Memories and Adventures 9781474433402

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Memories and Adventures



the edinburgh edition of the works of arthur conan doyle general editor douglas kerr

Memories and Adventures by

Arthur Conan Doyle

edited by

Douglas Kerr



Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Douglas Kerr, 2022 © the text in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2022

Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Adobe Arno Pro by Lois Burke, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 3338 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3340 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3341 9 (epub)

The right of Douglas Kerr to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents General Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements Chronology of the Life of Arthur Conan Doyle Introduction Genesis and Composition Publication History Reception Context: The Autobiographical Tradition Context: Historical Context: Biographical

vii ix xi xxi xxii xxiv xxvi xxx xxxv xxxviii

Memories and Adventures Preface Early Recollections Under the Jesuits Recollections of a Student Whaling in the Arctic Ocean My Voyage to West Africa My First Experiences in Practice My Start at Southsea My First Literary Success Pulling Up the Anchor The Great Break Sidelights on Sherlock Holmes Norwood and Switzerland Egypt in 1896 On the Edge of a Storm An Interlude of Peace The Start for South Africa Days with the Army Final Experiences in South Africa An Appeal to the World’s Opinion My Political Adventures The Years Between the Wars The Years Between the Wars (continued) Some Notable People

1 2 8 16 26 38 47 53 60 69 78 85 98 106 114 122 129 140 152 161 171 179 194 206

contents

Some Recollections of Sport To the Rocky Mountains in 1914 The Eve of War A Remembrance of the Dark Years Experiences on the British Front Experiences on the Italian Front Experiences on the French Front Breaking the Hindenburg Line The Psychic Quest Appendix – Up to Date (1930)

229 251 266 283 293 308 314 325 337 348

Illustrations An Essay on the Text Apparatus Abbreviations used in the Apparatus Emendations and Variations Explanatory Notes

356 360 388 390 391 463

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General Editor’s Preface Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing has always been popular, but until recent years it has received scant attention from scholars. Now that he is beginning to be recognised as one of the most important writers of his generation, and his books are not just widely read but studied by students and critics all over the world, the time is ripe for the first scholarly critical edition of Conan Doyle’s works. Appropriately this is being undertaken by the Press of Edinburgh University, for he was a native of the city, and a student of its university from 1876 to 1881. While Conan Doyle is remembered primarily for the Sherlock Holmes stories, which defined the genre of crime fiction and introduced one of the world’s best-known fictional characters, his contributions as a writer and as a public figure were astonishingly broad and diverse. He was a campaigner for justice, an advocate of sport, an indefatigable traveller, a propagandist for British wars, and a proselytiser of Spiritualism. His writing reflects this variety of experience. He wrote in the genres of science fiction, horror, ghost stories, medical realism, detective fiction, adventure fiction, military history, poetry, journalism, spiritual literature, and autobiography. There is a need for an accurate and authoritative edition of this body of writing, and the Edinburgh Conan Doyle will be unique as a series of critical editions of Conan Doyle’s works. He was a professional author, with no other source of income once he had made the momentous decision, in 1891, to retire from medicine and live by his pen. He belonged to a busy and sociable literary culture which served a well-educated reading public of unprecedented size. This public had an appetite for magazines, from the prestigious Cornhill to the popular Tit-Bits, and it was common for writers like Conan Doyle, with the help of the first generation of professional literary agents, to publish instalments of their work in periodical form before they appeared as books. Conan Doyle’s own relationship with the Strand Magazine is wellknown, but his work appeared in scores of serial outlets, and his books too came out under the imprint of dozens of publishers, on both sides of the Atlantic. These different and developing print institutions, and his many collaborators, editors, publishers, illustrators, and critics, ensure that a study of Conan Doyle’s writing opens a broad window onto the literary and cultural history of his time. Meanwhile the range of topics he wrote about in his stories gives a sense of how his society thought of vii

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itself, its tastes and ideals, and its anxieties and fears. The extent of Conan Doyle’s writing posed a problem, and it was decided early in the planning stage that this edition should not be a Complete Works. (Of the collections published in his lifetime and supposedly under his supervision, neither the thirteen-volume Author’s Edition of 1903 nor the twenty-four-volume Crowborough Edition of 1930 claimed to be comprehensive.) Quite a lot of his writing was frankly ephemeral; though it is all interesting, some of it would not enhance his literary reputation if republished. Even so, in order to keep the edition to a manageable size, difficult decisions have had to be made. This edition has striven not only to include Conan Doyle’s best writing, but also to offer a sense of the prodigious range of his output, a variety which easily stands comparison with that of his near contemporaries Stevenson and Kipling. To give a biographical context for his writings, Memories and Adventures is the first volume to be published in this edition. So here alongside Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger, and Brigadier Gerard, we have medical and military stories, historical fiction, tales of mystery and imagination, campaigns against injustice, journalistic dispatches and Spiritualist polemic. These are all presented here in texts as authoritative as scholarship can make them, each volume having besides an extensive introduction, a textual essay giving a full history from conception to the various published incarnations and their critical reception, and a textual apparatus laying out in full the variations and emendations of the text from manuscript, if available, through serial publication and on to the books. Here the interested reader can study not only the final flourishing of Conan Doyle’s work but also its organic development, the hundreds of textual decisions involved in its process. Selection notwithstanding, the intention has been to present Conan Doyle’s literary work as a whole in such a way as to enable a clear judgement of his achievement.

viii

Acknowledgements A scholarly edition is par excellence what practitioners of editing call a ‘social text’. There may have been only one Arthur Conan Doyle, but a critical edition of any of his books bears the fingerprints of many people, and institutions (if institutions can be said to leave fingerprints). It is a collaborative venture on many levels. For the editor whose name appears on the title page, it is an obligation, but also a pleasure, to acknowledge with thanks the contributions of those who helped to bring the volume to print. They can all take credit for whatever is of value in the enterprise, while responsibility for its errors and shortcomings belongs to the editor alone. At Edinburgh University Press, the instigator of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle was Jackie Jones. As the edition began to take shape, it passed into the capable hands of Michelle Houston, with assistance from Adela Rauchova. It is guided by an expert editorial board, and advised by anonymous reviewers. To all of these I extend grateful thanks. This volume benefited in the early stages from the work of my two brilliant research assistants at Hong Kong University, Rita Kelly and Caitlin Vandertop. Their painstaking work, particularly on the manuscript, has left them with an expertise on Conan Doyle which they can hardly have expected. At the other end of the project, Lois Burke at Edinburgh University applied editorial and computer skills that transformed the text of the edition into readable form. I am very grateful to these three young scholars. Thanks too to the staff of Hong Kong University Library, the British Library, the London Library, and particularly to the Mount Holyoke College Library (Archives and Special Collections), especially James Gehrt, Leslie Fields, and Debbie Richards, for so generously making the manuscript available, and for their hospitality. I have benefited greatly from the published work of Conan Doyle scholars and critics; many but not all of these debts are acknowledged in the pages that follow. But in the preparation of this volume, a number of individual scholars have given much-needed help and advice. First among equals is Ian Duncan, who oversaw the whole process and gave invaluable counsel and encouragement. Jon Lellenberg has been unfailingly generous with help for this volume and support for the edition as ix

acknowledgements

a whole. I am also very indebted to Jonathan Cranfield, Andrew Glazzard, Roger Luckhurst, James Machin, Richard Pooley, and the doyen of Conan Doyle studies, Owen Dudley Edwards. As a novice in scholarly editing, I was generously and patiently helped by Anthony Mandal and Allan Simmons, and by members of our editorial board. Rob Dale gave invaluable advice on page setting. For various kindnesses I would also like to thank Linda Dryden, Tom Ue, and of course Elaine Ho. The edition most gratefully acknowledges generous support from the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Conan Doyle Estate. DK

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A Chronology of the Life of Arthur Conan Doyle 1847 Catherine Foley (née Pack) moves to Edinburgh from Ireland with her daughters Mary and Catherine. 1849 Charles Altamont Doyle, youngest son of the political cartoonist John Doyle (H.B.), moves to Edinburgh from London to work at the Scottish Office of Works. 1855 Marriage of Charles Altamont Doyle and Mary Josephine Foley at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Edinburgh. 1859 Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, third child and elder son of Charles and Mary Doyle, born at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh (22 May), and baptised at St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral. 1866 ACD attends Newington Academy, Edinburgh. 1867 ACD, aged 8, enrolled at Hodder House in Lancashire, the preparatory school for Stonyhurst College. 1869 ACD, aged 10, begins five years of studies at Stonyhurst. 1874 First visit to London. 1875 ACD passes the matriculation examination for London University. He begins a year’s study at Stella Matutina, a Jesuit college in Feldkirch, Austria. 1876 Charles Doyle retires from the Office of Works with a pension of £150 per year. ACD returns to Edinburgh, where Bryan Charles Waller is lodging with the Doyle family. On Waller’s advice, in October he begins his studies in the Edinburgh University Medical School, aged 17. 1877 Waller leases 23 George Square, Edinburgh, as a ‘consulting pathologist’, and the Doyle family move in with him. ACD a medical student at Edinburgh, becomes surgeon’s clerk to Joseph Bell at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. xi

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1878 ACD works for three weeks as unpaid assistant to Dr Charles Richardson of Sheffield. Spends two months in London, visiting his Doyle relatives. Works for four months as unpaid assistant to Dr Henry Elliott in Ruyton-XI-Towns, Shropshire. 1879 Charles Doyle a patient at Fordoun House, near Montrose. On completing his second year of clinical study, ACD takes a further assistantship with Dr R. R. Hoare in a busy practice in Birmingham. He begins to write for publication, and submits ‘The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe’ to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, without success. His first published story, ‘The Mystery of Sasassa Valley’, appears in Chamber’s Journal (Sept). His letter, ‘Gelseminum as a Poison’, published in the British Medical Journal (Sept). 1880 ACD serves for seven months (Feb–Aug) as a surgeon on the Greenland whaling ship Hope, of Peterhead. 1881 Charles Doyle committed to Blairenro House, Drumlithie, Aberdeenshire, a home for alcoholics (Mar). ACD graduates MB, CM (Edin.). He serves as surgeon on the cargo steamer Mayumba (Oct–Jan 1882), on a voyage from Liverpool to West Africa. Two stories published in the Christmas issue of London Society. 1882 ACD joins his friend George Turnavine Budd in his medical practice in Plymouth (May), then moves to Southsea, Portsmouth (June) and sets up in practice for himself. His brother Innes, aged 9, comes to live with him at 1 Bush Villas, Elm Grove, Southsea. Mary Doyle and the rest of the family leave Edinburgh to live on the Masongill estate of Bryan Waller in Yorkshire. 1883 ACD writing and publishing stories, including ‘The Captain of the Pole-Star’ (Temple Bar, Jan) and ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’ (Cornhill, Jan 1884). 1885 Charles Doyle certified and transferred from Blairerno House to the Royal Lunatic Asylum, Montrose, under a detention order. ACD publishes ‘The Man from Archangel’ (London Society, Jan). Submits his thesis, on tabes dorsalis, and is awarded Edinburgh University MD. Meets xii

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Louisa (Touie) Hawkins, sister of his patient John Hawkins. They marry at Masongill (Aug). 1886 The Firm of Girdlestone completed (Jan). A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story, completed (May), the copyright eventually purchased by Ward, Lock & Co. for £25 (Oct). ACD’s first interest in psychic phenomena. 1887 A Study in Scarlet published as the main feature in Beeton’s Christmas Annual (Nov). 1888 Book edition of A Study in Scarlet published by Ward, Lock ( July). The Mystery of Cloomber serialized in Pall Mall Budget and Pall Mall Gazette and published (Ward and Downey, Dec). 1889 A daughter, Mary Louise Conan Doyle, born. ACD’s first historical novel, Micah Clarke, published by Longmans, Green (Feb). Death of George Turnavine Budd. At a dinner in the Langham Hotel, London, Joseph Stoddart, managing editor of Lippincott’s Magazine, commissions short novels from ACD and Oscar Wilde. 1890 The Sign of Four published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (Feb) and as a book by Spencer Blackett (Oct). The Captain of the Polestar and Other Stories (Longmans, Green, Mar) and The Firm of Girdlestone (Chatto and Windus, Apr), also published. ACD visits Berlin to report on Robert Koch’s vaunted cure for consumption (Nov). On his return he announces he will be leaving his Southsea practice. He acquires a literary agent, A. P. Watt. First issue of Strand Magazine published. 1891 Charles Doyle transferred to the Royal Edinburgh Asylum as a private patient. The White Company serialized in the Cornhill (Jan–Dec). After a brief spell studying in Vienna, ACD moves his family to London and sets up as an eye specialist at 2 Upper Wimpole Street, off Harley Street. After a bout of influenza, he quits his practice, deciding to live by his pen, and moves the family to the suburb of South Norwood. The first six Sherlock Holmes adventures published in the Strand, from July. The White Company (Smith, Elder, Oct) and Beyond the City (in the Christmas number of Good Words) published. xiii

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1892 Friendship with J. M. Barrie begins. The Doings of Raffles Haw (Cassell, Mar), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Newnes, Oct), and The Great Shadow (Arrowsmith’s Christmas Annual) all published. Charles Doyle transferred to the Crichton Royal Asylum, Dumfries, with a diagnosis of dementia. Arthur Alleyne Kingsley Conan Doyle born. 1893 More Holmes tales in the Strand. ACD joins the Society for Psychical Research. The Refugees published (Longmans, Green, May). Holidays with Touie in Switzerland (Aug) and visits the Reichenbach Falls. Touie diagnosed as suffering from consumption (tuberculosis). Death of Charles Doyle at the Crichton Royal, Dumfries, aged 61. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes published (Newnes, Dec), including ‘The Adventure of the Final Problem’ in which Holmes apparently dies. 1894 First performance of ACD’s play A Story of Waterloo, starring Henry Irving. ACD investigates a haunted house in Dorset for the Society for Psychical Research. Lecture tour in America, accompanied by his brother Innes (Sept–Dec). Visits Rudyard Kipling in Vermont. The first Brigadier Gerard story in the Strand. Publication of Round the Red Lamp (Methuen, Oct) and The Parasite (Archibald Constable, Dec). The Stark Munro Letters serialized in The Idler (Oct 1894–Nov 1895). 1895 The Stark Munro Letters published by Longmans, Green (Sept). ACD and Touie travel to Egypt (Nov). 1896 The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard published by Newnes (Feb). ACD accompanies Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian expeditionary force up the Nile as a war correspondent for the Westminster Gazette (Apr). Rodney Stone published by Smith, Elder (Nov). 1897 Meeting with Jean Leckie. Uncle Bernac published by Smith, Elder (May). The family move into Undershaw, Hindhead, Surrey (Oct). 1898 The Tragedy of the Korosko (Feb) and Songs of Action ( June) published by Smith, Elder. 1899 A Duet published by Grant Richards (Mar). ACD elected chairman of the Authors’ Club (May) and member of the MCC (June). The xiv

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drama Sherlock Holmes first performed by the American actor William Gillette. Outbreak of the South African (Second Boer) War. 1900 Serves with the volunteer-staffed Langman Field Hospital in South Africa (Feb–July), and helps to deal with an enteric (cholera) epidemic in Bloemfontein. The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport published by Smith, Elder (Mar). In the October general election, ACD stands unsuccessfully as Liberal Unionist candidate for Edinburgh Central. His history of The Great Boer War published by Smith, Elder (Oct), though the war is not yet over. 1901 Sherlock Holmes returns in The Hound of the Baskervilles (Strand, Aug 1901–Apr 1902), written with the assistance of Bertram Fletcher Robinson. 1902 ACD publishes The War in South Africa – Its Cause and Conduct (Smith, Elder, Jan), defending Britain’s actions in the war, and supervises its translation and dissemination. The Hound of the Baskervilles published by Newnes in March. ACD knighted by King Edward VII. 1903 ACD buys a motor car. Adventures of Gerard (Newnes, Sept). New Holmes stories in the Strand. Author’s Edition published in twelve volumes by Smith, Elder and in thirteen by D. Appleton of New York. 1905 The Return of Sherlock Holmes published by Newnes (Mar). ACD receives honorary LL.D from Edinburgh University. Sir Nigel serialized in the Strand (Dec 1905–Dec 1906). 1906 ACD stands as Unionist candidate for parliament for the Border Boroughs, again defeated (Jan). Touie (Louise, Lady Conan Doyle) dies (July). Sir Nigel published by Smith, Elder (Nov). 1907 The Story of Mr. George Edalji (Daily Telegraph, Jan). ACD working to clear Edalji’s name. Through the Magic Door, his book about reading, published by Smith, Elder (Nov). Marriage to Jean Leckie (the second Lady Conan Doyle) (Sept). They move to Windlesham, Crowborough, Sussex (Dec). xv

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1908 Round the Fire Stories published by Smith, Elder (Sept). 1909 Birth of Denis Percy Stewart Conan Doyle, ACD’s first child with Jean. The Fires of Fate, a play based on the novella The Tragedy of the Korosko, opens at the Shakespeare Theatre, Liverpool, and transfers to the Lyric Theatre, London ( June). ACD becomes President of the Divorce Law Reform Union. Works with E. D. Morel and Roger Casement for the Congo Reform Association, and publishes The Crime of the Congo (Oct). 1910 The House of Temperley (adapted from the novel Rodney Stone) followed by The Speckled Band at the Adelphi Theatre, London, leased by ACD for six months. Death of George Newnes. Adrian Malcolm Conan Doyle born. 1911 ACD takes part in the Prince Henry tour, an Anglo-German motoring competition. Songs of the Road (Mar) and The Last Galley (Apr) published by Smith, Elder. In a letter to the Belfast Evening Telegraph (Sept), ACD declares he is now in favour of Irish Home Rule. 1912 The Lost World, which introduces Professor Challenger, serialized in the Strand (Apr–Nov) and published in October by Hodder and Stoughton. The Case of Oscar Slater published by Hodder and Stoughton (Aug). Birth of Jean Lena Annette Conan Doyle. 1913 An essay, ‘Great Britain and the Next War’, published in the Fortnightly Review (Feb). The Poison Belt, the second Challenger story, published by Hodder and Stoughton (Aug). The House of Temperley filmed. 1914 ACD and Jean tour the United States and Canada (May–July). With the outbreak of war with Germany in August, ACD helps to form a local civilian reserve force, later enlisting as a private in the 6th Royal Sussex Volunteer Regiment. The Valley of Fear, the last Holmes novel, serialized in the Strand (Sept–May 1915). ACD and other authors invited by the new Propaganda Bureau to further the war effort with their writing. ACD produces the pamphlet To Arms! (Hodder and Stoughton, Sept), and begins a busy programme of patriotic speeches, lectures, and pamphlets about the War. xvi

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1915 Begins writing his history of The British Campaign in France and Flanders (commencing serial publication in the Strand in Apr 1916). The Valley of Fear published by Smith, Elder ( June). 1916 ACD writing patriotic pamphlets and agitating for body armour, improved weaponry, and the building of a Channel Tunnel. Reports for the Daily Chronicle from the British, Italian, and French front lines: A Visit to Three Fronts published by Hodder and Stoughton (Aug). Kingsley wounded in the Battle of the Somme ( July). Sir Roger Casement hanged for treason, despite pleas for reprieve from ACD and some others. ACD makes public his belief in Spiritualism in Light magazine (Nov). 1917 First of many lectures on Spiritualism (Sept). A new Holmes collection, His Last Bow, published by John Murray (Oct). 1918 The New Revelation, ACD’s first Spiritualist book, published by Hodder and Stoughton (Apr). ACD visits the Australian section of the Western Front (Sept), and witnesses the start of the decisive Allied counter-offensive. Death of Kingsley Conan Doyle, of pneumonia, two weeks before the Armistice. 1919 Death of ACD’s brother, Brigadier-General Innes Doyle, of pneumonia (Feb). ACD travels the country lecturing on Spiritualism. The Vital Message published by Hodder and Stoughton (Nov). 1920 Sixth and final volume of The British Campaign in France and Flanders published by Hodder and Stoughton ( Jan). ACD debates Joseph McCabe, of the Rationalist Press Association, at the Queen’s Hall, London (Mar). Meets Harry Houdini (Apr). Embarks on lecture tour of Australia and New Zealand (Aug). ‘Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event’ appears in Strand Christmas Number. Death of ACD’s mother Mary Doyle (Dec). 1921 The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, about his travels in Australia and New Zealand, published by Hodder and Stoughton (Sept). First Sherlock Holmes films starring Eille Norwood made by the Stoll Company. First appearance at séances of ACD’s spirit guide Pheneas. xvii

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1922 Lecture tour of the United States and Canada (Apr–July). Publication of The Coming of the Fairies (Hodder and Stoughton, Sept), The Poems of Arthur Conan Doyle ( John Murray, Sept), and The Case for Spirit Photography (Hutchinson, Dec). 1923 Another North American tour (Mar–Aug), lecturing on Spiritualism. Memories and Adventures serialized in the Strand (Oct 1923– July 1924). 1924 ACD mounts an exhibition of works by his father, Charles Altamont Doyle, at the Brooke Galleries in London (Jan). Memories and Adventures published by Hodder and Stoughton (Sept). 1925 The Psychic Bookshop opened in Victoria Street, London. Film of The Lost World premiered in New York (Feb). The Land of Mist in the Strand (July 1925–Mar 1926). ACD buys a house at Bignell Wood, Lyndhurst, in the New Forest. 1926 The Land of Mist published by Hutchinson (Mar). The History of Spiritualism published in two volumes (Cassell, June). 1927 Pheneas Speaks published by the Psychic Press (Mar). ‘The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place’, the last Holmes tale, appears in the Strand (Apr). The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes ( John Murray, June). Oscar Slater released from prison. 1928 ACD attends the Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal where Oscar Slater’s sentence is quashed ( July). The Complete Sherlock Holmes Stories published by John Murray (Oct). Embarks on a tour of South and East Africa (Nov 1928–Apr 1929). 1929 ACD’s 70th birthday (May). The Maracot Deep and Other Stories, his last collection of tales, published by John Murray ( July). Our African Winter ( John Murray, Sept). ACD taken ill while touring Holland and Scandinavia. 1930 ACD resigns from the Society for Psychical Research after thirty-six years ( Jan). The Edge of the Unknown, essays on psychic matters, xviii

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published by John Murray ( June). ACD dies at Windlesham, after a heart attack, on 7 July. Thousands attend his memorial service at the Albert Hall. Posthumous publication of a second edition of Memories and Adventures ( John Murray), and the 24-volume Crowborough Edition (Doubleday, Doran).

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Introduction In the years that followed the end of the Great War, which he was to describe in Memories and Adventures as ‘the physical climax of my life’ (M&A, 265), Arthur Conan Doyle felt that a national and personal crisis was over. There was time for reflection and retrospection. He probably sensed that his best literary work was behind him – he had not published a novel since The Valley of Fear in 1915 – though he continued to write and publish with a Victorian industriousness. His mother, to whom he was devoted, had died at the end of 1920, and the children of his second marriage were growing up and often accompanied their parents on their extensive travels. These indefatigable wanderings, in Europe, Australasia, North America, and South Africa, which occupied so much of the last decade of Conan Doyle’s life, were lecture tours in which he sought to spread the revelations of Spiritualism, which, as he wrote in the last chapter of his autobiography, had come ‘to absorb the whole energy of [his] life’ (M&A, 337). He was known around the world as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, though there were other literary achievements of which he was more proud. In 1923, after the publication of ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’ and as he contemplated writing his life story, he seems to have made one of his periodic resolutions to write no more Sherlock Holmes tales.1 He had tried his hand at many different kinds of writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and although nowadays we would class him a genre writer – Darryl Jones calls him ‘the greatest genre writer Britain has ever produced’2 – in his own day there was less concern to draw a firm line between serious literary writing and such genres, usually more popular, as historical or crime fiction, sporting tales or ghost stories. At home Dr Conan Doyle was a well-known public figure, accustomed to giving his opinion in the national press and on speaking platforms on matters as varied as the Congo atrocities, the Olympic Games, and divorce law reform. He was acquainted with a great many of the famous people of his ¹  See editor’s note 70 in ACD, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, ed. W. W. Robson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 249. ²  ‘Introduction’, ACD, Gothic Tales, ed. Darryl Jones (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016), ix. ‘Britain’ is of course a confusing term. Up to 1922, ACD himself seems to have usually meant it as a synonym for the whole archipelago of Great Britain and Ireland. xxi

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day. He had travelled the world, and reported on three wars. Now he had entered his seventh decade, and he, and his publisher, could have been confident that many of the readers who had taken him to their hearts, as the creator of Sherlock Holmes and Sir Nigel and Professor Challenger, would be interested in the story of his own memories and adventures. This introduction offers an account of the genesis of the book, its composition, publication history, and reception, and its relation to the genre of autobiography, to the times in which his life was lived, and to modern biographical knowledge of Conan Doyle. GENESIS AND COMPOSITION Conan Doyle was far from confessional by temperament, but earlier in his career he had published the unusually personal The Stark Munro Letters (London: Longmans, Green, 1895), an epistolary novel about a young doctor which is largely based on his own early career and intellectual development.3 The delightful Through the Magic Door (London: Smith, Elder, 1907), his book about the pleasures of reading, leaves a vivid impression of his intellectual and emotional life, and he had also published autobiographical work in various magazine articles and in his travel writing. In 1923 the time seemed right to review his career, and the evolution of his beliefs, in a single volume of memoirs. Some already published writing could be incorporated, with some revision, into the new project: this included his journalistic dispatches from the British, Italian, and French lines during the Great War,4 but also the account of his adventures on the whaling ship Hope, which he had first written about in ‘Whaling in the Arctic Ocean’ in the Strand Magazine (vol. 13, 16–25), as long ago as January 1897. But most of the material was new, the product of a sustained exercise of memory across several months. Undoubtedly a part of his motivation was to provide a context, a history, and a justification for the spiritual vocation which had come to dominate his life, and to which he was to devote most of the remarkable energies of his last decade. And so, drawing sometimes on previously published work, ³  Some subsequent Stark Munro material had already been used in ACD’s farcical tale ‘Crabbe’s Practice’, Boy’s Own Paper, Christmas number 1884, 54–7. ⁴  These had already been collected in the volume A Visit to Three Fronts (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916). xxii

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but mostly on his private records and a prodigious and usually accurate memory, he proceeded to write the autobiographical episodes which would be gathered together in Memories and Adventures, published as a book in September 1924. It is not certain exactly when Conan Doyle decided to write an autobiography, or when he began. But when ‘Early Recollections’, ‘Under the Jesuits’, and ‘Recollections of a Student’ appeared in the Strand Magazine in October 1923 (vol. 66, 323–36), they were presented as the first chapters of his Memories and Adventures. More chapters were promised for the next number, and they continued in a steady flow into the middle of the following year. Apart from the narratives of his visits to various fronts in the Great War, and the final chapter, almost all of the book first came before the public in instalments in the pages of the Strand, volumes 66 to 68, between October 1923 and July 1924. The apparent dispersal and disappearance of the relevant archives of the Strand, including authors’ correspondence and proofs, is a major loss to Conan Doyle studies.5 There exists a manuscript of some two-thirds of the book, now held in the library of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, USA. Most of it is in Conan Doyle’s own hand, though some passages are typewritten, and a few chapters incorporate pages of printed material. The indications are that he wrote fluently, in a remarkably legible hand (for a physician), and with relatively few second thoughts. He was a professional author with deadlines to meet, writing amidst a busy schedule of activities, meetings and speaking obligations, and other publishing commitments. There is not much evidence, in his vigorous hand, of indecision about the structure of the narrative, or of agonizing over the mot juste. The holograph suggests that he proceeded confidently and he seems to have had no difficulty supplying the Strand with monthly instalments, often consisting of two or three chapters. He kept up a steady chronological narrative, interrupted now and then with chapters devoted to a special theme, such as Sherlock Holmes, or sport. At the same time he was busy producing a stream of other publications – stories, travel narratives, Spiritualist articles – and making a se⁵  Reginald Pound, the Strand’s penultimate editor, wrote: ‘My impression was that most and in fact nearly all the documentary material relating to the magazine was dispersed at the death of Greenhough Smith in the ’thirties.’ Letter to Richard Lancelyn Green, 15 June 1984 (ACD1/L/66, Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, Richard Lancelyn Green Bequest, Portsmouth History Centre). xxiii

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ries of public appearances, usually to lecture on Spiritualist topics. (One significant activity he undertook while writing Memories and Adventures was an act of filial piety, the mounting of an exhibition of works by his late father, the artist and illustrator Charles Altamont Doyle, at the Brooke Galleries in London, from 31 January to 14 February 1924. The project arose from his reminiscence of his father while writing the book: he mentions his desire to mount such an exhibition in the first edition, and records his satisfaction at having done so in the second.) PUBLICATION HISTORY It was common practice for a writer of Conan Doyle’s generation to publish his or her work first in serial form, usually in a monthly periodical, and then to bring it out as a book, either as a ‘three-decker’ (a format for fiction which was in decline when he was starting out as an author) or as a single volume. Arranging advantageous magazine publication was one of the chief jobs of the literary agent, a profession which came into being in Conan Doyle’s lifetime to help authors navigate the complexities of the literary market. It was a market in which educational reforms, increasing affluence and leisure time for many, and a widespread appetite for self-improvement had created a potential readership of unprecedented size. Conan Doyle’s work appeared in scores of different outlets in his professional lifetime, but his relationship with the Strand Magazine is one of the legends of the great age of periodical publication.6 His story ‘The Voice of Science’ had been sent to the Strand by his agent, A. P. Watt, in January 1891 before the magazine appeared for the first time, and was published in the first volume in March. When he began to send his agent short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes (following the two novellas, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, in which Holmes had made his debut), Watt again sent them to Herbert Greenhough Smith, who was to remain the Strand’s editor until the year of Conan Doyle’s death, 1930; before long, Conan Doyle worked directly with Greenhough Smith much of the time. The popularity of the Holmes stories enhanced the popularity of the new magazine, and vice versa. Thereafter, the Strand was Conan Doyle’s most favoured publication outlet, and it remained ⁶  See Jonathan Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016). xxiv

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indelibly associated with the figure of the great detective, right up to the publication of the last Sherlock Holmes tale, ‘The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place’, which appeared in the magazine in April 1927 (vol. 73, 317–27). For a writer of Conan Doyle’s established reputation, it was not difficult for his agent to arrange for the instalments to come out in a magazine in the United States, more or less simultaneously with their publication in London. After the passing of the International Copyright Act of 1891, American magazine and book publication represented a lucrative income stream for the better-known British authors, and Conan Doyle, promoted in the States by the influential S. S. McClure, was already a transatlantic celebrity when he undertook his American lecture tour in 1894. So we see several chapters of the book given parallel publication in New York outlets like Collier’s Weekly Magazine and McClure’s. A few instalments appeared, either simultaneously with the Strand or exclusively, in other London titles like Pearson’s and even the venerable Cornhill Magazine. The London firm of Hodder and Stoughton published the first edition of Memories and Adventures on 18 September 1924, with a print run of 2,000 copies. It included eight photographic illustrations, and cost twenty shillings. A second impression of 1,000 copies followed in October. (By way of comparison, Hodders had printed 10,716 copies of The Lost World in 1912, and John Murray would put out 15,150 copies of The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes in 1927.)7 Coinciding with the London publication, a first American edition came out with the Boston house of Little, Brown. Late in 1929, when his health was failing, Conan Doyle returned to Memories and Adventures with a view to tidying up and updating it, with the encouragement of the publisher John Murray. The revisions he made are discussed later in this volume in the Essay on the Text, the chief ones being the omission of Chapter 25, ‘To the Rocky Mountains in 1914’, and the replacement of the original final chapter, ‘The Psychic Quest’, with a new ending, ‘Up to Date’.8 In the event this second edition, pub⁷  Figures are from A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle, revised edition, ed. Richard Lancelyn Green and John Michael Gibson (Boston: Hudson House, 2000). ⁸ See Green and Gibson, A Bibliography, 320–24. The first American edition had an index, and this was used for the second edition. xxv

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lished on 29 July 1930 by John Murray, was posthumous. Arthur Conan Doyle died on 7 July. Memories and Adventures is the final, twenty-fourth volume of the Crowborough Edition of the works of Conan Doyle, published in New York by Doubleday, Doran in 1930. The ailing author had been unable to supervise or to supply new prefaces for what had been intended to be a complete and definitive edition of his works of fiction (the autobiography is the one non-fictional anomaly), and the first edition of 1924 is simply reproduced. Conan Doyle’s fiction has been perennially popular, and interest in his life is attested by the list of some thirty full or partial biographical studies. While these are of varying interest, Memories and Adventures is a principal source for all of them, and its use by a handful of these biographers is discussed briefly below. It is the fiction, of course, which continues to enjoy a prodigious afterlife, but before the appearance of this edition, Memories and Adventures was still afloat and available, in print and electronic form. In recent times the text of the 1924 edition has been reprinted by Greenhill Books with a foreword by Richard Lancelyn Green (London: 1988), by Oxford University Press in the Oxford Letters and Memoirs series (Oxford: 1989), as Memories and Adventures: An Autobiography by Wordsworth Editions (Ware: 2007) with an introduction by David Stuart Davies, and again reproduced by Cambridge University Press in the Cambridge Library Collection (Cambridge: 2012). All these are unedited versions. Conan Doyle would, we hope, be gratified to know that the first full scholarly edition of his autobiography is issued by the press of his alma mater, the University of Edinburgh. RECEPTION When he began his autobiography, Conan Doyle was an international celebrity, the creator of two of the best-known fictional characters in the history of world literature. He was not only admired but held in affection by a wide public of men and women, at home and abroad. His work appealed in equal measure to those readers who would soon be christened highbrows, and to a wider public who looked to literature only for amusement, novelty, and distraction. Besides crime fiction, which he revolutionized, he had had popular success in other genres. Some of his historical fiction rivalled Sherlock Holmes in book sales. In particular, his xxvi

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mastery of the short-story form had coincided happily with a time when there was a huge appetite for short fiction, stoked by the many dozens of popular periodicals that had sprung up to supply an expanded and busy reading public, with a taste for tales of mystery and adventure that did not require an undue investment of time. Like his older contemporary Robert Louis Stevenson, and his younger contemporary Rudyard Kipling, it was not entirely clear whether he was an author for adults or for children: he was certainly enjoyed by both. But unlike the exotically remote Stevenson, or the fiercely private Kipling, Conan Doyle was also a cheerfully available, highly visible public figure, an accepter of invitations and honours, a patron of charities and good causes, a frequent speaker on this or that public platform, an indefatigable writer of letters to the editor. He communicated with his public in a friendly, accessible and unpretentious literary style. Progressive on some issues, culturally conservative on others, patriotic, and upright, he seemed to embody the sort of virtues which the British public suspected itself of possessing. That image of the author was, of course, part of the truth. It had reached its zenith in the early years of the Great War, when Conan Doyle, as he tells us in his autobiography, was enjoying dressing up in military uniform to visit the British troops and their allies, and to report on their courage and resourcefulness at a time of historic crisis. But at the same time there was another side to him, though it was kept largely out of the Sherlock Holmes stories. This was an author who had started to feel at odds with the society which had embraced him as a sort of national icon. His involvement with the case of George Edalji in 1907 undoubtedly shocked him with what it showed of the stupidity, corruption, and racial prejudice of the police and judicial process whose honesty had been so comfortably taken for granted in the background of his detective stories. A larger alienation sprang from his deepening commitment to the cause of Spiritualism, which he espoused publicly in the middle of the war.9 (For Conan Doyle, who had been a war patriot and had often written about the romance of fighting, the conflict ended in bitter disappointment. His estrangement may have been compounded by the feeling, ⁹  ACD, ‘A New Revelation: Spiritualism and Religion’, Light, vol. 36, 4 November 1916, 357–8. He described this new revelation as ‘by far the greatest religious event since the death of Christ’ (357). xxvii

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shared by many of his generation in the aftermath of the war, that they did not fully belong in the fast-changing post-war world.) In his defence of his beliefs he set his face against the many institutions – the churches, the political class, the scientific professions, the law, the press – which refused, he felt, to give Spiritualism a fair hearing.10 His advocacy of his psychic beliefs and experience was to become increasingly strident. Spiritualism had many adherents in the decade after the Great War. Still, of course, to most people Conan Doyle seemed increasingly wrong-headed, isolated, and hopelessly gullible. This last quality was painfully exposed when the Strand Magazine, with a circulation approaching half a million, loyally published an article in which he announced that actual fairies had been seen, and photographed, by two girls near the village of Cottingley in Yorkshire.11 Widespread derision followed, highly damaging to the reputation he had built up over many decades of pleasing work. This is the context for the reception of his autobiography. Reviewers’ responses to Memories and Adventures tend to be marked by a mixture of admiration of his long career as a storyteller, and exasperation at his recent turn to the spiritual. The Scottish Aberdeen Press and Journal (18 September 1924, 2) was fairly typical in its attitude. Its review begins: ‘Admirers of the historical novels and detective stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who have been unable to accompany him with any degree of satisfaction in his recently published books of psychic adventures, will find an abundance of agreeable, entertaining reading in his latest work, which is no less than his autobiography.’ The reviewer is impressed by what the book shows of the variety of its subject’s life: he has been a doctor, traveller, politician, soldier, lecturer, occultist, and sportsman. ‘And the psychic question, the sceptic, perhaps, will learn with some degree of jubilation, is not obtruded upon the reader.’ The London Times too (23 September 1924, 17) mentions ‘his “psychic” experiences, as to the validity of which he is perfectly confident’, but goes on to praise the book’s enthusiastic war pictures and memories of sport, adding shrewdly: ‘Whatever Sir Arthur has heard or seen at séances, we ¹⁰ These institutions are all attacked in his Spiritualist novel The Land of Mist (London: Hutchinson, 1926). ¹¹ ACD, ‘Fairies Photographed – An Epoch-Making Event’, Strand (Christmas Number), vol. 60, December 1920, 463–8.  xxviii

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are sure he has made “spirit contact” with Peter Pan.’ In the Times Literary Supplement (25 September 1924, 591), David Leslie Murray struck a similar note. ‘Few men can have carried the best of their schooldays with them through a long life with such success,’ Murray wrote, while allowing that ‘perhaps we ought to recognize the same spirit in a less alluring form in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “psychic quest”’. But the TLS too had little to say about the book’s record of its author’s literary life. In more recent times the book has chiefly drawn the attention, perhaps naturally, of writers whose focus has been on Conan Doyle’s life. The doyen of these, Owen Dudley Edwards, calls Memories and Adventures ‘vigorous and engaging’, but far from committed to a full romantic disclosure. He notes that ‘themes of alcoholism, avarice and insanity had made a severe imprint on Conan Doyle’s youthful mind,’ and are frequently present in the fiction, but that he struggled hard and successfully to keep them from his autobiographical work, and to hide the tragedy of his father.12 Martin Booth was also struck by what the book left out, but finds it nonetheless impressive. ‘For all its omissions, the book was honest, a sincere stocktaking in which he criticized some of his own books and admitted some of his mistakes but portrayed his life as a romantic adventure with a strong emphasis on his wartime exploits. His sense of excitement, chivalry and many achievements was strongly in evidence, as was his old sense of humour.’13 A similar approach had been taken by Richard Lancelyn Green in an essay describing the book as Conan Doyle’s ‘final tale of chivalry’. ‘When he describes his life,’ says Green, ‘he omits the inner man.’14 And the editors of a collection of Conan Doyle’s letters feel that the correspondence ‘constitutes a far more candid autobiography’ than the one he actually published as Memories

¹² Owen Dudley Edwards, The Quest for Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 18, 32. ¹³ Martin Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997), 331. ¹⁴ Richard Lancelyn Green, ‘His Final Tale of Chivalry’, in The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Thirteen Biographers in Search of a Life, ed. Jon L. Lellenberg (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987), 38–63, at 43. ‘His autobiography becomes the sequel to his historical novels,’ writes Green, ‘for here Sir Arthur vanquishes his foes and wins glory for himself. His life becomes a romance.’ (62) xxix

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and Adventures.15 This may well be so, though we need not judge or enjoy an autobiography only on the basis of the amount it discloses about the personal life of the author. In all, there has been little attention to Memories and Adventures as a piece of writing rather than as a record, and a gappy one, of what had happened to its author. A notable exception is an essay by Diana Barsham, in which she examines the rhetoric of the book, and specifically Conan Doyle’s strategies for evading the tendency of autobiography towards confession and the revealing of interiority.16 The question of genre is not an entirely straightforward one, but autobiography itself is an important part of the context in which Memories and Adventures was produced. CONTEXT: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL TRADITION In relating his Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle was undertaking a kind of book often favoured by authors and other public figures late in their career. The Victorians inherited the deeply autobiographical impulse of Romantic art itself, and a curiosity about individual lives which is reflected in big institutional projects of the Victorian age like the National Portrait Gallery and the Dictionary of National Biography. Of relevance to Conan Doyle’s venture were not only the reminiscences of authors, such as Anthony Trollope’s An Autobiography of 1883 (notably protective of its author’s private life), but also the memoirs of public figures – soldiers and explorers, statesmen and actors – oriented mostly to a life of action and relatively free of introspection. Conan Doyle’s own life-writing partakes of both this outward-oriented form of reminiscence, and, to a lesser degree, of the reflections of autobiographers whose attention is more given to the inner life and the development of their ideas, feelings, and personality. He can proceed sometimes like the soldier-memoirist Field Marshal Lord Roberts and at other times like

¹⁵  Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, ed. John Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley (London: Harper, 2007), 4. ¹⁶ Diana Barsham, ‘Buried in Laughter: The Memories and Adventures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’, Mortal Pages, Literary Lives: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Autobiography, ed. Vincent Newey and Philip Shaw (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 235–52. xxx

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the philosopher-autobiographer John Stuart Mill.17 Roberts chronicled his campaigns, while Mill offered the history of his mind. But whereas the narrative of memoirs can proceed on the simple principle of one-damned-thing-after-another, ‘the crucial literary problem of autobiography,’ as Patricia Meyer Spacks writes, ‘is to articulate a significant form for the relative incoherence of human experience.’18 An autobiography (as opposed to a memoir) is more likely to attend carefully to the developing inner life of the subject, and to be informed by some sense of an inner telos or destination, such as the pursuit of romantic authenticity or philosophical or spiritual truth. It is a biological impossibility for an autobiography to tell the complete story of a life, but often the principle that emerges is of a movement, sometimes painful, towards understanding, if only of the self. This is especially true of the autobiographies of artists, which characteristically dwell on the subject’s inner thoughts and feelings. An example of the autobiography of sensibility and introspection awaited Conan Doyle, comically enough, on a tedious journey down the Nile in 1896, where the only reading matter was the Confessions (1782) of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau boasted of the absolute frankness and intimacy of his life story, but Conan Doyle recollects in Memories and Adventures how he recoiled from this romantic self-accounting, which struck him as a self-indulgent and vulgar egotism. It was a form of expression alien to him, as he explained in a tongue-in-cheek discussion of autobiography in Through the Magic Door, seventeen years before writing his own life story: If we don’t know all about Gibbon it is not his fault, for he wrote no fewer than six accounts of his own career, each differing from the other, and all equally bad. A man must have more heart and soul than Gibbon to write a good autobiography. It is the most difficult of all human compositions, calling for a mixture of tact, discretion, ¹⁷ See Frederick Roberts (Lord Roberts of Kandahar), Forty-One Years in India: From Subaltern to Commander-in-Chief (London: Richard Bentley, 1898) and John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. John M. Robson (London: Penguin, 1989). A near-contemporary example of the action-oriented memoir is Winston Churchill’s My Early Life (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930). ¹⁸  Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1976), 434. xxxi

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and frankness which make an almost impossible blend. Gibbon, in spite of his foreign education, was a very typical Englishman in many ways, with the reticence, self-respect, and self-consciousness of the race. No British autobiography has ever been frank, and consequently no British autobiography has ever been good. Trollope’s perhaps, is as good as any that I know, but of all forms of literature it is the one least adapted to the national genius. You could not imagine a British Rousseau, still less a British Benvenuto Cellini. In one way it is to the credit of the race that it should be so. If we do as much evil as our neighbours we at least have grace enough to be ashamed of it and to suppress its publication.19 The autobiography of self-regard seemed to him unmanly and unBritish, which was to say it was foreign to the ethos which he himself cultivated and embodied.20 He thought the greatest autobiography in English was Samuel Pepys’s Diary,21 and the diary, of course, is the supreme example of the one-damned-thing-after-another structure. Pepys was keeping a chronicle. He was not at all concerned with a telos of romantic self-realization, or even with self-portraiture. If life-writing deals, in the words of Laura Marcus, with ‘the relationship between the inner and the outer world, psyche and polis’,22 Conan Doyle’s autobiography, like most of his fiction, dwells more in the outer world of action than in interiority and reflection. He does not have a great deal to say about his inner thoughts and feelings. Much of the story he has to tell is that of a public man, and this is not what we usually anticipate of the self-portrait of an artist such as an author, where the modern assumption is that we will be shown the real inner self, somehow separate from the outward face offered to the public. It is also a method that goes against the usual expectations of modern autobiography itself (expectations partly derived from the fact that autobiography so closely resembles a familiar kind of novel). ‘Autobiography is so powerfully ¹⁹  ACD, Through the Magic Door, 83–84. 20 See Diana Barsham, Arthur Conan Doyle and the Meaning of Masculinity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). ²¹ Through the Magic Door, 83. ACD calls it Pepys’s ‘involuntary autobiography’. ²²  Laura Marcus, ‘Autobiography and Psychoanalysis’, On Life-Writing, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015), 257–83, at 268. xxxii

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yoked in modern formulations to notions of interiority and depth,’ says Adam Smyth, ‘that the concept of a written self, assembled through surfaces and things, seems counter-intuitive or lacking.’23 Conan Doyle mostly eschews the confessional tradition of literary self-portraiture, and this may make him seem old-fashioned (or postmodern), or merely evasive.24 But perhaps what is at stake is a self-conception of the nature of the writer in society, and of his or her relations with the reading public, which we need to make an effort to recover. Few more recent authors share the mixture of confidence and modesty which Conan Doyle brought to the role of writer. There is little here, too, of the modernist distrust of narratives of a unified self, what D. H. Lawrence called ‘the old stable ego’ of the character.25 The mature subject of Conan Doyle’s life emerges as a steady moral self, consistent over time.26 The only significant change in that adult self is his espousal of Spiritualism. But it is this that provides his story with its telos, and at the same time opens a window into the interior life as he experienced it most passionately. Spiritual autobiography goes back to Saint Augustine, but a particular English tradition, which helped to shape the early history of the English novel as well as English autobiography, was the Puritan narrative of error and redemption best exemplified in John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to

²³ Adam Smyth, ‘Introduction’, A History of English Autobiography, ed. Adam Smyth (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016), 1–10, at 2. ²⁴ As for fictional instances of the autobiographical mode, ACD’s first novel, unpublished in his lifetime, consists almost entirely of rumination, its narrator being housebound throughout with gout, while by contrast the two late Holmes stories narrated by the great detective himself, ‘The Blanched Soldier’ and ‘The Lion’s Mane’, are notoriously thin on narratorial interiority. See ACD, The Narrative of John Smith, ed. Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Rachel Foss (London: British Library, 2011), and ACD, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, 151–91. ²⁵ D. H. Lawrence, Letter to Edward Garnett, 5 June 1914, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (London: Heinemann, 1955), 18. ²⁶ It must be admitted that Conan Doyle’s surprising poem ‘The Inner Room’, published in Songs of Action (London: Smith, Elder, 1898), in which he lists a number of conflicting avatars of his self, suggests a more complicated picture. xxxiii

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the Chief of Sinners (1666).27 In this sub-genre of life-writing, the author recounts in plain language a youth given over to sinfulness and error, a moment of conversion often prompted by a reading of scripture in which the truth of God’s mercy is revealed, and a subsequent career devoted to the Christian faith and ministry. The teleological arc of spiritual autobiography is also to be found in Memories and Adventures, though Conan Doyle’s conversion is presented as less melodramatic, more a gradual assenting to overwhelming evidence. (This was usually the case for scientifically or practically minded converts to Spiritualism, who were anxious to avoid the impression of charismatic revelation. Oliver Lodge averred that ‘the evidence for the survival of man … has always been cumulative’; Arthur Findlay in his autobiography recounts how he tested the voice medium John Sloan for five years before accepting survival after death as proven.)28 Conan Doyle shows that his own youth was misspent not in cursing and blaspheming like Bunyan’s, but in the arrogant materialism of his generation, the belief that science had answered all the questions raised by religion. Arthur Conan Doyle never ceased to think and act like a scientist, but he became convinced that the evidences of Spiritualism offered no less than scientific proof of the survival of the soul and its ability to communicate with the living after death. And so Memories and Adventures contains a spiritual pilgrim’s progress, telling the story of its author’s conversion, and ends with an account of his tireless ministry, spreading the word of the new revelation as assiduously as that earlier convert, the Apostle Paul.29

²⁷  ‘In effect, English autobiography never entirely escapes its religious roots.’ Richard Hughes Gibson and Timothy Larsen, ‘Nineteenth-Century Spiritual Autobiography: Carlyle, Newman, Mill’, in A History of English Autobiography, ed. Smyth, 192–206, at 201. ACD had attempted a Puritan autobiography in fiction in his first published novel, Micah Clarke (London: Longmans, Green, 1889). ²⁸ Sir Oliver Lodge, The Survival of Man (London: Methuen, 1909), 335, and Arthur Findlay, Looking Back: The Autobiography of a Spiritualist (London: Psychic Press, 1955), 207–22. ²⁹ ACD’s decision to replace the final chapter ‘The Psychic Quest’ in the second edition is discussed below in the Essay on the Text. xxxiv

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CONTEXT: HISTORICAL It is hard to think of another writer whose life touched so many of the surfaces of contemporary issues and events. Arthur Conan Doyle was born a couple of years after the Indian Rebellion of 1857–8 (the ‘Indian Mutiny’), the great nineteenth-century crisis of the British Empire. When he died in 1930, that empire was wider than ever in extent, still guaranteed by the most famous navy on the seas, and administered from one of the largest and most prosperous cities on earth. In his lifetime, Britain had prevailed in a number of colonial wars in Asia and Africa, including the conflicts in the Sudan and South Africa which he witnessed, and, at terrible cost, in the struggle with its chief industrial rival among the European ‘great powers’ in the Great War of 1914–18. That war saw a number of imperial competitors (German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian) removed from the board. But in its aftermath began a long economic decline, the emergence in the world of new industrial, military, and ideological forces, and the growth of dissent and resistance among colonized peoples, that would combine to bring the age of the British Empire to an end. Conan Doyle in the 1920s hoped for a future imperial confederation of equals comprising Britain and its white (or ‘settler’) dominions and, perhaps, the United States, but he probably did not foresee the disappearance within a few decades of the Empire itself. For the most part he wrote as a confident citizen of an imperial nation and a global super-power. His writing shows his fascination with the history from which this pre-eminence had evolved, his admiration of the men who ran it and protected it, and his awareness of the challenges in its path. Britain had become the first modern nation by virtue of its head start in industrialization and urbanization. A combination of an evolving parliamentary democracy, a constitutional monarchy, and some good luck enabled it to avoid the revolutionary upheavals that convulsed all its European neighbours in the nineteenth century. Through the latter part of that century and into the twentieth, a series of liberal reforms changed the face of the nation. Economic power had shifted decisively from the land to the cities, from a now largely decorative aristocracy to a busy bourgeoisie. With a broadening franchise, which at the time of Memories and Adventures had begun to include women, and a programme of reforms extending compulsory universal education, political and cultural power was xxxv

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shifting too. Conan Doyle himself belonged to, and often wrote about, an emerging and increasingly respected professional class of lawyers and doctors and civil servants and the like, a class which you could join by way of public examinations and qualifications and not through parentage or patronage.30 But though the Labour Party, created to represent the interests of the workers, formed its first government in the year Memories and Adventures was published (1924), class divisions – upper, middle, and lower – remained strong, sustained by noblesse oblige and a sense of entitlement at the top of the pyramid and, usually, by deference at the bottom. In Victoria’s reign Britain was the most affluent nation on earth, though a young doctor in general practice could see the glaring inequalities, the poor housing and wretched public health, which these riches failed to mask. There were also regional differences – the industrial midlands, the agrarian west, the metropolitan south-east. A Scot of Irish ancestry and Catholic education, settled in England, Conan Doyle was fascinated by the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ingredients of the nation. His work is also attuned to differences of manners between those who lived, as he had done at various times, in the provinces, the suburbs, and the capital. A number of themes recur in the political discourse of Conan Doyle’s time. The Liberal Party split over the Irish Question – should Ireland continue under British government, or be granted Home Rule or even independence? – and the Conservative Party split over economic policy – should trade be free across the world, or should preference and protection be extended to the colonies and dominions? These issues were themselves branches of a yet larger, historical question, about empire. What was the empire and what was it for, what were its justifications and benefits and costs, how should it be run, should it expand (‘wider still and wider’), or should British overseas possessions perhaps be given back to the people who lived in them? Some of these questions came to a head at the time of the South African War, enthusiastically supported by conservatives (deplored as ‘Jingoes’) and glumly deprecated by liberals (aspersed as ‘Little Englanders’), a disagreement that divided Conan Doyle’s own family. He himself spoke out vigorously against the cruelty ³⁰  See Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1990). xxxvi

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and greed of the Belgians in the Congo, but by and large he felt that the British Empire was more humane, and more efficient, than others’. On another controversial topic, the status of women, his views tended to be chivalrous, paternalistic, and patriarchal.31 Women are honoured in his writing, and sometimes portrayed as spirited, but it is very much a man’s world, as Memories and Adventures shows. As for economic life, his strongest critique of the society he lived in takes the form of a Carlylean or Ruskinian attack on materialism, particularly in the years after the Great War when he felt increasingly at odds with the way most people lived. Materialism was the word for a nonbelief in the spirit, but also had the familiar sense of an attachment to worldly things. Capitalism, he felt, is bound to make people more and more acquisitive and competitive, obsessed with money and possessions. At a time when religion had been badly weakened by science, this left people spiritually impoverished and hollow. His Spiritualism was, in this sense, his critique of the waste land of modernity. Spiritualism was the opposite of materialism. In Conan Doyle’s lifetime, both science and literature became professions in the modern sense. Science was entrenching itself in the world of universities and large laboratories and public funding: apparently freelance mavericks like Professor Challenger, and his contemporary the Professor Higgins of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913), were already anachronisms. With his medical degree, Conan Doyle supported himself for a number of years as a physician in general practice, though his ambition to enter the more lucrative world of specialist consultancy came to nothing.32 It was probably only ever a half-hearted ambition, for he was already earning money from his pen. For novelists and dramatists it was possible to make a living, even a good one, from literature, but it was advisable to keep an eye on the market and its appetites. While some of the more serious or more experimental authors (Henry James an older contemporary, Virginia Woolf a younger one) shrank from popular ³¹  He seems uncomfortable in his attempt to write about the fashionable theme of the New Woman, in the novelette Beyond the City, published in the special Christmas number of Good Words for 1891, and then in book form in The Great Shadow and Beyond the City (London: Arrowsmith, 1893). But women are shown as more than capable of holding their own in the medical profession, in the face of male prejudice, in ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’, in Round the Red Lamp (London: Methuen, 1894). ³²  See Douglas Kerr, Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 41–78. xxxvii

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tastes, or couldn’t connect with them, thus opening a divide between highbrow and ‘genre’ writing, Conan Doyle seems not to have thought in these terms at all, and was happy to provide his readers a steady stream of strong narrative in plain prose. He had little in common with the ‘art for art’s sake’ Aesthetic movement of the 1880s and 1890s, though he liked and admired its high priest, Oscar Wilde. After the scandal (1895) which saw the homosexual Wilde imprisoned and anathematized, many people preferred, or found it prudent, to look in art for qualities of unambiguous masculinity, simplicity, and good health, and no doubt Conan Doyle benefited from this shift in taste. Literature could be a respectable, even honoured profession, as his friends like Sir Walter Besant and Sir James Barrie could testify. Conan Doyle’s own knighthood, however, was awarded for services to the state as an apologist for the British cause in the Boer War. CONTEXT: BIOGRAPHICAL Memories and Adventures covers all of Conan Doyle’s life up to the time of writing: the second edition updates the story to the collapse in health which preceded his death. It deals with his family and education, his medical and literary careers, his travels and enthusiasms, his very wide acquaintance, his political life and his activism in many causes, and the Spiritualist mission that came to dominate his later years. It says something of his intellectual life, and the evolution of his ideas, but not so much about his emotional adventures, and it keeps the reader at some distance from the more intimate story of his relations with his two wives and his children.33 It does not appear to contain any falsehoods, though it is sometimes unreliable as to dates.34 But there are some significant omissions, of sensitive material which he considered none of the reader’s business. He makes no mention of the dipsomania of his father, Charles Altamont Doyle, which rendered him unable to work, was the cause of dis³³ His second family appears, however, in a series of whimsical sketches of family life published in the Strand and later as Three of Them (London: John Murray, 1923). ³⁴ The dates in Memories and Adventures can be checked against those given in Brian W. Pugh, A Chronology of the Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 4th edition (London: MX Publishing, 2018). xxxviii

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tressing domestic incidents, and led to his being institutionalized for the later years of his life (he died in 1892 in the Crichton Royal Institution at Dumfries). The stigma of Charles’s alcoholism, and perhaps guilt at the family’s consigning him to institutional care for many years, no doubt kept this story out of the pages of Memories and Adventures, though the so