Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Daniel Stashower
institutionalization for alcoholism. ‘We have packed papa off to a health resort in Aberdeenshire,’ Conan Doyle mentioned in passing in a letter dated April 9, 1881, to Lottie, who despite her youth had now joined Annette in Portugal as a governess. Blairerno, a farm near Drumlithie, Aberdeenshire, was a place for well-bred alcoholics to dry out.* In Charles Doyle’s case it led not to recovery, but to a series of sanitoria in which he spent the remainder of an increasingly forlorn life, until his death in 1893. It left Conan Doyle ‘practically the head of a large struggling family’, at a time when he had little idea of his future.
To mark his new status (memorialized by his drawing of himself waving his diploma over his head, captioned ‘Licensed to Kill’), he visited the Foleys of Ballygally House on his mother’s side of the family in Ireland—also appraising some eligible young ladies there, including one who would be the first love of his life, Elmore Weldon.
to Amy Hoare BALLYGALLY, LISMORE, CO. WATERFORD, JULY 1881
I take up an execrable pen to tell you all about Ireland and my cousins and the land league ; and things in general. I think a quiet chat with you is the best investment I can make of a cloudy morning and a penny. There is a sort of mistaken idea that Paradise was over in Palestine or Armenia or somewhere there, but it is a mistake for I have discovered it in the valley of the Blackwater. How I wish you were with me to enjoy it, and the Doctor too. What rambles we would have by river and wood.
My cousins, male and female are charming—Dick the elder one (32) is a man after my own heart—and after yours too, I think. Six feet—straight as a dart, square in the shoulders with a tawny beard, sunburned face, and fourteen stone of solid muscle. Ned the younger (27) has been mate of a merchantman, is smaller, but splendidly put together and as hard as nails—a very good fellow. They are both what I would call very well off. Dick makes £1000 a year from having the sole right to fish salmon in the Blackwater, and has a very large estate into the bargain—Ned has a lot of land too. Dick stalked into a great league meeting which was held here, with his big sea boots on, and informed the president that he wished the whole league had one neck and he had his foot on it—he was not forcibly ejected. I wish they would try some of their midnight business on us.
I had a bit of an escape last night. I had been dining with another cousin 4 miles off, (I find I am related to half the county) and we sat rather late over our wine. By the time I got back the place was shut up and everybody had gone to bed, thinking I had been put up for the night. I slouched round the building not liking to knock them up, and at last—you know the habits of the beast—I shinnied up a waterpipe, found a window unfastened, and after some fumbling opened it, and tumbled in. I received a rapturous reception from Dick, whose room it was—rather toorapturous for he sprang at me with a double barreled gun in his hand, and would have put a charge of No. 12 through my head in another moment if I hadn’t mildly pointed out the inhospitality of such an action.
By the way there is a chance of my seeing some great fun—these infernal rascals have boycotted the Cork cattle show. We never intended to exhibit (it is next month, I believe), but when Ned heard it was boycotted he swore a priestly oath that he would take down the most mangy cow he had, and exhibit that cow. Dick and I fostered the idea, so the upshot of it is that if they persist in boycotting the show, we intend not to throw ourselves upon police or soldiers for protection, but simply to go down the three of us, armed to the teeth, and dare any man to lay a finger on the cow—I think my cousins will be as good as their word, and I know that I wouldn’t like to miss the fun.
We have a young lady visitor with us—oh, mam, I wish you could be with us to see what the higher education of women leads to—she is 19—a bursar of Trinity College, first of her year in the hardest exam open to women—and such an addle-headed womanly fool, to put it mildly, I never saw, so help me Bob. She knows the dates of all the Egyptian kings but she hasn’t a word to say at the dinner table—she’ll give you chapter and verse for any quotation but she has about as much poetry in her as a cow. She has the theory of music at her finger ends, and she won’t play the accompaniment to a song—Lawn Tennis is too trivial for her—she does not play games of chance—chess she plays. Dancing is childish—you never saw such an educated cabbage in your life. Like St Paul ‘Much learning hath made her mad.’ Who says I don’t read the bible? You see I am not getting limp, as the Doctor used to say, over that girl.
‘Amberley excelled at chess—one mark, Watson, of a scheming mind.’
—‘The Adventure of the Retired Colourman’
From Charles Doyle, October 1884, from Blairerno
Oh I nearly forgot, when I was coming here my boat stopped six hours in Dublin so my choice lay between my old CB of an uncle & Heylesbury Street. Away I went for the latter but to save my life I couldn’t remember the number. I knocked up a few landladies without success, & was despairing when I raised my eyes and lo I saw Muggins* while he was yet far off. I walked quickly up to him in the street keeping my head down, and then pulled up right in front of him. If you had heard the yell he gave—he sprang into the air—‘Oh Murther—Oh Great God—Is it yourself? Sure it’s not now, is it?’ We had a great day together.
to Mary Doyle LISMORE, JULY 1881
I suppose dear old Tottie is with you by this time, and that Lottie is knocking around. I am beginning to get in the fidgets to come over to them. As you supposed my silence was due to the copying of my yarn. 40 foolscap pages, closely written it covered. You are right about the ‘murders’. I decided on calling it ‘The Gully of Bluemansdyke’ a true Colonial story. I sent it in yesterday with an appropriate letter to the editor. I think it very good but he may think otherwise. It has more individuality of style about it than any of my former lucubrations.
I am jogging along here very happily. I don’t like Mary at all. She is very selfish, cold & generally objectionable. Miss A is a puddingheaded idiot in spite of her bursaries &c. She is the greatest fool in petticoats that ever I met, so help me Bob! The old lady is a darling but rather inclined to yield to Mary’s absurd whims & tempers. Letts is an angel I’d marry her as soon as look at her if I was older or she was younger. I am thinking of performing the same cheerful ceremony with a splendid creature. By Jove! Such a beauty! Miss Elmore Weldon. We have been flirting hard for a week so that things are about ripe. There are two or three other girls about who I am longing to marry also, so that I am in a pitiable condition—perfectly demoralized. There’s a Miss Jeffers from Kilkenny, a little darling with an eye like a gimlet who has stirred up my soul to its lowest depths. I am to meet her & Elmore today and they are to show me the beauties of the ‘New Walk’.
The holiday’s end forced him to think hard about his future again. He visited George Budd in Bristol in September, and turned their ‘joyous riotous’ time into a hilarious short story, ‘Crabbe’s Practice’. But he found Budd’s practice there on the rocks, and suddenly a medical life at sea looked more realistic.
That idea was scuppered by a second cruise as a ship’s surgeon, from October 1881 to January 1882, this time on the steamship Mayumba, carrying cargo and passengers to and from Madeira and West Africa.
It was another big adventure, and also gave him welcome time to read, recording in a diary impressions of Carlyle (‘a grand rugged intellect [but] I fancy Poetry, Art and all the little amenities of life were dead letters to him’) and Oliver Wendell Holmes (‘a man after my own heart. He talks about Pathological Piety and Tuberculous Virtues—rather good’).
But he later called it the four most miserable months of his life. The heat sapped his energy for writing (‘Oh for a pair of skates and a long stretch of ice’). And at Lagos, in present-day