Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on May 22, 1859  to Charles Altamont Doyle and Mary Foley.  He was the second of seven children in the family (The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia ).   As a child, Doyle was given a Jesuit education and upbringing; although, later he would leave the Christian faith to become an agnostic (The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia ). He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1876. During this time, he served as a doctor in “Sheffield, Birmingham, and Shropshire” and met Dr. Joseph Bell (The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia ). After his graduation in 1881 he traveled to Lagos in Western Africa and in 1885 he married Louisa Hawkins.  They had two children, Kingsley and Mary Louise. The novelist, Walter Scott, mentored Doyle in the industry and Doyle’s first publication was, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887 (The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia ). In between writing, Doyle opened a small medical practice in London in the 1890s. The Sherlock Holmes stories became a regular part of the Strand Magazine . Doyle and his wife relocated to Switzerland in 1892 due to her illness from tuberculosis and it was there that Doyle wrote, The Adventure of the Final Problem, killing off Holmes. The public was outraged by Sherlock Holmes’s demise off the Reichenbach Falls with Professor Moriarty. Doyle traveled giving lectures in the United States starting in 1894 up to the beginning of the Boer War in 1899.  During the war, he supervised a hospital in Bloemfontein. Upon his return, he was bestowed the “title of Knight of Grace of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem” thus, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock’s resurrection occurs in 1903 when Doyle is enticed by money offered by an American publisher.  Shortly thereafter, Holmes returns in serialized stories (The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia ).  He remarried Jean Leckie in 1907 and they had three children together, Denis, Adrian and Jean (The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia ).  Doyle lost his son, Kingsley, and brother during World War I where he actively wrote the history and various communications.  He became an avid spiritualist and in 1924 published his autobiography, Memories and Adventures (The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia ). He died on July 7^th, 1930 from a heart attack (The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia ).

Dr. Joseph Bell served as Doyle’s mentor and the character, Sherlock Holmes, was modeled after him.  Dr. Bell was a renowned physician and surgeon at Edinburgh University when Doyle attended the school.  Barbara Westmoreland (1991) in her article, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Bell, and Sherlock Holmes, argues that Doyle whom worked as a subordinate under Dr. Bell observed his methods and observations of medical conditions (Westmoreland 326) .   Doyle states in Memories and Adventures (1924) concerning Dr. Joseph Bell:

“To his audience of Watson’s 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.” (The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia ).

Even Doyle’s description of Dr. Joseph Bell from Memories and Adventures (1924) mirrors the later description of his character, Sherlock Holmes.  Doyle states:

“But the most notable of the characters whom I met was one Joseph Bell, surgeon at the Edinburgh Infirmary. Bell was a very remarkable man in body and mind. He was thin, wiry, and dark, with a high-nosed acute face, penetrating grey eyes, angular shoulders, and a jerky way of walking. His voice was high and discordant. He was a very skillful surgeon, but his strong point was diagnosis, not only of disease, but of occupation and character” (The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia ).

The Sherlock Holmes Canon includes sixty stories; four novels and fifty-six short stories, written by Doyle from 1887 through 1927 (The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia ).  The Canon’s guardians are the Sherlockians and Baker Street Irregulars, two societies within the Sherlock fandom.  The three stories from the Canon explored in this project are: “A Study in Scarlet” (November 1887), “The Adventure of the Final Problem” (December 1893), and “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (August 1901).

Doyle is considered to be a Victorian author and lived within the Victorian era. Queen Victoria’s ascent to the throne and her death bookmark on each side what is considered the Victorian era from 1837-1901. During this era the perception of science and the medical world was in flux.  The Scottish author, Robert Chambers, wrote Vestiges and Charles Darwin wrote the Origin of Species while in the psychoanalytical realm Freud was an emerging figure.  Doyle appeared on the scene in the United Kingdom in November 1887 with his Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet (1887), published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual (The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia ).  The Victorian age with its Darwinian, Freudian, and Poe influences are apparent within the cultural text of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and reflective in his authorship signs.

 

Edgar Allan Poe, in his book The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) created the detective character, Dupin, who was a forerunner to Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.  The current detective storytelling genre emerges during this era with Dupin’s character.  The Dupin character as a detective shared his reasoning with the readership as a new narrative construct of the events of the crime. Dupin’s traits mirror Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in the depiction of Dupin as the social outcast and his “separation from the real world” (Thoms 47). Similar to Sherlock, Dupin’s perspective on crime solving uses detection as the “perfect game” and criminal profiling by assaulting their mind (Thoms 50,58) .  Peter Thoms in his book, Detection and its designs: Narrative and power in 19^th century Detective fiction, argues Holmes exemplifies the authorial figure head brandishing power over their subordinates and the narrative.  Dupin and Sherlock are the directors of their respective narratives. Courtney Novosat (2012) in her article, Outside Dupin’s Closet of Reason: (Homo) sexual Repression and Radicalized Terror in Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,argues Poe’s method of “juxtaposing narrative to counter narrative…draws the reader’s attention not to the crime, not to the resolution, but to the act of analysis…” allows the reader participatory action with the text (Novosat 78-79).   Dupin and later Sherlock’s character actions were innovative in the Victorian era as forensic and criminal sciences were in their infancies.  The Victorian era shaped Doyle’s cultural text within the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Works Cited

Novosat, Courtney. “Outside Dupin’s Closet of Reason: (Homo)sexual Repression and Racialized Terror in Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ .” Poe Studies, Vol. 45 (2012): 78-106. web.

The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia . August 2016. web. 20-23 August 2016.

Thoms, Peter. Detection and its designs: Narrative and power in the 19th century detective fiction. Athen, OH: Ohio University Press, 1998. Print .

Westmoreland, Barbara F. and Jack Key. “Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Bell, and Sherlock Holmes: A Neurologic Connection.” Arch Neurol, Vol. 48 (March 1991): 326-329. web .