Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Daniel Stashower
on till six o’clock today, I am quite fresh again, and only have some insignificant blisters. The whole distance was 42 miles, and such miles, done in 14 hours.
Now to business. I got your postcard and am anxiously expecting a letter to tell me whether you will buy me the Rorschach-Basle-Paris route. If so I intend to start on the Wednesday (26th) evening for Lindau and sleep there. Next morning bath in the lake, and start by steamer to Rorschach, so as to see the lake, and then I arrive at Basle at 7.15, and get to Paris next day.
The procurator refuses to give anybody any money on any account. Therefore when you enclose the ticket or means of buying it, pray send the travelling expenses. Perhaps two English pound notes are not too much, as I will be very careful and economical, but sometimes one incurs expense for the luggage, and the residue will go to pay my ticket from London home. However you can judge yourself better than I can on this point.
I am glad the cartes pleased you. I am getting quite gaunt, I assure you, as you may notice in the division photograph. There is nothing like alpine excursions for reducing spare flesh.
Love to all, best regards to Doctor Waller.
[P.S.] From that mountain I saw Baden, Austria, Switzerland, Bavaria, and Würtemburg.
He made his way back to England through Paris, paying a long-awaited visit to his uncle Michael Conan and aunt Susan in the Avenue Wagram off the Etoile. He arrived at their door with only a penny left in his pockets, he remembered, but had a wonderful visit of several weeks.
‘Then I returned home,’ he said, ‘conscious that real life was about to begin.’
*Biographers have believed, based on Conan Doyle’s testimony and surviving school records, that he began in 1868, but his letters home indicate that he started in 1867 instead.
*Who Mrs Russel was, and why she had fallen out of young Arthur’s favour, is unknown.
His younger sisters Lottie and Connie. Connie had been born only that month, on the 4th.
His older sister Annette.
*The Red Lion Inn in Preston served as a staging point for boys travelling back and forth from the school, and as a clearing house for deliveries from home.
*Perhaps ‘The Golden Goose’ by the Brothers Grimm, which begins with a grey-haired man in a forest, asking each of three brothers in turn to share his cakes and wine.
*Ann Standish was a member of the school staff catering to the boys’ needs, judging from references to her in Conan Doyle’s letters. (Perhaps a nurse, considering the time young Arthur appears to have spent in the infirmary?)
*The Cloister and the Hearth, by Charles Reade, 1861; one of Conan Doyle’s favourite historical novels for its treatment of a fifteenth-century man’s loyalties divided between family and Church.
*‘Pinned’: apparently Stonyhurst slang for ‘enjoyed’ or ‘liked’. While Conan Doyle uses it repeatedly in letters from Stonyhurst, he did not after leaving it.
A concerned marginal note by his mother—to whom is not apparent—on the letter reads: ‘Don’t suppose he meant regular big bottles. Mine were all small.’ The sanctioned amount of alcoholic beverages, not to mention tobacco, is in stark contrast to today’s standards.
*No wonder Conan Doyle suffered injuries: in his day Stonyhurst played an especially rugged version of football with origins in Elizabethan times. The rules, obscure and only lightly enforced, allowed each side to field as many as seventy players. The result was often a general melee, especially during a ‘Squash’—an enormous pileup of players designed to knock opponents to the ground or force the ball between the goalposts. Sometimes losing teams put a second ball into play surreptitiously, causing further confusion and hotly contested goals. When the dust finally settled the winners were feted with pancakes and lemonade.
*Years later, during rehearsals of a play based on his Brigadier Gerard stories about Napoleon’s wars, he was incensed when a group of soldiers, ostensibly returning from battle, marched onstage in pristine uniforms. ‘These men are warriors, not ballet dancers!’ he exclaimed, and at his insistence, their expensive costumes were taken outside to be ripped and dragged through the dirt, to give them a properly authentic appearance.
*Mary Burton, a family friend whose surname was bestowed on Lottie, had rented the Doyles her house at Liberton Bank, on the southern side of Edinburgh, at the time young Arthur attended the dreaded Newington Academy. Her brother was the Scottish historian John Hill Burton, whose son William Kinnimond Burton, three years older than Arthur, became one of his best friends until his early death in 1899 in Japan, while a professor of engineering at Imperial University there. As young men they shared an interest in photography, and ‘Willie’ Burton (sometimes WKB in these letters) may have introduced Conan Doyle to the British Journal of Photography, which published articles by him in the late 1870s and 1880s. Conan Doyle dedicated his 1890 novel The Firm of Girdlestone to Burton.
He reported his father’s exploit to his uncle James in London, who replied September 5th in a way that speaks to the hazy view that the London Doyles had of their brother Charles by now: ‘That same papa may think it nothing to kill only one snipe,’ James wrote, ‘but I should be long enough out before achieving so much. Give him my compliments when you see him, and ask him if he remembers such an individual as me? And say that a note in this direction would not be thrown away.’
*‘Pepper’s Ghost’ was an elaborate stage illusion of the time involving an angled mirror to create the appearance of ghosts on stage. Presumably Stonyhurst staged a simplified version.
*See Out of the Shadows: The Untold Story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s First Family, by Georgina Doyle (Ashcroft, B.C.: Calabash Press, 2004), pages 19-20.
*Ann Standish had been part of the Stonyhurst community far back enough to be called as a witness, for Arthur reported in a letter in July, ‘She appears to have nothing to say, and to have said it. She was in a dreadful fright before going. She had a vague idea that the Judge suspected she was Arthur Orton in disguise. She could scarcely be persuaded to get into the cab to drive off. She pinned her journey, putting up at the best hotels, at the expense of government, and receiving 10/ a day for nothing.’
*We do not know the precise nature of the accident. James Ryan, ‘an extraordinary boy who grew to be an extraordinary man’, was the one lifelong friend Conan Doyle made at Stonyhurst.
*‘The first thing