Although she was given only a few months to live, her husband ministrations kept her alive well into the New Century. Writing incessantly, looking after Louisa, no longer a wife, but a patient, and then losing his father, deeply troubled Conan Doyle.
It may well have been his resulting depression which caused him to become more and more fascinated by "life beyond the veil". He had long been attracted to Spiritualism, but when he joined the Society for Psychical Research, it was considered to be a public declaration of his interest and belief in the occult. As Sherlock Holmes said to Watson, "Work is the best antidote to sorrow…" Conan Doyle accepted to go to the United States to give a series of lectures.
He sailed for New York in September of with his younger brother Innes. He was booked to give talks in more than thirty cities. The tour was a huge success, judging by an article in the Ladies Home Journal. Conan Doyle. His personality is a peculiarly attractive one to Americans because it is so thoroughly wholesome…" The author returned to England in time for Christmas, as well as for the publication in The Strand Magazine , of the first of the "Brigadier Gerard" stories, which was an instant hit with the readers.
A trip with Louisa during the winter of to Egypt, where he hoped the warm climate would do her good, produced another of his novels: The Tragedy of the Korosko. It is believed that Conan Doyle, a man with the highest moral standards, remained celibate during the rest of Louisa's life. That didn't prevent him from falling deeply in love with Jean Leckie the first time he saw her in March of Aged twenty-four, she was a strikingly beautiful woman, with dark-blond hair and bright green eyes.
Her many accomplishments were quite unusual for those times: she was an intellectual, a good sportswoman as well as a trained mezzo-soprano. What further attracted Conan Doyle was that her family claimed to be related to the Scottish hero Rob Roy. During that same period, Conan Doyle wrote a play about Sherlock Holmes. It was not to give him new life but to shore-up his bank account. The very successful American actor William Gillette having read the script, asked for permission to revise it.
Conan Doyle agreed, and when the actor asked permission to alter the Holmes persona, he replied, "You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him. The author's laconic comment to Gillette was: "It's good to see the old chap again. After a triumphant tour in the United States, the play opened in London at the Lyceum Theatre in the fall of The British critics panned it, but as it often happens, vox populi prevailed, and the play was a huge success.
When the Boer War started, Conan Doyle declared to his horrified family that he was going to volunteer. Having written about many battles without the opportunity to test his skills as a soldier, he felt this would be his last opportunity to do so. Not surprisingly, being somewhat overweight at the age of forty, he was deemed unfit to enlist. Without losing an instant, he volunteered as a medical doctor and sailed to Africa in February of There, instead of fighting bullets, Conan Doyle had to wage a fierce battle against microbes.
During the few months he spent in Africa, he saw more soldiers and medical staff die of typhoid fever, than of war wounds. The Great Boer War , a five hundred-page chronicle, published in October of , was a masterpiece of military scholarship. It was not only a report of the war, but also an astute and well-informed commentary about some of the organizational shortcomings of the British forces at the time. Exhausted and disappointed, Conan Doyle opted for yet another change of direction when he returned to England.
He threw himself head first into politics by running for a seat in Central Edinburgh, which he described as being the "premier Radical stronghold of Scotland. To his credit, he lost the election by only a narrow margin. He then returned to London and continued writing. The inspiration for his next novel came from a prolonged stay in the Devonshire moors, which included a visit to Dartmoor prison.
At first, it was based mainly on local folklore about an inhospitable manor, an escaped convict and a huge black sepulchral hound. As the novel progressed, he came to realize that his story lacked a hero. He is quoted as having said, "Why should I invent such a character, when I already have him in the form of Sherlock Holmes.
To the delight of thousands of frustrated fans, the The Strand magazine published the first episode of The Hound of the Baskervilles in August of Gossip has it, that the King was such an avid Sherlock Holmes fan, that he had put the author's name on his Honours List to encourage him to write new stories.
Be that as it may, His Majesty and several hundred thousand of his subjects must have been very pleased when in The Strand Magazine started serializing The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Writing, looking after Louisa, seeing Jean Leckie as discreetly as possible, playing golf, driving fast cars, floating in the sky in hot air balloons, flying in early archaic and rather frightening airplanes, spending time on "muscle development," as body-building used to be called, kept Conan Doyle active but not really contented.
His lingering deep desire for public service made him go for a second attempt at politics in the spring of He lost the election once more. After Louisa died in his arms on the 4th of July , Conan Doyle slipped into a debilitating state of depression lasting many months. He extricated himself from his misery by trying to help someone in a worse condition than he was. Playing Sherlock Holmes, he got in touch with Scotland Yard to point out a case of miscarriage of justice.
It involved a young man called George Edalji who had been convicted of having slashed a number of horses and cows. Conan Doyle had observed that Edalji's eyesight was so poor that it was proof the convict couldn't possibly have done the awful deed.
The Case of Oscar Slater , which he wrote in , gives a detailed summary of that affair. In he published A Visit to Three Fronts and in again toured the front lines. These tours, plus extensive communication with a number of officers, enabled him to write his famous account The British Campaigns in France and Flanders, published in six volumes — Doyle had been interested in spiritualism the belief in the ability for the living to communicate with the dead since he rejected his Roman Catholic faith in In he experienced a new belief in "psychic religion," or spiritualism, so that after the war he devoted the rest of his life and career to spreading his new faith in a series of works: The New Revelation , The Vital Message , The Wanderings of a Spiritualist , and History of Spiritualism After travelling for years to promote this cause, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died on July 6, , of a heart attack, at his home in Crowborough, Sussex.
Booth, Martin. The Doctor and the Detective. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, Hardwick, Mollie. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Pascal, Janet B. New York: Oxford University Press, Toggle navigation. Best of Britain. History of Wales. History of Scotland. London History. Castles England Scotland Wales. Stately Homes England Scotland Wales. Monasteries England Scotland Wales. Prehistoric Sites England Scotland Wales. English Heritage.
Name the Historic attraction. British History Quiz. He takes my mind from better things. And when you look at a picture of Doyle it is certainly easier to see him as the slightly bumbling Dr Watson character than as Holmes himself.
So in December Sherlock Holmes and his arch rival Professor Moriarty plunged to their deaths in a waterfall. The public were outraged, so a decade later, in , Doyle resurrected Holmes for The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Doyle had served as a doctor in South Africa during the Boer War and published two pamphlets seeking to counter international condemnation of Britain's role in that war. He believed that his knighthood was as a result of these pamphlets.
During the early s Doyle unsuccessfully tried to become more directly involved in politics, standing as a Liberal Unionist candidate for two Scottish seats.
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