Reviewed by Christopher Pittard
The title of Andrew Norman’s The Real Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is both a promise and an accusation. A promise to unveil some previously unknown aspect of Doyle; an accusation that our previous image of Doyle has somehow been false or inaccurate. Unfortunately, the book fails to deliver on either of these fronts; its focus on Doyle is somewhat selective, concentrating mostly on the familiar story of his work in creating Sherlock Holmes, and the discussion’s claims to originality rest mostly on an account not of Arthur Conan Doyle, but his father Charles, and in particular his treatment for alcoholism and epilepsy.
Norman starts from the rather well-worn question of how Doyle, the creator of the arch-rationalist Sherlock Holmes, could come in later life to publicly espouse the apparently self-evident absurdity of spiritualism. It is a question which is frequently posed, but one which fundamentally misunderstands Doyle’s relation to both Holmes and spiritualism. Those asking the question tend (as Norman does) to unproblematically identify Holmes with Doyle, as if the former always already represented the views of the latter, and with no sense that Doyle conceived Holmes as being a faintly monstrous character. Douglas Kerr (2013), for instance, notes that the narrow expertise of Holmes as he first appears in A Study in Scarlet (1877) and The Sign of Four (1890) would have been anathema to the all-rounder Doyle, as would Holmes’ earlier treatment of cases as intellectual problems rather than as issues of moral justice. Nor, indeed, is Holmes always represented in quite so rationalistic terms: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-2) recasts him in gothic terms, one who has metaphorical out of body experiences, and whose positivistic and cartographical knowledge of Dartmoor proves useless once out on the moors. Holmes may seek to debunk the myth of the hound, but the superstition retains its power after the case is closed, and Holmes admits in the final chapter that the events of the novel are already fading from memory, his explanation of events more of an imaginative reconstruction than a scientific proof. But even if we accept Holmes as the hero of scientific rationality, Norman overlooks the ways in which spiritualism also made appeals to physical evidence in ways that made it more appealing to Doyle than the more intangible faith of more established religion. How one interpreted the evidence offered by spiritualism is, of course, another question, but the point is that a discourse based on moving beyond the material realm often made its case by reference to surprisingly material forms of manifestation.
Norman’s striking argument is that Doyle’s investment in spiritualism is only explicable in terms of mental illness, and that the source of this disorder is the previously unacknowledged inheritable mental illness suffered by Charles (in Norman’s reading, something approaching schizophrenia, although the book stops just short of definitely offering this diagnosis). This is a remarkable claim, but without remarkable evidence to substantiate it. It is well known that Doyle’s father suffered from alcoholism and epilepsy, for which he was kept in a succession of institutions including Blairerno House, the Montrose Royal Asylum, the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, and Crichton Royal Hospital, from 1879 until his death in 1893. Norman’s reluctance to take these diagnoses at face value is based on the claim that Charles’ condition deteriorated even in the absence of alcohol during his later treatments, while early on in his treatment at Blairerno Charles he had obtained alcohol, an odd treatment strategy for a patient supposedly admitted for disorders including alcoholism. There must, therefore, be some other explanation. The section of the book dealing with Charles Doyle’s time at Blairerno, Montrose, Edinburgh, and Crichton is the strongest part, detailing an aspect of the Doyle story that is less well known, and drawing on archival sources to illustrate Charles’ life in the asylum. But Norman’s modern medical diagnosis is questionable at best; the book never gives a compelling reason for not reading Charles’ alcoholism and epilepsy as precisely those conditions, beyond the requirement for a sensationalist claim about Doyle’s parentage and biological inheritance. A chapter testing the hypothesis by considering the potential for Doyle’s blood relations to exhibit similar symptoms of delusion is inconclusive, suggesting that Doyle’s brother Richard’s powerful imagination and interest in the supernatural might conceivably be regarded as a similar inheritance. The tone of this chapter is tentative, though, and feels less like a marshalling of convincing evidence than a speculative attempt to support the book’s eyecatching thesis.
Of course, I am not a medical specialist, and therefore cannot fully assess Norman’s diagnosis (though I would question its logical necessity). But I am a textual analyst, and it is here that the shortcomings of the book’s treatment of literary evidence become clear in a manner that casts doubt on its more specialised claims. Norman gleans details from Doyle’s own writings to suggest that these are reflections on his father’s (and, by hereditary extension, his own) condition. For example, particular weight is placed on one passage from The Empty House (1903), when Holmes outlines a rather domesticated version of Ernst Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation:
There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it often in humans. I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors, and that such a sudden turn to good or evil stands for some strong influence which came into the line of his pedigree. The person becomes, as it were, the epitome of the history of his own family.
Norman reads this as Doyle’s reflection on his own biological inheritance. I have already noted the shortcomings of reading Holmes’ views as identical with those of Doyle, but in any case The Empty House raises this idea only to immediately dismiss it. Norman conveniently omits Watson’s immediate response to Holmes:
"It is surely rather fanciful."
"Well, I don’t insist upon it."
Neither should Norman. The book’s reading of the Holmes stories tends to reduce them to a monolithic canon, overlooking the ways in which the character of Holmes changes from A Study in Scarlet to The Retired Colourman, and often hopping between Doyle’s early and later detective fictions without due contextualisation. The discussion frequently has an only tenuous grasp on historical contexts. The description of Moriarty in The Final Problem as having “hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind” is described by Norman as Doyle “unwittingly anticipating the advances in the sciences of genetics which would take place in the following century” (p. 52), despite the fact that inheritable tendencies to crime had already been extensively discussed in the nineteenth century by Francis Galton, Cesare Lombroso, and Havelock Ellis (and indeed, Doyle’s fiction elsewhere demonstrates a considerable ambivalence to such ideas of biological determinism; Moriarty, necessarily, is the exception). Perhaps the most egregious error is a gloss on the reference to Jean Paul in The Sign of Four (1890), which Doyle’s text makes clear is to the art historian Jean Paul Richter; astonishingly, Norman identifies this as a reference to “the French existentialist philosopher, dramatist and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre” (p. 41) born in 1905, a spectacular display of prediction on Doyle’s part. Like Holmes, I would draw your attention to the curious incident of the editor in the night-time.
The Real Sir Arthur Conan Doyle recently grabbed headlines in the Daily Express for its claims to explain Doyle’s interest in spiritualism through inherited disorder; unfortunately, there is little beneath the headline. The rather erratic structure of the book (chapters end abruptly, are interrupted by definitions, or dissolve into headed lists) suggests a rather rushed product. This is a shame as the chapters on Charles’ time in the asylum offer some interesting material, and there is certainly more to be said about Charles’ engagement with institutionalised medicine and late Victorian mental health practices. But the book rests on the erroneous assumption that engagements with spiritualism and the occult are necessarily based on delusion, rather than being part of a later nineteenth-century culture of scientific enquiry.
Reference
Kerr, D. (2013). Conan Doyle: Writing, profession, practice. Oxford University Press.
Dr Christopher Pittard is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth.