the castle rose several stories from the summit, which towered four hundred feet above the base. On the inland side rose a turret from whose crown of lancet windows archers had rained arrows upon besieging armies since the twelfth century.
The castle was so high that its time gun could be heard far in every direction. This civic reminder had been fired at one P.M. every day but Sundays since early 1861, before Arthur turned two, alerting Leith ship captains and New Town shop owners to set their clocks, while every man on Princes Street reached for a waistcoat pocket to check his watch. The sound carried so far from the castle that its instigator, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Scotland’s Astronomer Royal, prepared a concentric map showing the number of seconds it took the gun’s boom to reach each distance, for even more accurate timekeeping.
Prior to the invention of modern cannon, this fortress had been considered almost impregnable—and because it controlled Edinburgh, and thus Scotland, it had weathered many a siege. The castle stood so high that shepherds in Fife to the north could turn from shearing to glimpse it like a mirage on the horizon. Mariners sailing in from the northeast could peer up at its battlements long before they reached the shore. It provided an unparalleled view of the region—northward to the jagged peaks of the Grampians, eastward across a thousand dirty rooftops toward the storied height of Arthur’s Seat, southward to the Pentlands. A travel guide to Scotland published in 1859 boasted that the view from the castle combined “in one vast expanse the richest elements of the beautiful and the sublime.” The view of the city from the sea, the mountainous terrain, and Greek Revival architecture had earned Edinburgh the nickname “Athens of the North.”
The castle cast its royal shadow across a bustling market down in the city. The drum and bugle accompanying a changing of the guard could be heard above the clatter of carriage wheels, the taunts of street urchins, the rumble of passing trains. Dense with public houses and shops, bristling with turnpike stairs and crow-stepped gables, the Grassmarket had been a public site since the fifteenth century. In Arthur’s time it was still renowned for its cattle and horse trading. The venerable White Hart Inn was there, and the Black Bull, with its marble relief columns framing the entrance, and above them the words SPIRIT J. WILKINSON MERCHANT. Next door stood the Carriers Warehouse, where one-horse wagons clustered out front, piled with goods covered in tightly stretched tarpaulins against the frequent rain. To proclaim that their wares had traveled from exotic climes, the Tobacco & Snuff Manufactory featured above its sign a bust of a turbaned man, perhaps formerly the figurehead on a ship’s prow. Beneath it, wagons uncoupled from their horses projected handy rails on which loungers could lean to smoke and gossip.
The Grassmarket had once been home to Edinburgh’s public executions, including most famously that of a fishwife named Maggie Dickinson. Hanged in 1724 for murdering her own baby, she woke during transportation of her body home. Her attendants were astonished to realize that she had passed out rather than died. Judged to have served her sentence—and possibly to have been rescued by God—she was freed. Afterward, however, hanging sentences in Scotland were revised to read “until dead.”
With the town reduced to ashes more than once, only the castle itself, and Holyrood Palace at the other end of the slanting ridge now called the Royal Mile, had withstood the flames—to be plundered later by Cromwell’s army. By the late 1870s, as Arthur attended his classes, Holyrood’s crumbled abbey stood amid gasworks and breweries, as if its Gothic entrance fronted a stage set across which the red-uniformed guard paced mechanically back and forth.
Between the Castle and the University, in hilltop Greyfriars Kirkyard, orange-breasted robins and a clowder of plump cats wove among the chiseled names of Scottish history and the iron mortsafes that had protected graves from “resurrection men” such as William Burke and William Hare, who robbed graves and murdered the poor back in the 1820s.
Clustered below and east of the castle, the dark streets of Old Town sprawled in medieval disarray—poorly bracketed upper stories bulging above greasy streets so narrow that a man walking could stretch out his arms and touch a grimy wall on either side. Once Edinburgh’s tall buildings had housed aristocracy, until crowding and plague had driven them to the suburbs. By the 1870s, however, soot-flecked washing fluttered on clothes poles jutting from the windows of once proud houses that bore above their door a scutcheon with a tarnished coat of arms.
The view from many windows was a dreary prospect of slate roofs topped with red chimneys spouting eye-smarting clouds of smoke—with now and then the rooftop scrabble of a blackened urchin sweeping a chimney. Not surprisingly, the city had held on to its Middle Scots nickname, “Auld Reekie” (Old Smokey). Not only the smoke stank. So did the foul breath of tanneries and glue factories, and the effluvia from chamber pots emptied into street carts or into the streets themselves. At least the winds that buffeted the high elevation helped to dispel the stench.
There was so little space for the city to sprawl horizontally that it had instead climbed vertically. After their social betters fled, the poor were crowded into stacks of filthy flats—on the lower floors, sometimes two abreast with pigsties or stables. By the time Arthur first toddled down the cobblestones beside his mother, many of the former slums—tottering buildings locally called lands—had fallen. The Great Fire in 1824 had burned for five days, gutting or bringing to the ground such monuments as Old Assembly Hall, as well as more than two dozen tenements—some as tall as fourteen stories, said to be the tallest in Europe—from the High Street to Borthwick’s Close, including the birthplace of James Boswell in Parliament Close. Many hovels and tenements were torn down and replaced with safer and cleaner modern housing, but poverty and crowding still defined the Old Town.
He could stand high on the wind-plagued North Bridge, which joined Old Town to the cleaner streets and neoclassical buildings of New Town, and see the monuments to civic progress and mercantile ambition that had helped turn Edinburgh into a world-renowned center of intellectual labor. He was studying medicine in part because the university boasted one of the finest medical departments in the world. In the eighteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment had flowered in this center of research and publishing—philosopher and mathematician Dugald Stewart, economist Adam Smith, geologist James Hutton, and many others. Walter Scott, Arthur’s favorite novelist in his later youth, had been born in College Wynd, by the Cowgate, not far from Arthur’s own birthplace; had lived in George Square by the university that Arthur attended every day; and had died only a generation before Arthur’s birth. Ambition and artistry were in the very air of Edinburgh.
But Edinburgh was not a refuge in which Arthur could forget his troubles. His father’s financial unreliability and the end of his career at the Office of Works placed an ever greater financial burden upon Mary. Finally, considering the limited alternatives available to a genteel woman, she decided to take in boarders. In 1875, a twenty-two-year-old medical student who was in the last half of his senior year had rented a room. Literary, poetic, but practical enough to study medicine, Bryan Charles Waller came from a respectable family in Yorkshire. He was only six years Arthur’s senior, but he seems to have soon developed a curious relationship with Mary Doyle—one about which family records later remained silent. At first Arthur liked him, and “Dr. Waller,” as Arthur called him, advised the eager young man to pursue medicine. By May 1876, just before Arthur left Feldkirch, he was telling his mother that surely Dr. Waller would agree that Arthur would have “hard work getting up the subjects” for medical school, considering his ignorance of trigonometry and the later books of Euclid. But a tutor was found and Arthur was accepted at the university.
When Arthur returned to Edinburgh in September, fresh from his last year of boarding school and eager to see his beloved Mam, he learned that she was not going to be at home. Mary would be visiting at Massongill House, Bryan Waller’s family manse in Yorkshire. Arthur was either too innocent to consider the implications or too private to mention them to anyone. For reasons that remain mysterious, it wasn’t long before Waller rose above the level of lodger to the point of paying the entire Doyle family’s rent.
Meanwhile, facing a forced retirement, Charles tried sporadically to create artwork. In 1876 he painted one of his more cheerful (and least bizarre) works: a watercolor of many colorful skaters on the frozen white Duddingston Loch. Situated under the steep southern promontory of Arthur’s Seat, the loch offered boating among swans in summer and skating by torchlight at dusk in winter. Scotland was said to be the home of ice skating as a sport, and the Edinburgh Skating Club was already over a century old. Arthur enjoyed the Edinburgh region’s football and golf, hills to be climbed, trails to be hiked, and lochs on which to curl and slide and skate. When Arthur learned from his mother that his father had left the Office of Works, he remarked that perhaps this change would permit Charles to complete his skating picture soon. But if the family had dreams of a rise in Charles’s artistic reputation following this change, they were disappointed.