Arthur Conan Doyle

In this episode Sophie examines the life of eccentric Scottish author and creator of the iconic detective Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  You will be intrigued by the modern era physician to whom she compares our most interesting subject.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

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Arthur Conan Doyle and The Curious Case of the Man Who Outsmarted Himself. A podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies, wearer of scarves that my students have begun to treat as a kind of meteorological instrument. Bright colours apparently signal good news about essay deadlines, which is entirely their own invention, and I take no responsibility for it. And today your guide through a life that contains, in my considered professional opinion, more genuine irony per square biographical inch than almost any other life in the modern British tradition. I want to begin with a paradox, not a metaphorical paradox, not a rhetorical device deployed to make the opening seem more dramatic than it is, though it is dramatic, I assure you, but a genuine, structural, historically verifiable paradox that sits at the absolute centre of the life we are about to examine. The man we are discussing today created the most celebrated rationalist in the history of English literature, a figure whose entire existence was predicated on the supremacy of observation, logic, and evidence. A character who famously declared that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. A detective whose method was essentially the scientific method wearing a deer stalker and carrying a magnifying glass, and then the man who created him spent the last decade and more of his life as the world's most prominent and energetic advocate for communicating with the dead. I will give you a moment to sit with that. Arthur Conan Doyle, born may twenty second, eighteen fifty nine, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Died july seventh, nineteen thirty, at Windlesham, his home in Crowborough, East Sussex. In between those two dates, a medical degree, a failed eye practice, the invention of the most famous fictional detective in the English language, a knighthood, two wives, six children, a passionate involvement in two separate miscarriages of justice, service as a field doctor in the Boer War, multiple unsuccessful runs for parliament, a feud with Harry Houdini that became one of the most entertainingly documented friendships turned ruptures in the history of celebrity correspondence, and an absolutely unwavering conviction that the spirits of the dead could and did communicate with the living through mediums, seances, and at one particularly memorable juncture, photographs of fairies. I am not editorializing the photographs of fairies are a matter of historical record. We will get to them we will absolutely get to them. Let us begin properly. Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born into a family that was, by the standards of Edinburgh in the eighteen fifties and sixties, simultaneously distinguished and in difficulty. The Doyles were Irish Catholic, which in Victorian Britain was a social category that carried its own particular freight of suspicion and condescension. The British establishment's relationship to Irish Catholics being, then, as at various other historical moments, not one of its finer achievements. His grandfather John Doyle had been a celebrated political caricaturist. His uncle Richard was a prominent illustrator. He designed the original cover of Punch magazine, which if you are British and of a certain generation you will recognise, and if you are not, it was a satirical magazine that ran for a hundred and fifty years and considered itself the conscience of the English middle classes, which tells you quite a lot. The artistic lineage was substantial, the financial situation was less so. His father, Charles Doyle, was a civil servant, and a man of genuine artistic talent, who was also an alcoholic. The drinking worsened throughout Arthur's childhood. Charles eventually had to be institutionalized, and the practical consequence of this was that Arthur, the eldest son capable of doing something about it, understood from quite a young age that the family's material situation rested substantially on him. This is relevant not because it is sad, though it is sad, but because it shaped the professional pragmatism that characterized his early career. He did not have the luxury of writing purely for art's sake. He wrote because he needed to earn money, and then he wrote Sherlock Holmes, and then he had more money than he knew what to do with, which created an entirely new set of problems, as it tends to. He was educated at Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit school in Lancashire, which he attended on a scholarship from the age of nine. Stonyhurst was rigorous, disciplined, and Catholic in the thorough institutional sense daily mass, Latin, a curriculum designed to produce men of faith and learning and presumably some capacity for discomfort, since Stonyhurst in the Victorian era was not a place that trafficked in luxury. By the time he left at fifteen, he had lost his Catholic faith, not noisily, not with the dramatic apostasy of someone performing their rejection for an audience, but quietly and apparently completely. He replaced it for a time with a kind of agnostic materialism. The universe was what the evidence showed it to be, and the evidence showed it to be a physical place governed by physical laws. He was in his twenties and thirties about as orthodox a scientific materialist as his era produced. He went to Edinburgh University to study medicine, and here he met the man who would indirectly change the literary history of the English language. Joseph Bell was a surgeon and teacher at Edinburgh, a man of remarkable diagnostic ability whose method consisted of extraordinarily close observation of patients before they had said a word. He would study a person as they walked toward him, and deduce from their posture, their hands, their gait, their clothing, the calluses on their fingers, and the wear on their shoes, the nature of their profession, their habits, their recent history. He was, in short, Sherlock Holmes, without the violin and the cocaine habit. Conan Doyle watched Bell work and stored what he saw. He qualified as a doctor in eighteen eighty one. He had already begun writing short stories, historical fiction, medical journalism. He set up practice first in South Sea Portsmouth, which was not exactly the intellectual epicenter of the Empire, but was affordable and had enough prospective patients to constitute a plausible beginning. The practice was slow. The waiting room was often empty in the long hours between the patients who did not come, he wrote. It introduced Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to the world. The world initially was not overwhelmed, the story was bought for twenty-five pounds, outright no royalties, and the publisher was not especially enthusiastic. This is one of those historical facts that I find both amusing and useful for calibrating the judgment of publishers, who have, across the centuries, maintained a remarkably consistent record of missing the obvious. The Strand magazine began publishing Holmes' stories in eighteen ninety one, and from that point the commercial and cultural trajectory was essentially vertical. Holmes became a phenomenon with a speed that surprised even Conan Doyle. Letters arrived addressed to Holmes directly at two hundred twenty one B Baker Street. Readers treated him as a real person, in a way that his creator found alternately flattering and deeply peculiar. The stories were translated across Europe, Holmes became and has remained, the most recognizable fictional character in the English language, and Conan Doyle, having created this monument to rationalism and logical deduction, grew increasingly to resent him. The resentment is well documented and entirely understandable. He was a man of considerable range, a serious historical novelist, an author of science fiction that predated and influenced HG Wells, a journalist, a campaigner, a man engaged with the largest questions of his era. And all anyone wanted to talk about was Holmes. He wrote to his mother in eighteen ninety one, not long after the Strand stories began, that he was thinking of killing the character off, because Holmes was taking up time he wished to spend on work he considered more important. His mother told him, in the tone that mothers deploy when they are being strategically patient, that he should on no account do this. He did it anyway, in eighteen ninety three, at the Reichenbach Falls, in The Final Problem, in which Holmes and Moriarty apparently both perish. The public reaction was something between outrage and collective grief. Twenty thousand people cancelled their strand subscriptions. Men in London were reportedly seen wearing black armbands. He brought Holmes back in nineteen oh one, technically in a story set before the falls, which is the literary equivalent of having your cake, eating it, and then claiming the cake was always there, and then definitively resurrected him in 1903. He continued writing home stories intermittently and with visible reluctance in places until 1927. He needed the money, and he needed it for reasons that are central to understanding the full arc of his life, because we must now talk about the first wife and the spiritualism and the way in which grief and guilt and the specific vulnerabilities of a particular kind of intelligent man combined to produce something that historians have struggled with ever since. Louise Hawkins, known as Tui, was the sister of a patient. Conan Doyle married her in 1885. She bore him two children, Mary and Kingsley. In 1893 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Tuberculosis in 1893 was, in practical terms, a death sentence of uncertain timetable. The medical advice was fresh air and exercise and rest, and the prognosis was grim. Conan Doyle moved the family to various locations in search of the right climate, Davos in Switzerland, Hindhead in Surrey. He was a doctor, he understood exactly what was happening to his wife. He watched it happen slowly over years, with full clinical comprehension, and no clinical power to prevent it. During this period, approximately from eighteen ninety seven onward, he fell deeply in love with John Lecky, a young woman he had met socially. He did not, by all surviving evidence, consummate or openly pursue this relationship during Louise's lifetime. He maintained the marriage, he visited Jean, was seen with her at social events, apparently made no formal secret of his feelings among his close circle, but maintained the public and apparently the private proprieties. Louise died in nineteen oh six. He married Jean in nineteen oh seven. They had three more children. By most accounts, the second marriage was a genuinely happy one. But the years of watching Louise die, years during which he was both a devoted husband and a man in love with someone else, years of medical helplessness and emotional suppression, and the specific guilt that attaches to loving two people simultaneously in a culture that considers this impermissible. Those years did something to Arthur Conan Doyle's relationship to material reality. He had been interested in spiritualism since the eighteen eighties, as were a great many educated Victorians, and I want to pause here because this fact is frequently presented as a symptom of credulity when it was actually a symptom of intellectual engagement. Spiritualism in the Victorian era was not primarily a fringe phenomenon. It attracted serious people, scientists, philosophers, writers, men and women of substantial intellectual accomplishment, precisely because it seemed, at a moment when science was dismantling traditional religious certainty, to offer something that science could not empirical evidence for the survival of consciousness after death. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, included among its members some of the most eminent figures in British intellectual life. The question was being asked seriously, Conan Doyle was asking it seriously. The death of Tui, followed by the First World War, which killed his son Kingsley, his brother Innes, and a number of his closest friends, accelerated his conversion from interested inquirer to committed advocate with a force that is, when you understand what he had lost, entirely comprehensible, even if the conclusions he reached are not. By the early nineteen twenties he was the world's most prominent champion of spiritualism. Capital S as a movement. He toured, he lectured, he wrote, he visited mediums, he conducted seances. He contributed a two volume history of spiritualism and a series of books defending it against critics. He spent, by some estimates, a quarter of a million pounds, a colossal sum, on the cause. Jam became a medium herself, producing automatic writing that Conan Doyle interpreted as communications from the deceased, including at one memorable and deeply poignant seance from his own departed mother. And then there were the Cottingley Fairies. In nineteen seventeen, two cousins, Elsie Wright, age sixteen, and Frances Griffiths, age ten, in the village of Cottingley, West Yorkshire, produced a series of photographs purporting to show themselves in the company of actual fairies. The photographs were to modernise, obviously constructed from paper cutouts. They look like photographs of paper cutouts, because they are photographs of paper cutouts. That's the girls themselves eventually admitted in 1983, sixty six years later, by which point the entire episode had become a staple of books about famous hoaxes. In nineteen twenty, Conan Doyle came across the photographs, had them analysed by photographic experts, who concluded incorrectly, but um with the confidence of people who had not considered that the relevant question was whether anyone could make good paper cutouts, rather than whether the photographic process itself showed signs of manipulation that they were genuine, and published them in the Strand magazine as evidence of the existence of fairies. He was sixty years old. He was the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He was a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He published photographs of paper fairies. I have read a great deal of commentary on this episode that treats it primarily as evidence of Conan Doyle's descent into irrationality, and I understand the impulse, but I think it is too simple. What the Cottingley episode actually demonstrates is something more interesting and more uncomfortable, the degree to which even very intelligent people under the influence of sufficiently powerful emotional need will find evidence for what they desperately want to believe. The technical experts he consulted were looking for photographic manipulation, not paper cutouts. He was looking for confirmation. He found it. This is not stupidity. This is humanity operating with the full force of grief and hope, and the kind of motivated reasoning that none of us is entirely immune to, however confident we may feel about our critical faculties on a Tuesday morning in Cambridge when nothing important is at stake. Which brings me to Harry Houdini. Because no account of Conan Doyle's later life is complete without Harry Houdini, and no account of Harry Houdini is complete without acknowledging that their relationship is one of the most genuinely fascinating in the history of early 20th century celebrity culture. Houdini, born Eric Weiss in Budapest in 1874, raised in America, professional escapologist and illusionist of legendary status, was a vehement opponent of fraudulent mediums. He spent a substantial portion of his later career attending seances in disguise and exposing the tricks being used to deceive grieving people out of their money and their rational faculties. He and Conan Doyle met, became friends, corresponded warmly, and disagreed with escalating vehemence about the reality of psychic phenomena. The rupture came over Jean. Conan Doyle organised a seance, at which Jean, in a state of mediumistic inspiration, produced automatic writing that she and Conan Doyle presented to Houdini as a communication from his deceased mother. The communication was in English. Houdini's mother had spoken almost no English. The communication Communication did not acknowledge that it was his mother's birthday. The communication began with a cross, a Christian symbol, despite the fact that Houdini's mother had been Jewish. Houdini was not convinced. Conan Doyle interpreted his unconviction as the stubborn resistance of a man who was afraid to face the truth, rather than the reasonable scepticism of a man who had been presented with a communication from his mother that his mother could not have written. The friendship did not survive this. Houdini died in 1926 before the rupture could be repaired. Conan Doyle characteristically subsequently claimed to have received communications from Houdini through mediums. I tell you all of this not to mock him. I tell you all of this because I think it is essential to understanding him whole. The contradictions, the grief, the intellectual gifts deployed in service of emotional need, the creator of the most famous rationalist in literature, spending his final years as proof that rationalism is not a condition one achieves and maintains, but a practice that must be renewed constantly and fails most completely at the moments of greatest personal need. He died on july seventh, nineteen thirty, at Windlesham. His last words to Jean were reportedly You are wonderful. He was seventy one. The next day a seance was held at the Royal Albert Hall, capacity five thousand, at which a medium claimed to communicate his arrival in the spirit world. Jean attended. I would not have missed that for anything. Now the T's picture a man of undeniable intellectual gifts, trained in a rigorous discipline, credentialed, accomplished, capable of genuinely brilliant analysis, who also possessed a quality of certainty that was fundamentally emotional rather than evidential in origin. Someone who believed what he believed not because the evidence compelled it, but because he needed it to be true, and who deployed his considerable intelligence not to interrogate that belief but to defend it, picture someone who created or helped to create, a public persona of remarkable cultural power, a persona that became in the popular imagination, larger than the man himself, to the point where the persona and the person became almost impossible to distinguish, someone who was associated in the public mind with a particular kind of authority, intellectual, moral, investigative, that shaped how people received everything he said, even the things he said that the evidence did not support. Picture someone whose private grief and loss were fundamental drivers of his public positions in ways that he did not fully acknowledge, and that his audience was not equipped to see. Someone who suffered real losses, losses that would have broken many people, and whose response was to construct a framework of belief so total that it absorbed the grief and gave it meaning. Someone for whom the alternative to belief was a darkness he was not willing to inhabit. Picture someone who attracted, around his most controversial positions, an inner circle of devoted followers, who treated his pronouncements with a reverence that sometimes exceeded their critical scrutiny, someone whose reputation protected him from the degree of challenge that a less celebrated figure would have faced, someone who was, in short, famous enough to be wrong at scale. Picture someone whose most enduring cultural contribution was a creation that somewhat escaped his control. A character, a persona, an icon that the public claimed and would not relinquish. Whatever its creator's own wishes about the matter. Who is this? It is doctor Mehmet Oz. I know, stay with me.

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Dr.

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Mehmet Oz was born in nineteen sixty in Cleveland, Ohio, to Turkish immigrant parents. His father was a physician. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate, and then the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned both an MD and an MBA, the MBA being one might note, a somewhat unusual pairing for a medical degree, the implications of which become clearer as we proceed. He trained as a cardiothoracic surgeon at Columbia University and became genuinely substantively accomplished in that field. He performed real surgeries, he published real research, he was, by the standards of his actual training, a real and competent doctor. And then Oprah Winfrey invited him on her show. He appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show from 2004 onward, and the audience's response was immediate and overwhelming. He had presence, he had accessibility, he had the ability to translate medical concepts into language that people without medical training could understand and find useful. Oprah called him America's Doctor. In 2009, he got his own show, the Doctor Oz Show, which ran until 2022 and attracted at its peak approximately four million viewers daily, four million people every day watching a cardiothoracic surgeon from Columbia discuss their health. He was, in the public imagination, the authoritative medical voice, America's doctor, the expert you could trust. And then there were the supplements. The doctor Ozho became over time a vehicle for the promotion of alternative health products, herbal supplements, dietary interventions, and various other offerings that the scientific and medical establishment consistently found to be unsupported by the evidence, ineffective or actively misleading. He described green coffee bean extract as a magic weight loss cure for every body type. He promoted Garcinia Cambodia with similar enthusiasm. He faced a 2014 Senate hearing at which Senator Claire McCaskill told him directly that his show had become a platform for miracle cures that did not work. A characterization he disputed with somewhat less than full persuasiveness. His 2016 foray into anti-vaccine adjacent rhetoric and his 2020 COVID-19 commentary, in which he suggested on Fox News that reopening schools might be an acceptable trade-off if it only caused 2 or 3% additional mortality. A suggestion he later walked back compounded the concern of those who believed that the Dr. Oz on television had diverged considerably from the standards of evidence-based medicine he had been trained to uphold. He subsequently ran for the United States Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022 as a Republican candidate with the active endorsement of Donald Trump, and lost narrowly to a man who had suffered a stroke during the campaign and whom Dr. Oz's campaign had mocked for it. History again maintaining its standards now the parallels with Conan Doyle. First, and most fundamentally, the man of genuine medical and scientific training who used the credibility of that training to promote claims that the evidence did not support. Conan Doyle was a qualified surgeon who endorsed fairy photographs and seances. Oz is a qualified cardiac surgeon who endorsed magic weight loss supplements and disputed vaccine safety. In both cases, the authority was real. The use to which it was put was not, and in both cases the public assumed continuity between the one and the other, that because he was credentialed in this, he was reliable about that, which is precisely the logical error that the credential was exploited to induce. Second, the emotional driver beneath the public position. Conan Doyle's spiritualism was rooted in grief, in love, in the unbearable need to believe that the people he had lost were not simply gone. The emotional substrate was entirely human and entirely sympathetic, even if the conclusions were wrong. Oz's departure from evidence based medicine is less sympathetically explained. There are financial relationships with supplement companies that are documented and straightforwardly commercial. But there is also, in his public persona, a genuine emotional driver. The desire to give people hope, the desire to tell suffering people that there is something they can do, something available, something accessible. This is not a cynical impulse in its origins. It is a generous one that went wrong in its execution. The supplement industry happened to be waiting for exactly that generosity with a check. Third, the creation that escaped the creator. Sherlock Holmes became larger than Conan Doyle and could not be killed off. America's doctor became larger than Mehmet Oz and could not be unbranded. Both men found themselves defined by a public persona they had made but no longer controlled, Conan Doyle by a rationalist detective, Oz by a trustworthy medical authority, and both found that persona simultaneously, their greatest commercial asset, and their most constraining personal limitation. Conan Doyle couldn't write what he wanted to write because Holmes was what people wanted to buy. Oz couldn't speak with the full nuance of a scientific expert, because America's Doctor was what four million daily viewers had tuned in to receive. Fourth, the inner circle of true believers. Conan Doyle had his spiritualist community, who treated his conviction as confirmation of their own. Oz had his audience, particularly the daytime television audience of predominantly women who'd been told by a credentialed male authority that this supplement, this practice, this alternative approach was what they needed, who received his endorsements with a trust that went beyond what the evidence warranted. In both cases the celebrity created a closed loop. The figure's authority inflated the audience's trust, and the audience's trust inflated the figure's conviction that he must be right. Fifth, the Senate. Conan Doyle ran for Parliament twice and lost both times, having presumably concluded that the political arena needed the kind of serious moral engagement he was prepared to offer. It did not, on either occasion, agree. Oz ran for the Senate and lost. The parallel is perhaps more structural than meaningful, but I note it because there is something characteristic about a certain kind of prominent, self-certain man, regardless of era, who concludes at a particular point in his career that the logical next step is elected office. It is rarely the logical next step, but the conclusion is apparently irresistible. Where do the parallels break down? Conan Doyle's spiritualism was a matter of personal conviction that cost him his reputation among serious people, but did not in any direct sense harm anyone. A person who paid a fraudulent medium to pass messages from their deceased relatives was poorer and perhaps distressed when the fraud was revealed, but they were not in physical danger. Ozzie's medical misinformation operated in a domain where the stakes are literally life and death. A person who chose unproven supplements over evidence based treatment or who delayed vaccination on the basis of advice from a credentialed television personality faced real medical consequences. The ethical gravity is therefore not equivalent, and intellectual honesty requires me to say so clearly. Conan Doyle was also, by all surviving accounts, a man of genuine personal decency, generous, loyal, courageous in his advocacy for the wrongly convicted, sincerely committed to what he believed was right even when right was expensive. He took on the cases of George Adalgy and Oscar Slater, men who had been unjustly imprisoned, at significant personal cost, and with remarkable effectiveness. He was wrong about fairies and right about injustice, and both of those things were expressions of the same underlying character. A man who trusted his own assessment over the establishments, for better and occasionally for worse. Ozzie's relationship to disinterested advocacy is harder to assess when significant financial interests are running alongside the public positions, and I leave that assessment to those with more complete information than I possess. So the verdict Conan Doyle comprehensively, affectionately, and without serious hesitation, not because he was right about the things he was wrong about. He was wrong about them with an earnestness that I find equal parts exasperating and rather moving, and I have spent enough time in the company of his biography to feel something genuine toward the man underneath the monument. But because his life is, in its full arc, one of the great case studies in the history of the relationship between intellect and emotion, in the story of what happens to a very clever person who is also a feeling person, who loses people he loves, who lives through a war that kills his son and his brother and his illusions, and who makes in the wreckage of all that, a bargain with the universe. The bargain is I will believe if the universe will give them back to me in some form, in some frequency, through some medium that science has not yet fully mapped. It is not a rational bargain, it is an entirely human one. And the man who made it had also given the world Sherlock Holmes, and had freed George Adalgy from prison, and had written The White Company and the Lost World and a substantial body of work that is still read with genuine pleasure a century after his death. He was not diminished by his final decade, he was revealed by it, as someone whose gifts were great and whose needs were human, and who was, in the end, more human than great, which is possibly the more interesting thing to be. I grew up in Kingston upon Thames, where the general cultural position is that one should not make a spectacle of oneself, and that grief should be managed with a cup of tea and sensible footwear, and perhaps, in extremis, a quiet word with the vicar. Arthur Conan Doyle made a very considerable spectacle of himself indeed. He hired halls and bought newspaper space, and crossed the Atlantic to tell Americans about his communications with the dead. He did not do it quietly, he did not do it sensibly, he did it with everything he had, for reasons that were at their root about love and loss and the unbearable alternative. I find that in spite of everything, rather magnificent. Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, doctor, novelist, creator of the world's most famous rationalist, campaigner for the unjustly convicted, devoted, perhaps catastrophically devoted, believer in the possibility that death is not the end, born Edinburgh, eighteen fifty nine. Died Crowborough, nineteen thirty, still being argued about. Still, through Holmes, the most widely read British author in the world, he would have found the irony delicious, or possibly he would have found a medium who could tell me whether he finds the irony delicious. I'm Sophie Manners, thank you for listening. The trial record of Joan of Arc remains a superior primary source document, but the Conan Doyle Houdini correspondence is an extremely close second and significantly funnier. Do read both. Good night.