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Imagine the man who created the most famous character in world literature, a character that millions believed in as real.
Explore Arthur Conan Doyle's complex relationship with Sherlock Holmes and his surprising belief in spiritualism.
Key Takeaways
- Doyle's creation, Sherlock Holmes, took on a life of its own, overshadowing its creator.
- Despite his scientific background, Doyle embraced spiritualism and the supernatural.
- His personal experiences with family tragedy influenced his turn towards mysticism.
- Doyle's life reflects a tension between reason and faith, science and belief.
- He remains a complex figure, both a rationalist and a mystic.
What the video covers
- Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, a character so real that people wrote to him for help.
- Doyle hated Holmes, calling him a monster that distracted him from more important work and even killed him off.
- Despite being a man of science and medicine, Doyle became a leading advocate of spiritualism later in life.
- His family background was artistic but troubled, with his father struggling with alcoholism and mental illness.
- Doyle's mother instilled in him a strong moral code and passion for literature and sport.
- He was educated at a strict Jesuit school where he lost his faith and became an agnostic.
- Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where he met influences that shaped his detective fiction.
- He balanced his scientific rationalism with a deep belief in the supernatural, publishing works on spiritualism.
- Doyle's life was marked by personal tragedies, including the illness and death of loved ones, which deepened his spiritual beliefs.
- His legacy includes not only Sherlock Holmes but also his efforts to prove life after death and communicate with spirits.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes
- 03:47Doyle's Troubled Family Background
- 07:45Education at Jesuit School Stonyhurst
- 11:29Medical Studies and Influences in Edinburgh
- 15:23Doyle's Scientific Approach and Detective Fiction
- 18:55Doyle's Spiritualism and Belief in the Supernatural
- 23:32Personal Tragedies and Their Impact
- 30:05Legacy: Rationalist, Mystic, and Literary Icon
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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People wrote to him at 221B Baker Street asking for help in investigating murders and robberies.
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They considered him a living, brilliant detective, and his creator only his literary agent, the biographer of Dr.
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Watson. This creator's name was Arthur Conan Doyle, and he hated his creation. He called Sherlock Holmes a monster who distracts me from more important things. He even killed him by throwing him into a waterfall, but was forced to resurrect him under
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pressure from the public and his own mother. But Conan Doyle's paradox goes even deeper.
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The man who invented the deductive method, a man of science, a doctor, an athlete, at the end of his life became the most famous preacher of spiritualism in the world. He believed in fairies, ghosts, and communication with the dead.
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He spent millions to prove that death is not the end. Who was he? Rationalist or mystic? A genius or a naive simpleton? If you want to know the truth about the man who gave us Sherlock, but who himself was searching not for criminals but for
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spirits, subscribe to our channel, Personalities in Detail. This will be a story about reason and faith, full of unexpected twists.
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To understand this man, we need to go to Edinburgh in the mid-19th century. The city was stern, grey, blown by the winds from the northern sea, but full of hidden life and ancient secrets. The Doyle family lived at
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number 11 Picardy Place. It was not a luxurious mansion, but a modest apartment where coal was often scarce for the fireplace. The Doyle family was unusual. They were Irish Catholics in Protestant Scotland, which already made them outsiders. But most importantly, they were a
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family of artists, bohemians, thrown into the world of pragmatic Scots. Arthur's grandfather, John Doyle, known by his pen name, was a famous London cartoonist whose sharp political cartoons were discussed in Parliament and the Royal Palace.
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His four sons, Arthur's uncles, also became successful artists, illustrators, and gallery directors. It seemed that Arthur's fate was predetermined.
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Brush, canvas, London. But in his own home, it was not creative bohemia that reigned, but a quiet tragedy.
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His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was perhaps the most talented of the brothers, but also the most broken. He worked as a clerk in the Edinburgh Office of Public Works. Boring, monotonous work with drawings and estimates, which he
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hated with all his soul. In the evenings, when he came home, he would pick up a pencil. But he did not draw satire, like his father. He painted strange, frightening, fantastic worlds.
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In his watercolors, fairies danced with monsters, giant birds carried people away, and trees had human faces.
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These were the drawings of a man running away from reality. And he fled not only into art. Charles was drinking. He drank a lot, terribly, binge-drinking. He stole money from the family budget to buy whiskey.
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He became aggressive, then fell into depression. Little Arthur saw it all. He watched his father transform from a kind, albeit strange, man into a shaking creature with wild eyes. He saw him talking to invisible interlocutors.
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The fear of madness, of losing control of his mind, settled in Arthur's soul forever.
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Perhaps this is why he would later create Holmes, a man whose brain works like a perfect machine, not subject to emotions. It was his protection, his dream of order.
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Charles Doyle was eventually placed in an asylum where he died, forgotten by everyone but his family. This is a secret. His father in the madhouse hung over Arthur like the sword of Damocles. But in this dark kingdom there was also
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light. His mother is Mary Foley. She was a woman of incredible strength of spirit, education, and pride. She came from an ancient Irish family and traced her ancestry back to the Plantagenets.
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Something Arthur, as an adult, always doubted. But he didn’t contradict his mother. Mary carried the whole family on her shoulders. She washed, cooked, darned clothes, and bargained with shopkeepers.
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But most importantly, she raised her son. She didn't want him to become a clerk or a drunkard. She wanted him to become a knight.
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In the evenings, when her father was sleeping or absent, Mary would sit by the fireplace and tell Arthur stories. She talked about the knights of the round table, about French heroes, about honor, about duty, about how a real man should
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protect the weak. She read Walter Scott to him, immersing the boy in the world of medieval romance. "I had two passions in my life: literature and sport, and they both came from my mother," he would write later.
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Mary instilled in him the moral code that he followed all his life. Be honest, be brave, be true to your word. His childhood was harsh. The family often moved from one cheap apartment to another. Arthur had to fight with the street boys
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of Edinburgh, the children of workers and dock workers. He was strong, stocky, broad-shouldered. He quickly realized that fists are an argument. Once he fought with a boy who bullied a kitten, and returned home with a broken nose, but with
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a sense of duty fulfilled. Chivalry in action. At the age of 9, his life changed dramatically.
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Wealthy relatives of his father, seeing the plight of the family and the boy's talents, offered to pay for his education.
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But not in Scotland. He was sent to England, to Lancashire, to a closed Jesuit school, Stonyhurst.
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It was an elite but harsh institution. The Jesuits were renowned for their iron discipline and excellent education.
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For Arthur, it was a shock. Cold bedrooms, rising at 5:00 a.m., endless prayers and cramming Latin, and punishment.
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For the slightest offense, being late, wearing a dirty collar, talking in line, students were beaten with a ferula, a piece of hard rubber shaped like a shoe sole. They beat their palms. It was painful, humiliating, and offensive.
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Arthur, who had a heightened sense of justice, often rebelled. He wrote angry letters to his mother, complaining about the injustice of the fathers and the Jesuits.
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But Stonyhurst gave him much more. He received a brilliant classical education. He loved history, literature, and began writing poetry.
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He published a school magazine, and he became interested in sports. Cricket, rugby. In this he found an outlet for his energy. Sport became his escape from the boredom of the monastery. But the main thing that happened to him at
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school was the loss of faith. Observing the Jesuits, their dogmatism, their ability to justify any cruelty by the will of God, Arthur began to doubt.
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He saw hypocrisy. He asked questions that the priests could not answer. By the time he graduated at 16, he told his family that he did not want to be a Catholic. He became an agnostic.
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He did not deny God, but he refused to believe in church dogma. This was a terrible blow for his mother and relatives, who hoped that he would become a priest or at least a good Catholic.
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They even threatened to withdraw their support, but Arthur was adamant. "I will not be a hypocrite," he said. He returned to Edinburgh in 1876. He was faced with a choice of path.
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Art. His father was an artist, and this frightened him. The church was impossible. Medicine remained. This was respectable, useful, and, most importantly, scientific. Arthur believed in science. He believed that reason could explain everything. He entered the medical faculty of the
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University of Edinburgh. This decision proved fateful. It was there, in the anatomical theaters and hospital wards, that he would meet the man who would change his life and give the world the most famous literary legend. The University of Edinburgh at the end of the 19th century
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was not just an educational institution, but a true temple of medicine, a mecca for doctors from all over the world.
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Here, under the eternally gray Scottish sky, worked luminaries whose names thundered on all continents.
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Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptics, w
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James Simpson, who was the first to use chloroform as an anesthetic, freeing humanity from the hellish pain of surgery. And many others.
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Seventeen-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle entered this world with awe, respect, and enormous ambition. He wanted to become not just a doctor, but a good one. He crammed anatomy, dissected cadavers, which, according to rumors, were sometimes supplied by the very gravediggers Stevenson wrote about
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, although the era of Burke and Hare was already over. He spent nights in the library, absorbing knowledge like a sponge.
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But the main event of his student life, an event that changed not only his fate, but also the fate of world literature, was a meeting not with the Great Lister, but with another, less well-known to the general public, but no less brilliant
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man, with Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell was a surgeon, teacher, and consultant to the Crown in legal cases.
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He was a tall, thin, wiry man, with a razor-sharp face, piercing gray eyes, and a harsh, raspy voice that seemed to cut the air.
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He moved around the classroom swiftly, like a bird of prey, and his energy was infectious.
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But most importantly, it was his mind, his incredible, sharp analytical mind. At his lectures, Bell put on real performances that captivated the students more than any anatomical dissection.
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He would call a patient from the emergency room and, without asking a single question, begin to talk about him, as if he were reading his biography.
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“This man,” he would say, pointing to an embarrassed worker in shabby clothes. He served in the army in a mountain rifle regiment. He recently returned from Barbados. He is left-handed and a shoemaker. The students sat with their mouths open.
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Not believing his ears, the patient nodded, confirming every word. It was all true. Then Bell, enjoying the effect he had produced, explained his method.
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I see a tattoo of the regiment on his arm, but it’s slightly blurred, which means it was done a long time ago. His skin has a characteristic tan that can only be obtained in the tropics. And Barbados is the only
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place where this regiment is currently stationed. On the index finger of his left hand he has The characteristic callus had come off. This meant he was left-handed and worked with leather. And his gait, the specific way he placed his foot,
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betrayed a habit of marching through the mountains. Arthur was not simply impressed, he was enchanted. He became Bell's assistant, his Watson. Even before Watson's arrival, he kept patient records, observed the master, and hung on his every word. He
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understood the main thing: medicine is the same as a detective. Symptoms are clues left by a disease. A disease is a criminal trying to escape, and a doctor is a detective who must collect the facts, analyze them, and make the
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only correct conclusion: a diagnosis. This principle of induction and deduction, attention to the smallest details that others overlook, was forever imprinted on his brain.
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Joseph Bell became not just a teacher; he became the living prototype of Sherlock Holmes.
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Doyle would later write to him: "It is to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes." And although I have the advantage in stories of being able to put him in any situation, I do not think that his analytical work is
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exaggerated compared to yours." But studying required money, and the Doyle family was still in poverty. His father was in the hospital. His mother barely made ends meet, trying to feed the younger children.
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Arthur, as the eldest man in the family, needed to earn money. In his third year, he decided on a desperate, risky step. He hired himself out as a ship's doctor on the whaling ship Nadezhda Hope, which was heading to
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the Arctic in the icy waters of the Greenland Sea. to hunt for seals and whales.
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It was a journey worthy of the novels of Jack London or Herman Melwell. 7 months in the ice, far from civilization.
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Cold piercing to the bones, danger, hard physical labor. Arthur, who was a strong guy and an excellent athlete, not only treated cuts, fractures and frostbite in harsh sailors, but and worked alongside them. He was a seal hunter. He fell into icy
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water. The captain pulled him out by the scruff of the neck, saving him from death, and participated in butchering the carcasses.
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One day he quarreled with the boatswain and, remembering his school boxing lessons, knocked him out, earning the boundless respect of the entire crew.
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He returned to Odinburgh a different man, matured, strong, self-confident, with a weathered face and calloused hands.
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I became an adult at latitude eighty. he said. This experience taught him not to be afraid of difficulties and to appreciate the simple joys of life.
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In 1881, he finally received his bachelor's degree in medicine. Now he was a doctor.
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But he had neither the money nor the connections to buy a good practice in a prestigious area. He tried to work with a former classmate, George Budd, in Plymouth.
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Budd was an eccentric, even crazy guy who saw patients for free, but foisted mountains of useless drugs on them, from which he made huge profits. money.
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Their partnership ended in scandal. Doyle, honest and principled, raised on a code of honor, could not tolerate charlatanism and deception of poor people.
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He broke off relations with Bud. Left penniless, with only a suitcase, he moved to Portsmouth, a resort town in the south of England. There, in 1882, he rented a cheap house, hung a brass plate on the door: A Conon Doyle, physician
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and surgeon, and began waiting for patients. It was the most difficult time in his life. Patients did not come. The young, unknown doctor did not inspire confidence in the locals. There was no money even for food.
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He washed the floors in the waiting room himself to avoid paying a cleaning lady, and left the house at night to polish the brass plate until it shined, creating the appearance of having a servant. He economized on coal, on
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tobacco, on everything. He had a lot of free time, too much. And to keep from going crazy from idleness, Loneliness and hunger, he began to write.
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He had already tried his hand at writing during his student years, publishing a couple of short stories in Chambers Magazine and other magazines. But now he decided to take things seriously.
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He wrote historical essays, mystical stories in the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe. They were published, paid small royalties that helped him make ends meet , but they did not bring fame.
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And then an idea occurred to him. He remembered Dr. Bell, remembered his method, his piercing gaze, his ability to see the invisible.
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What if he applied this method not to illnesses, but to crimes? What if he created a hero who would unravel mysteries not by intuition and chance, like the heroes of the then-fashionable French detective novels by Gaboriau?
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Oh, with the pure, cold logic of an intellectual, a scientist, a detective. He sat down at the table and began to sketch out the outline of the story. At first, he wanted to call the hero Sherinford Holmes, and his friend Dr.
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Ormand Secker. But these names seemed cumbersome and unnatural to him. He went through the options, crossed them out, wrote again.
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And finally settled on Sherlock, perhaps in honor of the famous cricket player Sherlock or the paperclip artist Alfred Sherlock, and John Watson after his real-life friend, the physician Dr. Watson.
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The plot of the story, which he called "Etude in Scarlet Estari Innrlet," was complex and ambitious.
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Revenge of the Marmons. Murder in London. A consulting detective with Beaker SSRT who plays the violin and takes drugs out of boredom.
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He wrote it in just three weeks, working at night when the city slept and his waiting room was empty.
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He felt that he had created something new, fresh unusual. But the publishers did not think so. The manuscript was rejected again and again. Too long, too short. No one was interested.
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The market was overcrowded. Publishers were looking Cheap sensations. Shilling shockers, not intellectual puzzles. Finally in 1886, the publishing house World and COM agreed to publish the story, but the terms were enslaving, humiliating for the author. They bought all rights to the
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work forever for 25 pounds sterling, about $3,000 today. No royalties, no percentage of sales.
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Doyle was desperate. He needed money, and he agreed. He sold the rights to Sherlock Holmes for a pittance.
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He didn’t know that he had just made the biggest mistake and the greatest discovery of his life. He thought it was just a passing thing, a way to earn a little money so he could continue writing real literature.
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He had no idea that he had created an icon. A Study in Scarlet was published in the Beat Christmas Annual for 1887. And the world remained silent.
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No fanfare, no rave reviews, no lines at bookstores. The book passed almost unnoticed. Critics, if they mentioned it at all, did so in passing, as just another run-of-the-mill detective story to read on the train.
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For Doyle, this was a disappointment, but not a tragedy. He hadn't banked on Holmes. He considered himself a serious writer, the heir to Walter Scott. He wanted to write historical novels, large-scale canvases about knights, honor, battles, and the great
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events of the past. He began work on Micah Clarke, a novel about the Monmouth Rebellion in the 15th century.
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Changes also occurred in his personal life. In 1885, he married. His chosen one was Louisa Hawkins, the sister of one of his patients, a young man who died in Doyle's arms from cerebral meningitis. Despite all the doctor's efforts,
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Louisa, or Tui, as he affectionately called her, was a quiet, kind, homely woman. She was not an intellectual, did not share his passion for literature or history, but she idolized her husband, created for him She knitted socks and didn't
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interfere with her work. They had a daughter, Mary. Doyle became a respectable bourgeois, a doctor who played cricket on weekends and wrote novels in the evenings.
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Life seemed to have settled into a calm rut, but Holmes's fate was not yet sealed. In 1889, an event occurred that changed everything.
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Joseph Marshall Stodart, editor of the prestigious American magazine Lippings Monthly Magazine, arrived in London. He was searching for new talent for the American market, and he invited two young promising writers, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle, to dinner at the luxurious Lenham Hotel.
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This dinner became literary legend. Imagine the scene. At the same table, laden with exquisite dishes, sit the plump, good-natured, mustachioed Doyle, resembling a sea captain or a farmer, and the refined, sarcastic dandy Wilde, dressed to the nines.
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It would seem they had nothing in common, but they talked all evening. Doyle was fascinated by Wilde, his brilliant mind, his paradoxes.
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He towered over us like a Roman emperor, he later recalled with admiration. As a result of this dinner, Stodart commissioned a story from each of them for his magazine.
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Wilde wrote his only novel, The Picture of Darian Gray, which became a manifesto of aestheticism.
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And Doyle agreed to write a second Holmes story, The Sign of the Four. The Sign of the Four was published in 1890 and was much more successful than the first book. The public began to get a taste for deduction. They
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liked the exoticism, the treasures of Agra, the savage Sandoman Islands, and the charisma of the protagonist.
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But the real explosion that turned Holmes into an icon and Doyle into a superstar occurred a year later.
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Doyle made a brilliant marketing decision that changed the publishing business. He realized that long stories published in parts once a year were a thing of the past . The reader forgets the plot and loses interest. The future is short stories, each a
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complete case that could be read in one evening, but with the same characters, to whom the reader became accustomed as friends.
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It was the format of a modern serial. He wrote several of these stories and sent them to the newly opened London magazine The Strand Magazine.
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The first story - a scandal in Bohemia. The one in which Irene Adler appears, the woman who was the only one to outwit Holmes, was published in July 1891. And London went crazy. The success was immediate and stunning. The
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magazine's circulation skyrocketed. People lined up at the newsstands on the day of the new issue. On trains, in cabs, in clubs, everyone was reading Strand, discussing the detective's new adventures.
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Sherlock Holmes was no longer just a literary character. He became reality. Readers believed that he lived at 221B Baker Street.
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Although such a house did not exist then, the numbering ended earlier. On Bags of letters began arriving at this address. People asked Holmes to find missing husbands, stolen jewels, solve murders, give advice. They offered him money, they asked for autographs.
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Women professed their love for him. Some even sent him gifts: tobacco, pipes, violin strings. Doyle was shocked.
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He had created a monster that began to live its own life, separate from the author.
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Doyle became famous and rich. He could finally give up the medicine he hated. He closed his practice in Portsmouth, which, by the way, never had many patients and was only bringing in losses. He moved to London, to the prestigious Norwood district, and declared himself a
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professional writer. The magazine paid him huge royalties, 50 pounds per story, which was a lot.
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Publishers begged for new stories, but along with success came irritation. Doyle felt that Holmes was stealing his time, his talent, his soul. He wanted to write serious books about the Middle Ages, the White Company, which he considered his
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masterpiece. About Napoleon's soldiers. Exiles, his own Stone. He considered these novels real literature, and the Holmes stories light reading, pottery .
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And the public demanded only Holmes. I think of killing Holmes and finishing him off forever.
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He distracts my thoughts from better things, he wrote to his mother in 1891. Mary Foley, who was herself a fan of detective fiction and often suggested plots to her son, answered him harshly: "You wouldn't dare, you can't, you shouldn't."
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But he dared. In 1893, tired of his hero, of the need to invent more and more ingenious crimes, he decided to commit literary suicide.
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He went with his wife to Switzerland, saw the majestic Reichenbach Falls, a powerful stream of water falling into the abyss, and realized: "This is an ideal grave, this is a worthy end." He wrote the story The Last case.
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In it, Holmes engages in mortal combat with Professor Mariarti, the Napoleon of crime, his dark double, the genius of evil. And the two, locked in a mortal embrace, fall into the roaring abyss of the waterfall. The bodies are not found. Doyle
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has concluded. He has killed Sherlock Holmes. He thought he was free. He thought he could now get down to real business. He did not know that he had just unleashed a war on his readers and on the entire nation.
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December 1893. The issue of StN magazine containing the story "The Last Problem" went on sale, and England was plunged into mourning. This is not a metaphor or an exaggeration.
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People on the streets of London really did wear black mourning armbands or attach black ribbons to their hats. Clerks in the City cried while reading the magazine At Lunchtime. Women fainted. It was a national hysteria comparable only to What about the death of a
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beloved monarch? The magazine's editorial office was literally besieged by a crowd. The post office couldn't cope with the influx of letters. 20,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions in protest. The magazine nearly went bankrupt, its shares plummeting. The letters addressed to Doyle were full of
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hatred, pain, and threats. They called him a murderer, a sadist, a traitor. "You killed my best friend." "You will pay for this," they wrote to him. Rumor had it that even Queen Victoria expressed her displeasure, saying, "We are not surprised, we are saddened."
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People approached Doyle on the streets and waved umbrellas or canes at him . But Arthur himself was happy in his diary. That day, he wrote just one sentence, short and cruel: "Killed Holmes." He felt like a freed slave who had
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thrown off heavy chains. Now he could write what he wanted, what he considered important. He threw himself into his work.
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He created a series of stories about Brigadier Gerard, a brave, vain, stupid, but incredibly charming hussar in Napoleon's army. Gerard was the anti-Holmes. A hero of action, not of thought, a man of the heart, not of the brain. Comical and lively.
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The public received Zhar warmly, but still demanded the return of the detective. Doyle wrote a play.
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Mystical stories about the secret of the flowerbed. Tragedy novels. He proved to everyone that he was a versatile author, a master of great literature.
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Doyle traveled a lot. He went to Switzerland to see the crime scene, the Reichenbach Falls, again and to make sure that it was impossible to escape from there.
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He visited Egypt, where he nearly died after falling from his horse during an excursion into the desert. The horse bolted.
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In 1894 he went on a lecture tour of the United States. He lectured to packed halls and met with Rudyard Kipling at his home in Vermont. Kipling lived there with his American wife.
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He was a star, a recognized master. But in 1893 , the very year he killed Holmes, a real, unimagined disaster came into his personal life . His wife Louise, the quiet and faithful Tui, was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
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Scabies. At that time, it was a death sentence. Doctors gave her several months to live. For Dol, who was a doctor and knew very well what this meant, it was a terrible blow. He loved Louise, although their marriage was calm, without
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Italian passions. He felt responsible for her. He threw all his strength into saving her.
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They moved to Dovoz, Switzerland, hoping that the clean mountain air and dry climate would help.
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In Davos, Doyle accomplished another small feat that few people know about. He ordered skis from Norway and became one of the first people to ski in the Alps for sport.
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He made the dangerous crossing of the Mainfelder Furka Pass, proving that skiing is the future of winter tourism. The locals looked at him as a crazy Englishman who had tied boards to his feet and was risking his life for
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fun. But he looked for risk in this. Adrenaline is a way to distract myself from my wife's illnesses.
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The fight for Louise's life lasted 10 years. She was slowly fading away. Doyle was a devoted husband. He looked after her, read aloud to her, carried her in his arms, and took her to resorts. But it was at this time, when
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his wife was dying, that he met the woman who became the main passion of his life.
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In 1897 he met Jean Leckie. She was 23 years old. She was beautiful, smart, athletic, an excellent horsewoman, a wonderful soprano sang and, importantly, was interested in mysticism.
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Doyle fell in love instantly and irrevocably. It was love at first sight. That same chemistry.
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which was not with Louise, but he was a knight, raised by his mother on a code of honor. He couldn't leave his dying wife.
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He couldn't cheat on her physically. At least, that's what he claimed and that's what all biographers believed. His romance began without sin. He and Jean met secretly, walked in parks, talked about literature and perfumes, wrote tender letters to each other, but maintained a
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platonic relationship. This lasted for almost 10 years. This tension, uh, suppressed passion was tearing his soul apart.
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He felt guilty towards his wife and longing for his beloved. He lived a double life.
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In 1899, the Boer War began in South Africa. The British Empire fought against the Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers. Doyle, a patriot to the core , wanted to volunteer for the front . He was already 40. He was
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too old and obese to be a soldier. But he could not stand aside while his country was at war. He found a way out. He organized a field hospital with his own money and the money of his friends. He went to
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South Africa. There, in Bloemfantine, he saw not the romance of battles, but the horrors of an epidemic. The Tiv mowed down soldiers by the thousands, far more than the Boer bullets. There was not enough water, no medicine, and no hygiene.
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Doyle worked as a doctor in inhumane conditions among dirt, flies and dying people. He saw death every day. This war showed him the fragility of life and the powerlessness of medicine.
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Returning to England, he wrote The Great Boer War, a book in which he defended the actions of the British army against international criticism.
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Britain was accused of creating the first concentration camps for Boer families and of cruelty.
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He also wrote a pamphlet, "The South African War, Causes and Visions," which was translated into many languages and distributed to embassies.
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For this propaganda work and for his service at the hospital, King Edward VI knighted him.
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In 1902 he became Sir Arthur Conondoyle. He achieved everything: title, fame, money, respect. But Holmes did not let him go. Publishers offered astronomical sums for the hero's resurrection, and Doelel gave in to the cunning. In 1901, while on holiday in Norfolk
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playing golf, he heard from his friend, journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson, a legend about a ghostly killer dog in Devonshire that haunts an ancient family. This story captivated him.
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He realized it was the perfect plot for Holmes, but he didn't want to resurrect him.
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He wrote a story set before the detective's death, based on Dr. Watson's early unpublished memoirs .
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This is how the Hound of the Baskervilles appeared. It was a masterpiece. The gloomy atmosphere of the swamps, the curse of the family, a giant dog glowing in the dark with phosphorus.
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The readers were ecstatic. The success was so resounding that Doyle realized that resistance was futile.
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Holmes is immortal. Success. The Hounds of the Baskervilles was so colossal that publishers couldn't leave Doyle alone. The American magazine Coliers made an offer that was impossible to refuse.
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45,000 dollars. more than a million in today's equivalent for 13 new stories about Sherlock Holmes.
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It was the highest price ever offered to a writer for short stories. Doyle, who had high expenses to maintain two houses and treat his wife, gave in.
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He told his agent, "Okay, let him rise again." In 1903, the story "The Empty House" was published. In it, Holmes makes a dramatic comeback, explaining to Watson and millions of readers that he did not fall into the Reichenbach Falls at all
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. He used the Japanese wrestling skills of Boritsu, threw Professor Mariarti into the abyss, and faked his own death to escape from the professor's accomplices who were hunting him. This explanation was a bit far-fetched, but readers didn't care.
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Their hero returned, the world rejoiced. Sales of StN magazine in England and Coliers in the USA broke all records. Doyle became Sherlock Holmes' father again. He continued to write stories, but did so without much enthusiasm, viewing it as a
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job, a cash cow. His thoughts were occupied with something else. On July 4, 1906, after 13 years of battling tuberculosis, Louise Doyle died in her husband's arms. Her long, painful agony was over.
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For Arthur, this was both a liberation and a profound grief, and he fell into a severe depression. He blamed himself for loving another woman while his wife was dying, for perhaps not having done enough for her. For several months he could not write a single
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line. He wandered around his estate in Andishaw, trying to find meaning in life by sketching a tombstone for Louise.
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But life took its toll. After a year of mourning, in September 1907 he finally married Jean Leckie.
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The wedding was lavish. There were 250 guests present. Jean, who was already 33 years old, waited for her knight. They were happy.
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They had three children: Denis, Adrian and Jean, who was called Billie. Doyle got his second wind. He sold the house in Andishaw, where everything reminded him of his first wife's illness, and built a new spacious house called Windlesham in
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Sussex. He began writing actively again, but now he was interested in more than just entertainment.
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He became interested in human rights work, becoming a real detective. In 1906, he read in the newspaper about the case of George Edalji.
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Edalji was a humble Parsi lawyer of Indian descent who was accused of a series of brutal murders and mutilations of livestock in the East End village of Great Whirley.
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Someone was ripping open the bellies of horses and cows at night. The racist police fabricated evidence against the strange stranger.
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Edlji was sentenced to 7 years of hard labor, served 3 years, and was released, but without the right to practice law.
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His career was ruined. Doyle was indignant. He conducted his own investigation using his hero's methods.
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He went to the crime scene, studied the police reports, and met with Edolji. At their first meeting in the hotel lobby, Doyle noticed that Edelji was holding a newspaper almost to his nose and looking at him with an iskasa.
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"You have astigmatism and severe myopia," Doyle exclaimed. Edlji confirmed this. Doyle realized that a man with such poor eyesight was physically unable to make night forays through muddy fields, climb over fences and kill animals without being noticed.
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Doyle proved that the dirt on Eddlege's clothes did not match the soil at the crime scene, and that the razors found on him were dull and old.
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He wrote a series of impassioned articles for the Daily Telegraph, blasting the accusations to smithereens. Public opinion exploded. The case was reviewed.
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Edlji was pardoned and reinstated, although he received no financial compensation because the police refused to admit full guilt.
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It was a triumph of justice. Doyle became not just a writer, but a national defender, a real-life Sherlock Holmes. This case led to the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal in England. He later also brilliantly investigated the case of Oscar Slater, a
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German Jew wrongly accused of murdering a wealthy old woman in Glasgow. Slater was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
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Doyle fought for his release for years, publishing pamphlets and paying for lawyers. Eventually, after nearly 20 years, Slater was released and awarded compensation.
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But beneath this layer of active social activity grew the seed of mysticism. An interest in spiritualism had haunted Doyles since his youth, but now, under the influence of his new wife, it became an obsession.
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Jean Leckie was much more inclined towards mysticism than Arthur. She claimed to have the gift of a medium, that she could hear the voices of spirits and have premonitions of events. She began conducting automatic writing sessions at home. on which
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spirits allegedly guided her hand. Doyle, a man of science, first tried to find a rational explanation for this.
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He joined the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), an organization that attempted to study paranormal phenomena using scientific methods.
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He tested mediums, exposed charlatans and used his deductive method to find the catch. But he wanted to believe.
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He was looking for evidence of life after death. He began to read books on theosophy, attend lectures, and communicate with famous spiritualists, such as physicist Oliver Lodge. In 1912, he wrote the science fiction novel The Lost World about Professor
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Challenger, who discovers an isolated plateau in South America with living dinosaurs. It was an ode to science, adventure and male friendship, a hymn to the human mind, capable of unlocking any secret.
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But for Doyle himself, the real adventures now lay not in the Amazon jungle, but in the dark rooms of spiritualistic seances. The First World War began. For Doyle, it was a personal disaster. He was too old to fight. He was
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55, but he couldn't sit idle. He created a volunteer force of civilians that became the prototype of the National Guard.
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He wrote propaganda articles about German atrocities. He proposed inventions for the army, bulletproof vests for soldiers, which could have saved thousands of lives, but were rejected by the command as unsportsmanlike.
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Inflatable rubber boats for rescuing sailors. from sunken ships that were accepted. But the war hit him from a different, more painful side. Death began to mow down his loved ones.
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First his brother-in-law died, then his beloved nephews. And in 1918, his eldest son Kingsley died of the Spanish flu, weakened by severe wounds received in the Battle of the Somme.
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Soon his younger brother Innes, a general and his best friend since childhood, also died. This was the last straw. Doyle was broken with grief. He could not come to terms with the fact that his son, young and talented, had disappeared into nowhere, into
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oblivion. He needed to know that Kingsley was alive, that he continued to exist in another world.
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And so, during one of the sessions with the Uvalilian medium, he received a message. A message allegedly from Kingsley. It contained details of family life that Doyle felt only a son could know. Doyle believed completely and irrevocably.
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In 1916, at the height of the war, he committed Kamenngaut. He publicly announced his belief in spiritualism in journals.
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It was a shock. The creator of the world's most rational hero , a symbol of logic and deduction, declared that he believes in ghosts, flying tables, and ectoplasm.
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The press started laughing at him. The scientists twirled their fingers at their temples. The Church called this heresy and devilry.
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But Doyle didn't care. He found his new mission. He decided to become an apostle of spiritualism.
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He, like Saint Paul, went to preach a new religion throughout the world to console millions of people who had lost loved ones in the war. Sherlock Holmes was forgotten.
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Now the main work of his life became proving that there is no death. The 1920s were a time of continuous, grueling crusade for Sir Arthur Cohendoyle. He, a renowned writer, a rich and respected man, turned into an itinerant preacher.
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He traveled all over the world. Australia, New Zealand, America, Europe, South Africa. He filled huge halls. Thousands of people came to hear the creator of Sherlock Holmes, but he did not lecture on literature or deduction. He would go on stage and
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show slides of ectoplasm a substance supposedly secreted by mediums, spirit photographs, and ghostly hands. He talked about how wonderful it is to live in the afterlife, in the land of eternal summer, where there is no pain or old age. He spent
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hundreds of thousands of pounds on this. All the money made from Holmes. He became a missionary of the new revelation.
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In America he met a man who became his main opponent. and paradoxically another. Harry Houdini, the great Esquipionist, illusionist who could escape from any shackles, from a locked safe, from a straitjacket underwater. Houdini was a skeptic.
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After the death of his beloved, he went to mediums, desperately hoping to hear her voice, but each time he saw only cheap tricks. He knew the secrets of magic from the inside and saw how charlatans profit from people's grief.
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He declared war on spiritualism. He publicly exposed their methods, showing how they moved tables with their feet, how they read sealed letters with the help of alcohol, how they imitated voices. Doyle and Houdini became friends. It was a strange,
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impossible friendship. Doyle, a true believer, was convinced that Houdini was the most powerful medium in the world, who was simply unaware or deliberately hiding his gift.
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How else can he pass through walls and free himself from locked safes unless he dematerializes his body? - Doyle asked. Houdini tried to explain the tricks to him and showed him the mechanics of the locks. But Doyle didn't listen. He believed in
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miracles. "You don't know your own strength, Harry," he said, looking at the magician with fatherly pity.
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The break occurred in 1922 in Atlantic City. Jean Doyle, the writer's wife, offered to conduct an automatic writing session for Houdini to contact his late mother.
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Houdini, out of respect for his friend, agreed. Jean fell into a trance. Her hand began to write feverishly. She filled 15 pages with a message from Houdini's mother.
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The message was full of love, blessings and Christian humility. Doyle was delighted. "You see, Harry," he exclaimed.
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But Houdini was furious. First, the message began with a cross, although Houdini's mother was the wife of a Rabbi and a deeply religious Jew, for whom the cross was an alien symbol.
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Secondly, it was written in impeccable literary English, even though his mother, an immigrant, spoke almost no English, communicating only in Yiddish, Hungarian and German.
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And thirdly, it was on her birthday, but the spirit did not even mention this important event.
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Houdini realized that Jean, perhaps unconsciously, in a fit of religious ecstasy, was simply fantasizing, passing off her thoughts as the voice of the spirit. He publicly stated that the session was a farce.
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Doyle was mortally offended. He accused the hum of betrayal, narrow-mindedness, and even demonic possession.
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Their friendship ended in a public feud on the pages of newspapers. But the strangest, most absurd, and most destructive episode, which forever tarnished Doyle's reputation as a thinking man, was the story of the fairies and the Cotingleys.
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In 1917, two girls from the Yorkshire village of Cotingley, sixteen-year-old Elsie Ride and nine-year-old Frances Griffiths, took their father's camera and took some pictures in the garden by the stream.
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When the father developed the records, he saw girls playing with little winged creatures, fairies and a gnome.
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The father laughed and decided that it was a childish prank. But the girls' mother, who was interested in theosophy, believed it. The photographs fell into the hands of theosophists, and then in 1920 to Doyle. And the great creator of Sherlock
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Holmes, the man who taught the world to look for clues, analyze facts and discard the impossible, believed.
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He believed it unconditionally, immediately, with childish naivety. He saw in these pictures what he wanted to see. Proof of the existence of the subtle world.
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He hired experts from Codec, who stated that the negatives had not been retouched, which was true, since the girls had used a different method than retouching.
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Doyle wrote an enthusiastic article for the Strant magazine, which once published stories about Holmes, and then published a whole book about the appearance of fairies, The Coming of the Faies.
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In this book, he claimed in all seriousness that this was irrefutable scientific proof of the existence of a parallel world inhabited by nature spirits.
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He wrote that the wings of fairies are similar to the wings of insects, that their clothes are made of ethereal matter, condensed by the power of thought. He discussed the biology of gnomes.
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He put his reputation, his name, the entire authority of his intellect on the line.
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The world laughed. The newspapers made fun of the old fool. Cartoonists drew Sherlock Holmes looking through a magnifying glass at the fairies sitting on Doyle's nose. How could a smart person, a doctor, not notice the obvious, that the fairies' photos are flat as paper?
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That their hairstyles are 1920s fashion? the famous beans, that their poses are unnatural, that they are simply figures cut out of a children's picture book, attached to hatpins.
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The girls admitted this only in 1983, when they were already very old women. They said they simply cut out the fairy books and took pictures of them to play a prank on their parents.
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They were shocked when their joke was taken seriously by the great Conon Doyle himself, and for years they were afraid to admit it, lest they shame him. But Doel didn't see the cardboard or the pins. He saw a miracle. He wanted to
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believe that the world was not limited to gross matter, that there was room in it for fairy tales, for magic. It was his escape from reality, from pain and loss, the death of his son, brother, from the horrors of war,
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which showed what people are capable of. He preferred to believe in good fairies than in evil people.
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His faith was his account of despair. He was ready to look stupid, ridiculous, just to keep alive the hope that the world is not empty and meaningless.
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In recent years, he has become an outcast in the scientific world, but a hero to spiritualists. He opened The Pychic Book Shop in London, which became the headquarters of the movement.
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He wrote the books The History of Spiritualism and The Land of Fog, where his hero, Professor Challenger, an ardent materialist, also converts to spiritualism.
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It was Doyle's own dream. He spent all his energy and money on this fight. Doctors warned him that his heart, weakened by years of strain, would not withstand it, but he replied: "I have a mission. I must convey
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the truth to people." In the autumn of 1929, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle returned from his last great tour of Scandinavia.
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It was a hard, grueling trip. In every city, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, he spoke to packed halls, proving the reality of the afterlife, arguing with materialists, showing photographs of spirits.
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He worked himself to the point of exhaustion, ignoring doctors' warnings and his own fatigue. And the heart couldn't take it. He suffered a severe attack of angina.
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He was carried home to Windulsham Manor on a stretcher. The doctors were categorical: complete rest, no worries, no work. But for Doyle this was impossible. Lying in bed, he turned his bedroom into a headquarters. He dictated letters to newspapers, responded to critics' attacks, and
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planned new lectures. He behaved like a general before a decisive battle, a battle with death. But he was not afraid of death. For him, a convinced Spirit, death was not the end, not darkness, not disappearance, but a joyful event.
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a transition to the land of eternal summer, where there is no pain, old age or separation, where his son Kingsley, brother Innes and first wife Louise were waiting for him. He told his family with a smile: "I'm not dying, I'm just changing rooms. I
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'll wait for you there." He discussed the details of his funeral the way one might discuss vacation plans.
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The winter and spring of 1930 were spent in struggle. He got better and worse. In moments of relief, he tried to work in the garden. In moments of crisis he would become breathless, but he would remain clear-headed.
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He wrote his last letter to the Home Office, demanding that the old witchcraft law, which had persecuted mediums, be repealed.
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He fought to the end. On the morning of July 7, 1930, the day was sunny and warm. Doyle felt a surge of strength. He asked to help him get out of bed and go out into the garden. He wanted
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to see his favorite flowers, to feel the wind. Leaning on his cane and his son’s hand, he slowly walked to the summer gazebo.
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He sat down in a wicker chair, looking out over the green hills of Sasix.
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His wife, Lady Jean, was by his side. The woman he loved all his life, for whom he made a deal with his conscience and who shared with him his belief in spirits.
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They sat in silence. Suddenly Doyle felt ill. His face turned pale and he clutched his chest. The pain was unbearable, but he found the strength within himself. He turned to his wife, squeezed her hand tightly and, looking straight into her eyes, whispered his last
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words: "You are wonderful, ure wonderful." Then he closed his eyes. His hand unclenched. Sir Arthur Conon Doyle, knight of letters and prophet of spiritualism, has died. He was 71 years old. The news of his death instantly spread throughout the world. Telegrams of
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condolence came from America, Australia, and India, but the reaction was mixed. The literary world mourned the creator of Sherlock Holmes. The scientific world maintained a polite silence, while the spiritual world rejoiced. They believed that their leader was now free, had become a
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powerful spirit and would be able to help them from there. His funeral, which took place four days later, became the final act of his mystical drama, directed by himself. He left clear instructions. no mourning, no black clothes, no
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tears, no gloomy hymns. It was supposed to be a celebration of liberation. The Church of England refused to bury a heretic and a Spiritualist in the consecrated ground of a parish cemetery.
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This was the final blow to the official religion. But the family was not upset.
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They decided to bury him right in the garden of Windulsham Manor, under a huge old oak tree, next to his favorite gazebo.
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Hundreds of people, friends, relatives, famous writers and, of course, mediums from all over the country gathered for the ceremony. Everyone was dressed in light summer dresses and suits. The garden was decorated with flowers.
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Lady Jean, a widow, wore a floral dress. She didn't cry. She smiled, holding hands with the children. She believed that Arthur was standing next to her, invisible but alive, and approving of what was happening.
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Instead of a funeral service, they read his favorite poems and sang cheerful songs. It was like a garden party. and not to the funeral. There was no cross on the simple oak slab.
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His name, dates and knightly motto were engraved there . Ste blade straight. Faithful as steel, straight as a blade. But the climax came a few days later. On July 13, 6,000 spiritualists from all over Britain gathered in London's giant Albert Hall
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. It was a memorial evening, but more like a session of mass hypnosis and anticipation of a miracle. There was an empty chair in the center of the stage with a plaque reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was brightly illuminated by a
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spotlight. The family sat in the front row, leaving the seat next to them empty for him. Medium Estelle Roberts, a star of British spiritualism, took to the stage. A dead silence reigned in the hall. She looked at the empty chair and suddenly
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declared that she saw it. She began to describe: "He is here, he is sitting in a chair. He is wearing his evening clothes. He is smiling.
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He is stroking his moustache, as he always did when he was pleased. Then she conveyed a message, allegedly received from the spirit.
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I am here, I am with you. I have conquered death. Everything I told you is true. Do not be afraid, there is no death." The hall exploded. People jumped up from their seats, cried with joy, shouted: "Hallelujah!" For them, this was proof.
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Their prophet had returned. But the story did not end there. Doyle's family continued to try to contact him. Lady Jean claimed to regularly receive messages from him through automatic writing. She even published a book with these messages.
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Son Adrian and daughter Jean also became ardent spiritualists. The house in Windlesham turned into a pilgrimage center.
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Mediums came there to conduct séances in the writer's study. In 1955, when Lady Jean died, the estate was sold. The new owners were forced to rebury the remains of Sir Arthur and his wife. They were moved to the cemetery of All Saints' Church
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in Minstood, Newst. The church that had once rejected him finally accepted the prodigal son. But even there, on the tombstone, next to the cross, is an inscription recalling his double life.
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Knight, patriot, doctor, and writer. Not a word is said about spiritualism. Thus ended Arthur Conandoyle's earthly life .
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But his life in legend began. For some, he remained a great writer, the father of detective fiction; for others, the patron saint of spirit communication.
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Silence Pattern Detected Proceeding with the request. The eighth and final chapter. This will be a major verdict. We will bring together all the threads: literature, science, and mysticism. We will answer the main question: why did the man who gave the world the
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triumph of reason choose the irrational? Chapter Eight. The Verdict of History. Detective versus medium. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is gone, but the debate about him continues. Who was he really? A great rationalist who created the classic detective genre, taught the world
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to think logically, look for clues, and not take anyone's word for it? Or a naive mystic who, at the end of his life, betrayed the ideals of reason and plunged into a world of fantasy, believing in cardboard fails from the darkness.
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This paradox is the key to understanding not only his personality, but his entire era.
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Doyle was a man of Victorian England, an era when science was making giant, frightening strides forward. Darwin explained the origin of man without God. Physicists discovered invisible rays and waves. The world was becoming understandable, but cold.
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Religion was losing ground. People were looking for a new faith that would reconcile science and the soul. And many, like Doyle, tried to find it at the intersection. They wanted to prove the existence of the soul with the help of
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experiments, photographs, and recordings. For Doyle, spiritualism was Not a rejection of science, but its continuation.
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He considered himself an explorer of new, subtle matters, a Columbus of the invisible world. The most surprising thing about his life is his relationship with Sherlock Holmes. He created a hero who became a symbol of pure reason, a cold intellect that
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rejects everything supernatural. "I don't believe in ghosts," Holmes said in The Hound of the Baskervilles.
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"The world is big enough for us." There is no need to summon ghosts." But Doyle himself believed.
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He was Watson, who wanted to believe in miracles, but was forced to live next to Holmes, who exposed these miracles.
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All his life he tried to kill Holmes, threw him into a waterfall, stopped writing about him, called him a monster. But Holmes always returned.
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He was stronger than his author. He was more alive than his author. The irony of fate is that it was the money earned from the rational Holmes that allowed Doyle to finance his irrational belief in spiritualism.
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Holmes paid the bills of mediums, the printing of brochures about fairies and the rent of halls for lectures on spirits.
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Logic fed mysticism. What remained after him? His spiritualist books, The History of Spiritualism the phenomenon of fairies in the land of fog are read today only by historians as curiosities, as an example of the mass delusion of the early 20th century.
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His historical novels The White Company, Sir Nigel, which he was so proud of and which he considered his main contribution to literature, are almost forgotten. They are rarely read, but Sherlock Holmes lives on.
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He lives in films, TV series, video games. He has become an archetype. He taught us to see details. He showed that intelligence is the sexiest thing in the world. He became a symbol of justice, which is achieved not by force, but by
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intellect. Every time we see a detective examining a crime scene with a magnifying glass or wearing gloves, we see the shadow of Holmes and the shadow of Doyle. Doyle lost the battle for spiritualism. The world did not believe in his fairies.
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Science took a different path, but he won the battle for immortality. He created a hero who defeated time.
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Perhaps this was his main tragedy. He wanted to be the prophet of a new religion, but became the author of entertaining fiction. He wanted to reveal to people the truth about death, but gave them a beautiful tale of
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crime. He wanted to be a knight of the spirit, but became a knight of deduction.
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But perhaps it is precisely in this contradiction The secret of his genius lies. Only a man who so passionately wanted to believe in miracles could create a hero who so convincingly denied these miracles .
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Only a man with a big heart, wounded by losses and a rich imagination could invent the world of Baker Street, where the fireplace is always burning, where the fog outside the window hides a secret, but where any, even the most terrible question, always
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has a logical answer. Where evil is always punished, and chaos is defeated by reason. The world of Holmes is the world in which Doyle himself would like to live. A world where everything has a reason. But in his real world, he
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found no reason for the death of his son, for wars, for illnesses. And so he went into the world of spirits.
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, knight, doctor, patriot, spiritualist and father of the detective. A man who searched for the truth all his life. Did he find it? Everyone will answer this question for themselves. For some, he is a genius who
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gave us a best friend, for others, a tragic figure, lost in the fog of his own illusions.
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But one thing is certain, He was a man of incredible passion and integrity. He believed in what he did, and he left us a light. The light of the gas jet on Baker Street and the light of hope that death is
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not the end. If this story about the struggle between reason and faith, about a genius and his demons, has given you pause, please support our channel with your subscription. New mysteries and new heroes await us. M.
Topics:Arthur Conan DoyleSherlock HolmesspiritualismliteratureEdinburghJesuit educationmedicine19th centurymysticismdetective fiction
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