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This marked the start of a serious dichotomy in the author's life. Conan Doyle much preferred his next novel Micah Clark, which though well received, is by now almost forgotten. Two years later this novel was published in Beeton's Christmas Annual, under the title A Study in Scarlet which introduced us to the immortal Sherlock Holmes and Dr. At first it was named A Tangled Skein and the two main characters were called Sheridan Hope and Ormond Sacker. In March 1886, Conan Doyle started writing the novel which catapulted him to fame. He described her in his memoirs as having been "gentle and amiable." In August of 1885, he married a young woman called Louisa Hawkins, the sister of one of his patients. But he was compassionate and hard-working, so that by the end of the third year, his practice started to earn him a comfortable income.ĭuring the next years, the young man divided his time between trying to be a good doctor and struggling to become a recognized author. The rest of the house was almost bare and his practice was off to a rocky start.

He rented a house but was only able to furnish the two rooms his patients would see. After that debacle, and on the verge of bankruptcy, Conan Doyle left for Portsmouth, to open his first practice. Then came a short but quite dramatic stint with an unscrupulous doctor in Plymouth of which Conan Doyle gave a vivid account of forty years later in The Stark Munro Letters. Unfortunately he did not find Africa to be as seductive as the Arctic, so he gave up that position as soon as the boat landed back in England. Arthur Conan Doyle's first gainful employment after his graduation was as a medical officer on the steamer “Mayumba”, a battered old vessel navigating between Liverpool and the west coast of Africa. On this occasion, he drew a humorous sketch of himself receiving his diploma, with the caption: "Licensed to Kill”.ĭr. A year later, he obtained his "Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery degree. Without much enthusiasm, Conan Doyle returned to his studies in the autumn of 1880. With his innate sense of humour and his sportsmanship, having ruled out any feelings of self-pity, Arthur was ready and willing to face the world. He was often found surrounded by a bevy of totally enraptured younger students listening to the amazing stories he would make up to amuse them.īy 1876, graduating at the age of seventeen, Arthur Doyle, (as he was called, before adding his middle name "Conan" to his surname), was a surprisingly normal young man. It was during these difficult years at boarding school that Arthur realized he also had a talent for storytelling. Arthur loathed the bigotry surrounding his studies and rebelled at corporal punishment, which was prevalent and incredibly brutal in most English schools of that epoch.ĭuring those gruelling years, Arthur's only moments of happiness were when he wrote to his mother, a regular habit that lasted for the rest of her life, and also when he practised sports, mainly cricket, at which he was very good. He was in tears all the way to England, where he spent seven years in a Jesuit boarding school.

Arthur's touching description of his mother's beneficial influence is also poignantly described in his autobiography, "In my early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life."Īfter Arthur reached his ninth birthday, the wealthy members of the Doyle family offered to pay for his studies. There was little money in the family and even less harmony on account of his father's excesses and erratic behaviour. Her son Arthur wrote of his mother's gift of "sinking her voice to a horror-stricken whisper" when she reached the culminating point of a story. Mary Doyle had a passion for books and was a master storyteller. At the age of twenty-two, Charles had married Mary Foley, a vivacious and well educated young woman of seventeen. Charles Altamont Doyle, Arthur's father, a chronic alcoholic, was a moderately successful artist, who apart from fathering a brilliant son, never accomplished anything of note. The Doyles were a prosperous Irish-Catholic family.

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland.