After taking a break from Sherlock Holmes for some four years after His Last Bow, Arthur Conan Doyle would make his return to the series in 1921. In the intervening time, however, his entire public persona, and the main thrust of his professional work, had undertaken a fundamental shift. To a public which largely knew him as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, it may have appeared that he’d undergone a rapid personal transformation. Previously, he had been a paragon of rationality who applied the same techniques of logical deduction he used in his fiction in real-life cases, famously assisting to reverse several miscarriages of justice; now he was an avowed Spiritualist, eagerly promoting the faith (which had become resurgent after its early 20th Century doldrums thanks to the trauma of World War I) and proclaiming the reality of a range of paranormal phenomena.
This, however, would be an oversimplification of the truth. As far back as 1887, Doyle had been attending seances and occasionally writing to the Spiritualist journal Light; in the 1890s he joined the Society for Psychical Research and undertook a spot of ghost-hunting. Up until the war years, Spiritualism would seem to have been one of Doyle’s many interests, and never one of his primary ones.
Another common myth about Doyle is that the catalysing factor for his turn to Spiritualism was the deaths of a great many family members in the War. Whilst it’s likely to be the case that several people of Doyle’s acquaintance died in the early War (after all, it was a meat-grinder that ate up an entire generation), most of the deaths of those closest to him – his brother, son, two brothers-in-law, and two nephews – all occurred after 1916, when he made his big turn to Spiritualism. The actual incident which prompted him to step up his involvement in the field involved his children’s nanny, Lily Loder Symonds, who seemed to have spontaneously become a medium and started producing psychic phenomena such as automatic writing. Doyle was sufficiently convinced by her to write to Light and proclaim that Spiritualism was a “new revelation” (a title he would later use for a book on the subject), sent by Providence for the relief of an embattled world.
Even then, his new enthusiasm for Spiritualism would not have necessarily been that obvious at that stage, because as well as putting out stuff like His Last Bow Doyle was also producing a large amount of war writing, including essays penned on a tour of the front in 1916, and obviously for as long as the War lasted (and a little beyond the ceasefire) Doyle had so much work to do on that subject that his new enthusiasm for Spiritualism was a drop in the ocean compared to his essays and writing on other subjects. A glance over his essays and letters over the years makes this apparent: the Spiritualist stuff is vastly outweighed by war writing in 1916 to the end of the War, then there’s a time when it competes with various other interests of his, but by 1920 it has come to dominate his output.
If the deaths I have mentioned above have a role in this, it would seem to be less to trigger a conversion (Doyle was already inclined to believe in Spiritualism and had merely become more emphatic in that belief) and more to prompt him to double down on his convictions. You could make a comparison to the way people seem to snap these days over QAnon stuff and related conspiracy theories: the world is in tulmult, it’s all quite scary, that comes with a number of personal setbacks, you’re casting about for something which makes this all make sense, once you find it you commit to it regardless of logic or evidence.
Ah yes, about that…
Continue reading “The Holmes Canon, Part 7: Distracted By Fairies, Frustrated By Formula”