Chapter 3 THE KNIGHT-ERRANT

Victorian fears were on abundant display in the detective novel, a genre that had its first great flowering in the late nineteenth century. Earlier crime fiction had concerned itself approvingly with the exploits of dashing brigands: heroes, heavily romanticized, were modeled on populist historical figures like Dick Turpin, the eighteenth-century highwayman who energetically robbed, plundered, and murdered his way across England. Villains were typically noblemen who had denied the masses their economic due or malevolent law officers seeking to snare the hero.

But by the Victorian era, with its metropolitan terrors, new middle class, and zeal for safeguarding possessions, the concerns of crime fiction had shifted markedly. Now property trumped populism in the foremost crime stories of the day, and the heroic rogue was replaced by the upright detective. This new fictional detective had a twofold role. His first task was to reassure. Lombroso had tried to convince upright citizens that criminals could be diagnosed at a glance and thus avoided. The detective novel, with somewhat more finesse, attempted to do the same: it sought to persuade the public that, as one scholar has described it, “the individual’s traces were readable and could not be concealed in the crowd.”

The detective’s second function was scientific—even medical: to act, where prevention was impossible, as an agent of cure. If the Victorian age was about little else, it was about the coming of modern science: the world-shaking evolutionary theory of Darwin; signal advances in physics, chemistry, biology, and geology; the increased understanding of the structure and function of living cells and of the germ theory of disease; and, hand in hand with those discoveries, the professionalization of modern medicine.

These developments informed the era’s preoccupation with crime and criminals. Crime was increasingly seen as a form of contagion—a kind of “social pathology”—and the new scientific method as a tool with which to track it down and wipe it out. By late Victorian times, criminals (especially foreign ones) were viewed as invading the populace in much the same way that germs invade the body. In the literature of the period, metaphors of invasion are everywhere: consider the blood-sucking antihero of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, or the insidious Jewish hypnotist Svengali in George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, Trilby, who co-opts the soul of his lovely young protégée.

The Holmes stories, too, bear witness to these fears, for their author, like many progressives of his era, was not immune to prevailing ideas about criminal physiognomy, about the glories of empire, and even—as some Holmes stories betray—about foreigners. (For his simultaneous embrace of ecumenical humanism and ardent fealty to Crown and country, the scholar Laura Otis has aptly described Conan Doyle as a “Liberal Imperialist.”) While many of Conan Doyle’s villains are Englishmen gone bad, the canon also contains its share of nefarious outsiders, like the vengeful American Jefferson Hope in A Study in Scarlet, or Tonga, the murderous Andaman islander from The Sign of Four. Conan Doyle, Otis writes, “depicts British society as permeated by foreign criminals, ‘passing’ as respectable citizens….Sherlock Holmes, his hero, acts as an immune system…to identify them and render them innocuous.”

The Slater case embodied the most potent concerns of its time. It is every inch about paranoia—highly personal on Miss Gilchrist’s part, more general on the public’s. It sprang from an act of invasion of the most terrifying kind: intrusion into a heavily fortified home. It involved a shadowy outsider who was not only a foreigner but also a Jew, a people long taxed, as Nazi ideology would soon trumpet, as being agents of the transmission of disease. Above all, it would require the use of sharp scientific reason to combat the willful unreason of police and prosecutors. How fitting, then, that Slater’s greatest champion was both a medical doctor and the father of the literary figure who remains the supreme incarnation of the Victorian detective.

THE FIRST CITIZEN OF Baker Street, as Sherlock Holmes would be known, sprang fully and impeccably to life in Conan Doyle’s novella A Study in Scarlet. First published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887, it was reprinted in book form the next year. Though Conan Doyle would continue publishing Holmes stories until 1927, even the late works embody the Victorian sensibility to their core.

Holmes quickly became a global sensation, not only for his investigative prowess, unimpeachable morals, and ultra-rational mind but also for his embodiment of an age of Victorian gentility, and Victorian certainties, that was already slipping away. From the beginning, the tales conjured a comforting world of gaslight and empire, where problems could still be remedied through the combined palliatives of reason and honor.

“Marshall McLuhan…once observed that serious cultural change always comes masked in the familiar trappings of the preceding cultural norm,” the critic Frank D. McConnell has written. “In this context, we can see that Doyle’s invention of Holmes and Watson is a crucial survival myth for the modern era, the technologized and urban age. If Doyle had not invented Holmes, someone else would have had to.”

The sea change to which Holmes bore witness was manifest in the scientific revolution then sweeping the West, of which Conan Doyle was an ardent adherent. Just as Thomas Henry Huxley (the distinguished nineteenth-century English biologist, Darwin acolyte, and grandfather of Aldous) had used his popular writings and lectures to bring the new scientific advances to the masses, Conan Doyle used Holmes to showcase their application to the investigation of crime. Holmes’s rationalist approach differed from that of most earlier literary detectives, something his creator set out to ensure from the first.

“It often annoyed me how in the old-fashioned detective stories, the detective always seemed to get at his results by some sort of lucky chance or fluke or else it was unexplained how he got there,” Conan Doyle said in a 1927 interview. “I began to think about…turning scientific methods…onto the work of detection.”

Holmes resonated so deeply with the late Victorian public that people could scarcely countenance him as fictional. Readers requested his autograph and sent him pipe tobacco and violin strings. Women wrote to Conan Doyle, applying to be Holmes’s housekeeper. An American tobacconist requested a copy of his putative monograph classifying 140 different varieties of ash. “Occasionally,” a biographer has written, “when a certain ‘pawky strain of humor’ came over him, Conan Doyle would send a brief postcard in reply, expressing regret that the detective was not available. The signature, however, was calculated to raise eyebrows. It was: ‘Dr. John Watson.’ ”

In 1893, Conan Doyle (who soon wearied of his hero and would rather have been known for the ponderous historical novels he also wrote) killed Holmes off in “The Final Problem.” But so great was the public clamor for Holmes—and so correspondingly lucrative the prospect of renewed publication—that Conan Doyle found he could not leave him dead. He first revived his hero in flashback in the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialized in 1901–2 but set in the years before Holmes’s demise. In 1903, he brought Holmes fully back to life in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” an act of resuscitation that prefigured his real-life rehabilitations of George Edalji and Oscar Slater. All three cases confirmed an essential truth that Conan Doyle had noted in childhood, after devouring boys’ adventure stories: “It was easy to get people into scrapes,” he observed, “but not so easy to get them out again.”

IF OSCAR SLATER WAS the incarnation of late Victorian fears, then Arthur Conan Doyle embodied most of the era’s sterling qualities: valor, thirst for adventure, love of manly competition in the boxing ring and on the cricket pitch, a passion for scientific knowledge, and a deep sense of fair play. To the systemic prejudices of Victorian Britain—his own included—he brought the unshakable counterweight of populist progressivism, for, like Slater, he had grown up poor, marginalized for his religion, and very much not an Englishman.

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh on May 22, 1859, the second child, and eldest son, of the seven surviving children of Charles Altamont Doyle and the former Mary Josephine Foley.*1 Theirs was an impoverished branch of an illustrious family: Arthur’s paternal grandfather, John Doyle, an artist who drew under the name H.B., was a political caricaturist of renown in early nineteenth-century London; among his luminous acquaintances were William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and Benjamin Disraeli. Arthur’s paternal uncles included James Doyle, author and illustrator of The Chronicle of England; Henry Doyle, manager of the National Gallery in Dublin; and Richard Doyle, an illustrator for Punch.

Arthur’s father, a painter and illustrator, appeared to have been as gifted as his brothers. But he suffered from epilepsy, alcoholism, and, by the time Arthur was a youth, severe mental illness. When he was able to work, he earned a meager wage as a clerk in an Edinburgh municipal office. “We lived,” Conan Doyle later wrote, “in the hardy and bracing atmosphere of poverty.”

“Charles possessed the Doyle family charm in full measure, yet was frequently described as ‘dreamy and remote,’ ‘apathetic,’ ‘naturally philosophic’ or ‘unworldly,’ ” the biographer Russell Miller has written. “When he was only 30 years old he suffered such a severe attack of delirium tremens that he was incapacitated and put on half pay for almost a year. Mary would later tell doctors that for months at a time her husband could only crawl, ‘was perfectly idiotic [and] could not tell his own name.’…He became increasingly unstable, once stripping off his clothes and trying to sell them in the street.” In 1881, Charles was committed to the first of the series of Scottish institutions that would be his home to the end of his life. He died in 1893, at sixty-one, at the Crichton Royal Lunatic Asylum in Dumfries.

Holding the family together in these years was Mary Doyle, the well-read daughter of an Irish doctor, who had married Charles in 1855, at seventeen. She was descended on her mother’s side, or so she had been told, from English nobility. “Diminutive Mary Doyle…fiercely proud of her heritage, drummed into her son her fervent belief that they had aristocratic ancestors and schooled him in the traditions and lore of a bygone age, of chivalry and heraldry and knights in shining armour,” Miller wrote, adding:

She would frequently challenge him to emblazon heraldic shields and he could soon provide every detail. It was a welcome escape from the spartan conditions, anxiety and genteel poverty in which they lived….Arthur never forgot sitting on the kitchen table while his mother busied herself cleaning the hearth and expounding on the past glories of her family and its connections with the Plantagenets, the Dukes of Brittany and the Percys of Northumberland: “I would sit swinging my knickerbockered legs, swelling with pride until my waistcoat was as tight as a sausage skin, as I contemplated the gulf which separated me from all other little boys who swang their legs upon tables.”^*2

Arthur grew up curious, sturdy, literary—he began writing little stories as a child—and, when need be, bellicose. “I will say for myself, however,” he wrote, “that though I was pugnacious I was never so to those weaker than myself and that some of my escapades were in the defence of such.” It was a trait that would define him to the end of his life.

The Doyles were Roman Catholics; as a youth Arthur, helped by well-to-do members of his extended family, was educated at Stonyhurst, a centuries-old Jesuit boarding school in Lancashire. He would remember it for its austerity, discipline, and frequent corporal punishment. “I can speak with feeling as I think few, if any boys of my time endured more of it,” he later wrote. “I went out of my way to do really mischievous and outrageous things simply to show that my spirit was unbroken….One master, when I told him that I thought of being a civil engineer, remarked, ‘Well, Doyle, you may be an engineer, but I don’t think you will ever be a civil one.’ ”

After leaving Stonyhurst in 1875, he studied for a year at a Jesuit school in Austria before returning to Edinburgh to start his university education. “I was wild, full-blooded, and a trifle reckless, but the situation called for energy and application, so that one was bound to try to meet it,” he wrote. “My mother had been so splendid that we could not fail her. It had been determined that I should be a doctor, chiefly, I think, because Edinburgh was so famous a centre for medical learning.”

Medical education in Scotland was then part of the undergraduate curriculum, and in 1876, at seventeen, Conan Doyle entered the University of Edinburgh to work toward a bachelor of medicine. He had already begun to part company with his religious beliefs, and the breach was widened by the scientific ideas to which he was exposed at university.

“Judging…by all the new knowledge which came to me both from my reading and from my studies, I found that the foundations not only of Roman Catholicism but of the whole Christian faith, as presented to me in nineteenth century theology, were so weak that my mind could not build upon them,” he wrote. “It is to be remembered that these were the years when Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill were our chief philosophers, and that even the man in the street felt the strong sweeping current of their thought, while to the young student, eager and impressionable, it was overwhelming.” This loss of faith meant a corresponding loss of support from the well-heeled, observant branches of his family, both in his student days and afterward, when he was struggling to establish a medical practice. But he held firm to his newfound convictions.

At the university, Conan Doyle came under the sway of an eminent professor, Dr. Joseph Bell. “Bell was a very remarkable man in body and mind,” he recalled. “He was thin, wiry, dark, with a high-nosed acute face, penetrating grey eyes, angular shoulders, and a jerky way of walking….His strong point was diagnosis, not only of disease, but of occupation and character….To his audience of Watsons it all seemed very miraculous until it was explained, and then it became simple enough. It is no wonder that after the study of such a character I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.”

By the time Conan Doyle was twenty, he later wrote, “my father’s health had utterly broken”—in his memoir, he refers to his father’s decline with gentle diplomacy, never specifying the precise nature of his illness—“and I…found myself practically the head of a large and struggling family.” To earn money, he began writing short stories. His first, “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley” (a non-Holmes tale set in Africa and regarded by modern critics as a pastiche of Poe and Bret Harte), was published in 1879 in Chambers’s Journal, an Edinburgh literary magazine. The next year, also to ease family finances, he interrupted his studies to sign on as the medical officer of the whaling ship Hope. The seven-month voyage would be the first of his many dashing adventures.

Joining the ship, with its crew of fifty, Conan Doyle embarked from the port of Peterhead, the Scottish town where Slater would one day be incarcerated, bound for the Arctic. “The life is dangerously fascinating,” he later wrote with characteristic Victorian understatement, and he soon found that its dangers applied to the doctor as well as the crew. More than once he was thrown overboard by a sudden swell, landing amid blocks of floating ice before regaining the ship. On another occasion he joined a party of harpooners in their little boat as they set upon a whale. “Its instinct urges it to get its tail to work on the boats, and yours urges you to keep poling and boat-hooking along its side, so as to retain your safe position near its shoulder,” he wrote. “Even there, however, we found…that we were not quite out of danger’s way, for the creature in its flurry raised its huge side-flapper and poised it over the boat. One flap would have sent us to the bottom of the sea.” He added, with equally characteristic sentiment: “Who would swap that moment for any other triumph that sport can give?”

In 1881, Conan Doyle graduated from Edinburgh as a bachelor of medicine and master of surgery. That autumn, he took a post as a ship’s surgeon on the steamer Mayumba, bound from Liverpool for the west coast of Africa. His account of that voyage betrays the best of Victorian valor and the worst of Victorian imperialism. On one occasion, he helped subdue an out-of-control fire aboard the ship, laden with a cargo of palm oil. On another, in Lagos, he fell seriously ill. “The germ or the mosquito or whatever it was reached me and I was down with a very sharp fever,” he wrote. “As I was myself doctor there was no one to look after me and I lay for several days fighting it out with Death in a very small ring and without a second….It must have been a close call, and I had scarcely sat up before I heard that another victim who got it at the same time was dead.”

In his appraisal of the ship’s African passengers, Conan Doyle does himself little credit. “There were…some unpleasant negro traders whose manners and bearing were objectionable, but who were patrons of the line and must, therefore, be tolerated. Some of these palm oil chiefs and traders have incomes of many thousands a year, but as they have no cultivated tastes they can only spend their money on drink, debauchery and senseless extravagance. One of them, I remember, had a choice selection of the demi-monde of Liverpool to see him off.”

In 1882, Conan Doyle established a medical practice in Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth in the south of England. Three years later, he married Louise Hawkins, familiarly known as Touie, the sister of one of his patients.^*3 A daughter, Mary, was born in 1889; a son, Kingsley, in 1892. The marriage, which would last until Louise’s death in 1906, was amicable, though it seemed based, as one scholar has noted, “more on affection and respect than on passion.”

Conan Doyle was by all accounts a capable doctor, but he found solo practice a struggle. “I made £154 the first year, and £250 the second, rising slowly to £300, which in eight years I never passed,” he later wrote. “In the first year the Income Tax paper arrived and I filled it up to show that I was not liable. They returned the paper with ‘Most unsatisfactory’ scrawled across it. I wrote ‘I entirely agree’ under the words, and returned it once more.”

Between patients, he continued to write, selling the occasional story to magazines and completing a historical novel, The Firm of Girdlestone, which would not see publication until 1890. He began to dream of producing a set of stories that, unlike the popular serials of the day, would each be self-contained in a single issue yet leave readers clamoring for sequels.

“Poe’s masterful detective, M. Dupin, had from boyhood been one of my heroes,” Conan Doyle wrote. “But could I bring an addition of my own? I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details. If he were a detective he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer to an exact science.” For his hero, he considered various names—among them Sherrinford Holmes—before hitting on one whose steel-trap snap befit a detective whose acumen, logical rigor, and sense of honor would outstrip those of many real-life counterparts.^*4

For a time Conan Doyle plied his two trades in parallel: In 1891, after training briefly in Vienna as an ophthalmologist, he moved with his family to London, where he set up a practice. Before long, Holmes’s success would let him relinquish medicine entirely, though his first vocation would stand him in good stead to the end. “Often, physicians who become serious writers abandon the clinic wholly or visit it only intermittently,” Edmund D. Pellegrino, a doctor and bioethicist, has observed. “But they retain the clinician’s way of looking.”

ONCE HOLMES MADE HIM FAMOUS, Conan Doyle had to spend a great deal of time denying that he was Holmesian himself. After a reviewer castigated him for letting Holmes disparage Poe’s great detective, the chevalier Dupin, in A Study in Scarlet, he replied, charmingly: “Please grip this fact with your cérebral tentacle, / The doll and his maker are never identical.” In fact, with his big bluff build, round face, and walrus mustache, Conan Doyle seemed far more the embodiment of Watson than of Holmes.

Yet the doll Holmes sprang from somewhere. Between his natural questing temperament and his supreme diagnostic training under Bell, Conan Doyle possessed a far more Holmesian cast of mind than he usually let on. “I have often been asked whether I had myself the qualities which I depicted, or whether I was merely the Watson that I look,” he wrote. “Of course I am well aware that it is one thing to grapple with a practical problem and quite another thing when you are allowed to solve it under your own conditions. I have no delusions about that. At the same time a man cannot spin a character out of his own inner consciousness and make it really life-like unless he has some possibilities of that character within him.”

He continued: “I…have several times solved problems by Holmes’ methods after the police have been baffled. Yet I must admit that in ordinary life I am by no means observant and that I have to throw myself into an artificial frame of mind before I can weigh evidence and anticipate the sequence of events.”

But according to Adrian Conan Doyle, a son from the author’s second marriage, his father could perform feats of diagnostic logic with ease:

In travelling through the capital cities of the world, it was one of my keenest enjoyments to accompany my father to any principal restaurant, and there to listen to his quiet speculations as to the characteristics, professions and other idiosyncrasies, all quite hidden from my eyes, of our fellow diners. Sometimes we could not prove the correctness…of his findings as the particular subject might be unknown to the head-waiter; but whenever those concerned were known to the maître d’hotel, the accuracy of my father’s deduction was positively startling. As a footnote, here is a point that will intrigue Holmes enthusiasts. In the mind’s eye, we surely visualize the Master complete with dust-red dressing-gown and curving pipe. But these were the accoutrements of Conan Doyle, and the originals are still in the family possession!

Conan Doyle’s skill was evident not only in his powers of reasoning but also in his eagerness to amass the welter of empirical data—the clues—on which his rational mind could work. He had started down this empirical path in his university days. “I always regarded him as one of the best students I ever had,” Bell said of him years later. “He was exceedingly interested always upon anything connected with diagnosis, and was never tired of trying to discover those little details which one looks for.”

As a young doctor, Conan Doyle stood ready to challenge scientific opinion when he thought the facts did not bear it out. In November 1890, while practicing in Southsea, he traveled to Berlin to hear a lecture by the German doctor and microbiologist Robert Koch. Koch, who would receive the Nobel Prize in 1905, was already a titan, renowned for having isolated the bacilli that cause anthrax, cholera, and tuberculosis. By the late nineteenth century, he authentically believed that he had uncovered not only the cause of tuberculosis but also a cure, one of the most urgently sought grails in world health. This was the subject of his Berlin lecture.

Arriving the day before, Conan Doyle found the lecture so oversubscribed that he could not get a seat. “Undaunted,” his biographer Russell Miller wrote, “he tried calling at Koch’s home, but got no further than the front hall, where he watched a postman empty a sack of letters onto a desk. He realised, with a sense of shock, that they were mostly from desperately ill people who had heard about Koch’s cure and believed he was their last hope….Since Koch’s findings remained to be verified it seemed to the sceptical Conan Doyle that ‘a wave of madness had seized the world.’ ”

Returning to the lecture hall the next day, Conan Doyle befriended an American doctor who had gained admission, and who afterward shared his notes. Reviewing them—and spirited in by his American friend to tour Koch’s clinical wards—Conan Doyle realized that the vaunted remedy was not all it appeared. “Observing the patients treated with Koch’s tuberculosis ‘cure,’ ” Laura Otis has written, “Doyle comprehended immediately that the treatment—which proved to be a tremendous disappointment—functioned not by killing the bacillus directly but by killing and expelling the damaged tissue in which the bacillus grew.”

Conan Doyle outlined his conclusions in a letter in the Daily Telegraph. Koch’s remedy, he wrote, “does not touch the real seat of the evil. To use a homely illustration, it is as if a man whose house was infested with rats were to remove the marks of the creatures every morning and expect in that way to get rid of them.” His was a minority viewpoint, but over time it proved correct.

By the late 1890s, when Conan Doyle had forsaken medicine and Holmes was a vibrant worldwide presence, he was asked increasingly to turn his diagnostic skills to problems of another sort: real-life criminal mysteries. He would bring his “clinician’s way of looking” to bear on each of them, including, in the most formidable case of his career, the conviction of Oscar Slater.