Between 1882 and 1891, the celebrated novelist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was a practising doctor in Southsea. During this period he created Sherlock Holmes. A flavour of his arrival in Portsmouth and the somewhat straitened circumstances of his early years there can be gained from John Dickson Carr’s The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1949):

 

‘It would never do to let the neighbours know he could not afford a maidservant, especially in such a fashionable suburb of Portsmouth as this. The house of which he was so proud, three narrow storeys of sedate red brick, stood in a busy street near the junction of Elm Grove with Large Road, King’s Road, and Park Street. At past midnight, however, there should be nobody to see him polishing the brass plate. Aside from getting into a fight with a navvy on his very first day in Portsmouth (the fellow was unchivalrously kicking his wife, and later became a patient), Dr Conan Doyle’s professional conduct had been flawless.

 

Any passer-by, on that September night in 1882, would have seen a frock-coated figure six feet two inches in height, seeming even taller by reason if its vast breadth, in weight fifteen stone when in training without an ounce of fat. Above starched collar and spreading tie loomed a large, young-looking, serious-minded face: hair parted and drawn across his forehead, with long sideburns and as yet only a modest line of moustache.

 

Portsmouth, and the sense of being free there, buoyed him up to the skies. There was a fine house, in the suburb of Southsea, to be had for forty pounds a year. Giving as one of his references the name of Henry Doyle, C.B., Director of the National Art Gallery of Ireland, he received the keys without any palaver about a deposit. Some odds and ends of furniture he bought at an auction. It was necessary, at first, to furnish only the consulting room: with of course, a bed for some upstairs room, and an umbrella-stand to decorate the hall.

 

It was a proud moment when he closed the door of his own house, even though the noise of the door went echoing up through empty rooms. With the carefulness of an experienced householder he had remembered to buy a bed, but forgotten mattress and bedclothes. On the other hand, the consulting-room on the ground-floor front – with its red drugget of carpet, its oak table bearing stethoscope and dresser’s case, its three chairs and three pictures – swam in a mysterious twilight created by drawing brown curtains rather closely together, which made corners of the room appear to be furnished; and outside, his brass plate glittered in the sunshine’.

 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (b. 22 May 1859, d. 7 Jul. 1930) was a practising medical doctor who became a prolific writer best known for the creation of the world’s most famous detective duo, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. His first Holmes and Watson story, A Study in Scarlet (1887) was written while Doyle was living and working in Portsmouth. Three further novels and fifty short stories in the series followed. Doyle wrote a wide range of other fiction, including the Professor Challenger science fiction stories, which included The Lost World (1912) which inspired a host of TV, radio, and film adaptations. Doyle is also known for his interest in a a number of scientific and esoteric subjects, including freemasonry and spiritualism. His 1926 Professor Challenger novel, The Land of the Mist was strongly influenced by his belief in the latter. Doyle also advocated for the existence of fairies. His belief in the hoax perpetrated in 1917 by 16-year old Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances Griffiths (aged 10) who faked two photographs of fairies in their garden led Doyle to write The Coming of the Fairies(1922), a much-ridiculed work contributed to a decline in Doyle’s reputation to which his vocal advocacy of spiritualism had contributed. Nonetheless Doyle remains amongst the most well-known of British writers of his period, and the range of his interests, as well as the energy with which he approached all of his activities, make him an especially rich subject of analysis. 

 

Born in Edinburgh to a troubled Irish Catholic family, Doyle was strongly influenced both by his mother, a gifted storyteller, and his father, an alcoholic artist, illustrator, and civil servant. Early family life was difficult and often squalid, but Doyle’s education at Jesuit establishments in Lancashire and Austria was supported by wealthy uncles. While in Austria he lost his faith and became attracted to mysticism. Between 1876 and 1881 Doyle trained at the University of Edinburgh Medical School. While in Edinburgh, Doyle met fellow student Robert Louis Stevenson. During this period he began to write fiction, but with limited success. After a period on a Greenland whaler in 1880, Doyle graduated the following year, became the ship’s surgeon on the West Africa-bound  SS Mayumba, before returning to form a short-lived shared medical practice in Plymouth. In 1882, Doyle set up as a solo practitioner at 1, Bush Villas, Elm Grove, Southsea and returned to writing. The success of the Sherlock Holmes stories, published both as books and in periodicals such as The Strand Magazine. The latter’s reputation as the leading popular periodical of the 1890s was strongly formed by the fact that it published 121 stories as well as over 80 other pieces by Doyle. While in Southsea, Doyle married Louisa Hawkins (in 1885). After Louisa’s death from tuberculosis in 1907, Doyle married Jean Elizabeth Leckie. Doyle had two children with his first wife and three with his second. All died without descendants. While in Portsmouth, Doyle threw himself into the social and sporting life of the city. 

 

Doyle dabbled in politics, standing twice as a Liberal candidate for parliament, and writing widely on political subjects. He investigated two closed cases, leading to two successful exonerations. His involvement in the George Edalji case became the subject of Julian Barnes’s novel Arthur and George (2005), later adapted as a 2015 ITV TV drama. The second case led to the release of German-Jewish Oscar Slater who had been wrongly accused of a violent murder.

 

Doyle died of a heart attack in Crowborough in 1930.