I do not think that life has any joy to offer so complete, so soul-filling as that which comes upon the imaginative lad, whose spare time is limited, but who is able to snuggle down into a corner with his book knowing that the next hour is all his own.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “JUVENILIA”
Daily, on his way to classes and the clinic, Arthur walked past a den of temptation at 54 and 55 South Bridge, in the shadow of the university: James Thin, Bookseller. Although Thin sold new books as well, the majority of his many rooms were devoted to the diverse plunder of auctions and estate sales—shelf after groaning shelf boasting the kind of serious volumes that Thin’s tradition-minded, classically trained scholars sought or were pleased to stumble upon. Only strict organization could prevent chaos among such plenty. Thus one entire room was devoted to medicine, another to theology, another to law. Thin sold few novels.
An Edinburgh institution since 1848, Thin’s shop had seen Macaulay and Carlyle browse and gossip. Diminutive, skittish Thomas de Quincey had prowled its shelves, mostly after sunset, his opium-ravaged teeth looking caved in and making his lower lip jut when he spoke with his usual fine manners. The university’s eccentric Professor John Stuart Blackie would dash across Bridge Street to inquire about books, weaving between carriages and shoppers, his black gown flapping around his knees.
The intent expressions and occasional exclamations of delight from Thin’s patrons—often whiskery old men tottering atop ladders, from which they browsed fat arcane volumes—reminded one observer of Dominie Sampson, a schoolmaster in Walter Scott’s 1815 novel Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer. Scholarship was revered in Edinburgh. The fictional Sampson was one of sixty-plus figures capering on the two-hundred-foot-tall Scott Monument, whose Gothic Revival excesses on Princes Street celebrated Edinburgh’s favorite contemporary writer.
James Thin’s siren call to impecunious Arthur was a window card informing him that for threepence he could purchase any volume in the large tub beneath the sign. Thruppence was precisely his daily budget for a midday meal and beer. As he neared the bookshop on his way for food, Arthur wrestled with two kinds of hunger, and most days his body bested his mind. About once a week, however, he skipped lunch and stopped at the tub of books.
Unable to even aspire to fine editions, he would happily sort through these volumes, which had been evicted from more valuable real estate within the shop. Patiently he exhumed logarithmic tables, deceased almanacs, and the annotated navel-gazing of Scottish theologians, setting each book aside, digging deeper in the hope of treasure. Often he found some. One day he would take home Jonathan Swift’s dense satire on Christianity, Tale of a Tub, and the next Alain-René Lesage’s picaresque novel Gil Blas—tomes whose thick leather bindings and faded gilt recalled better days in the library of a gentleman.
One day he picked out a stubby volume armored in dour brown leather: a treatise on warfare, written in Latin. He opened the front page and found on the flyleaf, in a firm angular hand, a signature that had faded to yellow—Ex libris Guilielmi Whyte 1672—from an era that had already captured his imagination, and in a handwriting that seemed to begin writing a story in his mind. The past seemed deliriously romantic to him. He bought the book. In general, however, despite his endless drilling in Latin and Greek at Stonyhurst and before, he felt that an English translation was an irresistible shortcut to ancient greatness. To that end, in this tub Arthur found all four volumes of Thomas Gordon’s acclaimed edition of the Roman historian Tacitus, battered but no less readable.
He ran across the essays of Joseph Addison, who founded an age of literate journalism when he launched The Spectator in 1711 with Joseph Steele. Further fueling his passion for British history, Arthur read the classic account of the English Civil War by Edward Hyde, the first Earl of Clarendon. He enjoyed the poems of the seventeenth-century courtier George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham, and those of the eighteenth-century satirist Charles Churchill. Although he ranged widely, he turned most often to the writers of Scotland, Ireland, and England for his instruction and entertainment.
Arthur’s appetite for books had begun at an early age. However much he fought other boys during his rambles on the streets, at home in the evenings and on weekends he dived into books as a refuge. As a child he read so quickly that the nearby library informed his mother that he would not be allowed to borrow more than two books per day.
In 1874, at the age of fifteen, Arthur had spent his three-week Christmas holiday with relatives in London, where he saw the renowned actor Henry Irving play Hamlet and where he admired the glittering swords in the armory of the Tower. Foremost on his pilgrimage, however, was Westminster Abbey. Despite his passion for British history, Arthur first sought out not the gilt-bronze supine Edward III on his sarcophagus, not the marble effigy of Mary, Queen of Scots with her white hands eerily raised in prayer, but the South Transept, nicknamed “Poets’ Corner.” There, below the grand rose window, near the grave of Chaucer and the bust of Milton, he paid his respects to the mortal remains of Thomas Babington Macaulay. “His body is buried in peace,” read the gravestone, “but his name liveth for evermore.” It was the kind of antique diction and heroic sentiment that quickened Arthur’s pulse.
The Scottish historian and politician had, for Arthur, opened a window in the formerly opaque wall of history. For years, moving from school to school, Arthur had packed in his luggage a tired copy of Macaulay’s 1843 collection Critical and Historical Essays. These diverse writings had first appeared in the Whig journal Edinburgh Review. Macaulay was typical of the Review’s commitment to a serious and stylish engagement with literature and history in longer, more thoughtful essays.
Macaulay had long since become Arthur’s favorite writer. At the bookshop’s discount bin, forgoing lunch one day, he found a newer but still tattered and lovingly read copy of the Essays. With its dramatic big-brush portraits of figures such as Machiavelli and Frederick the Great, Francis Bacon and John Bunyan, the collection fed Arthur’s appetite for history but also sparked a yearning to imitate Macaulay’s grandeur and sweep. Although some critics complained about Macaulay’s smug patriotism, especially in his somewhat fictionalized history of England, as a young man Arthur admired Macaulay’s authoritative tone and his curiosity about different levels of society. The adolescent boy had lingered particularly over his idol’s grand flourishes, provocative asides, and vivid attention to the texture that brought a scene to life. Later Arthur agreed with the criticisms.
But other writers also appealed to his imagination. Before he could even understand them as a child, Arthur was given a set of Walter Scott’s novels bound in olive-green cloth. Later, despite his mother’s advice that he ought to sleep instead, he read them in bed by candlelight, unable to tear himself away from the heroics. He admired Scott’s adventurous tales so much that his first copy of the author’s 1820 novel Ivanhoe suffered an untimely demise. Carrying it about with him as a boy, Arthur absentmindedly left it on a grassy creek bank and found it days later downstream—washed ashore like a drowning victim, muddy and bloated.
Critics such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle argued that Ivanhoe, set at the end of the twelfth century, inspired the revival of English interest in medieval history that still flourished during Arthur’s time. It also established a mental image of the fabled Robin Hood, appearing for the first time in this novel under the name Locksley, as a merry outlaw so adept with a bow that he can split another’s arrow. “This must be the devil, and no man of flesh and blood,” whisper the yeomen; “such archery was never seen since a bow was first bent in Britain.” Arthur thrilled at such scenes.
From an early age, he was aware that Scott could be long-winded and discursive, but Arthur thought that once he turned his attention to the action at hand, he conjured scenes like a sorcerer—the texture of everyday life in Elizabethan England in Kenilworth, the treacherous rivalries of the Byzantine Empire during the First Crusade in Count Robert of Paris. Only a few years before Arthur discovered Scott, a commentator had praised the national icon, “whose novels have not only refreshed and embellished the incidents of history, but have conferred on many a spot, formerly unknown to fame, a reputation as enduring as the annals of history itself.” Since these early days of reading, Arthur had sometimes wished that Scott had turned his imagination to the figures of his own time rather than spent so many years conjuring the past.
Arthur also loved martial poetry. He found nothing more inspiring than a vision of a stout-hearted soldier marching into battle against the odds. He admired valor the way he loved all things that struck him as manly—boxing, patriotism, hunting. At Stonyhurst he had finally succeeded in memorizing all seventy eight-line stanzas of Macaulay’s heroic lay “Horatius,” which opened with a driving meter that Arthur found irresistible:
Lars Porsena of Clusium
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.
By the Nine Gods he swore it,
And named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
East and west and south and north,
To summon his array.
He loved reading about adventures as much as he loved adventuring. As a young child, he admired above all other writers the Irish American novelist Mayne Reid, especially such works as his 1851 dime novel The Scalp Hunters: A Romance of the Plain. Its opening words helped conjure Arthur’s romantic view of the American West:
Unroll the world’s map, and look upon the great northern continent of America. Away to the wild west, away toward the setting sun, away beyond many a far meridian, let your eyes wander. Rest them where golden rivers rise among peaks that carry the eternal snow. Rest them there.
You are looking upon a land whose features are un-furrowed by human hands, still bearing the marks of the Almighty mould, as upon the morning of creation; a region whose every object wears the impress of God’s image. . .
Follow me, with the eye of your mind, through scenes of wild beauty, of savage sublimity.
After several pages of ecstatic description, Reid exclaimed, “These are the Rocky Mountains, the American Andes, the colossal vertebræ of the continent!”
Immersed in such books ever since he had learned to read, Arthur as a boy spent his time imagining hand-to-hand combat with fierce Red Indian braves and finding his wounds nursed by a charming squaw. Having mentally voyaged from Hudson Bay to Cape Horn, he knew how to behave aboard a ship. In his mind he carried a long-barreled Kentucky rifle and was sure he understood how to elude pursuers by running down a brook to throw bloodhounds off his scent. He still bore with him these stirring tales—and a vision of himself as an adventurer—when he strode along Edinburgh’s hilly streets toward the university.