Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Daniel Stashower

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СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_23cb1c30-f2ea-5aa7-8ae3-0c0e0e2ca2d3">1 The Schoolboy (1867-1876)

       ‘You have talents enough and we have every reason to hope that you mean to make the most of them.’

      —FATHER REGINALD COLLEY, STONYHURST COLLEGE, 1876

      Arthur Conan Doyle’s literary turn of mind showed itself early. In 1864, not yet five years old, he took up a pencil to craft a thirty-six-word story involving a Bengal tiger and a hunter armed with ‘knife, gun and pistle’. Recalling the story later, he said he had ‘remarked to my mother with precocious wisdom that it was easy to get people into scrapes, but not so easy to get them out again.’ But she was impressed enough with his effort to report it to Michael Conan, Arthur’s great-uncle and godfather. A distinguished journalist in Paris, his surname had been added to theirs at christening to form the compound name Conan Doyle, which Arthur and Annette alone among the seven children bore.

      When Arthur met his godfather years later, at the end of his schooling, he found Michael Conan to be ‘an intellectual Irishman of the type which originally founded the Sinn Fein movement,’ he reported in Memories and Adventures: ‘He was as keen on heraldry and genealogy as my mother, and he traced his descent in some circuitous way from the Dukes of Brittany, who were all Conans.’ Upon meeting ‘this dear old volcanic Irishman’ whose sister had been Conan Doyle’s paternal grandmother, the strapping young man discovered that he was ‘built rather on [Michael Conan’s] lines of body and mind than on any of the Doyles.’

      Michael Conan had been impressed with the four-year-old Arthur’s literary precocity, and provided advice for his education that Mary Doyle followed—and some later advice for his young godson as well.

      Michael Conan to Mary Doyle PARIS, APRIL 11, 1864

      With regard to that philosopher, Master Arthur, whose sympathy with the carnivorous tiger is so ultra comical. I shall look to his development with great interest. The question you ask about his schooling can have scarcely yet arisen. Keep him at your apronstrings for two or three years more, at least. You can teach him much of the initiating and more necessary matters. Win him into multiplication, division and the rule of three and make him practically familiar with geography. I would soon familiarize him with maps. His more serious schooling gives rise to a nice question. I perfectly accord with you, in all your expansive geniality of opinion—in all your unexclusive humanity—remembering your friend Burns’ prophetic record—

       ‘It’s coming yet, for a that that man to man, the world over shall brothers be, for a that.’

      and I do not encourage my old acquaintances, the Jesuits, for their devotion to the per-centa creed—but in matters of education—I mean mere secular education, they are, from experience and their employment therein, of the highest order of mind, unmatched. Therefore the question will assume this form—viz, have you any school at Edinburgh where a boy of gentle birth can be thoroughly well instructed on terms as reasonable as those which you would have to disburse in consigning Master Arthur to the Jesuits—and that gives rise to the further query—have you in Edinburgh, as they have in Dublin, a good Jesuit day school? But this question, as I have said, cannot be ripe for decision for two or three years more. In the meantime, keep your attention awake on the subject and be ready for the final move, when made it must perforce be. As to Arthur’s future development, that, apart from Nature’s endowments, will much depend upon the mother who cherishes him and at once secures his love and respect.

      Three years later Michael Conan presented his godson, now eight, with a book about French history, feeding a growing interest in pageantry and ancient codes of honour. Already the boy was fascinated with tales of knights and their deeds, and the sweep and glamour of history—‘which,’ he later wrote, ‘I drank in with my mother’s milk.’

       Mary Foley at the of her marriage, by Richard Doyle

      Michael Conan to Arthur Conan Doyle PARIS, JULY 7, 1867

      My dearest Laddie

      I am happy to have an opportunity to send you the accompanying book—from which, I hope you will derive not a little pleasure and that, I know, you will value more, instruction. It is a very sketchy little history of France, with coloured illustrations, giving portraits, in their various costumes, of the Kings and Queens of that country, from the earliest up, even to the present time. You will find gratification in studying these attentively—and, I feel sure that, with the instruction of your dearest Mama who is so well acquainted with the French language, you will, at no distant time, become acquainted with it and thus read the text, by which you will be more especially introduced to their Majesties.

      Believe me to be

      My Dearest Laddie

      Your loving Godfather

      That autumn Arthur left Edinburgh for England, and a Jesuit education. It was a big change, but in some ways a welcome one. ‘Of my boyhood I need say little,’ he wrote in Memories and Adventures, ‘save that it was Spartan at home and more Spartan at the Edinburgh school [Newington Academy] where a tawse-brandishing schoolmaster of the old type made our young lives miserable. From the age of seven to nine [sic] I suffered under this pock-marked, one-eyed rascal who might have stepped from the pages of Dickens. In the evenings, home and books were my sole consolation, save for week-end holidays. My comrades were rough boys, and I became a rough boy, too.’

He spent the next two academic years at Hodder House, a preparatory school for Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, and another five at Stonyhurst itself, established in 1593 as one of England’s two foremost Roman Catholic schools for boys.* He was only eight years old when he travelled by train to Preston, Lancashire, the nearest station. ‘It was a long journey for a little boy who had never been away from home before,’ he recalled, ‘and I felt very lonesome and wept bitterly upon the way.’ He put on a brave face nonetheless in frequent letters home to his mother, and occasional ones to his father.

      to Mary Doyle HODDER HOUSE, OCTOBER 13, 1867

dear mama I am getting on nicely the only thing i find at all difficult is my Latin Exercise but I will soon be accustomed to it I and 2 other boys had a constaio [sic] and I won 1 of them and was equal to another. I am to get a nice little bible picture for winning—my love to everybody except Mrs Russel*—did lottie get the little picture?

      I am ever your own boy.

      A Conan Doyle

      to Mary Doyle HODDER HOUSE, MARCH 28, 1868

I hope you are quite well I send some little french foot soldiers for cony and lottieŸ please write soon, many thanks for the little whale, we are in the midst of the easter holiday. I hope tot is getting on nicely at schoolŸ I am having the greatest fun cricket is such a jolly game.

      When he entered his second year at Hodder he settled into the rigorous academic routine, but to his СКАЧАТЬ