Arthur Conan Doyle

Life
1859-1930; son of Charles Altamount Doyle (1832-93), a surveyor in the Scottish office of works and amateur artist who exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy, 1862-87; ACD was raised a Catholic but was non-practising in later life; author of the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ mysteries assoc. with 221b Baker St., London; he was a nephew of Richard Doyle [q.v.] and gradnson of John Doyle [q.v.]; ed., Stonyhurst; later abandoned Catholicism; there is a life by Hesketh Pearson (1945); Conan Doyle was active in the campaign to reprieve Roger Casement; his house, Undershaw, is the object of a preservation campaign. OCEL SUTH FDA

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Bibliographical notes
Catherine Wynne, The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and the Gothic (2002) - Publisher’snotice: ‘Arthur Conan Doyle is often perceived as the quintessential Englishman, patriotically devoted to the Crown and the empire’s defender and apologist. But such a relegation is both limiting and simplistic. Born in Scotland to Irish Catholic parents, Doyle’sheritage is complex. His paternal grandfather, John Doyle, had originally left Ireland for London in the early 19th century; his father was committed to the cause of Irish separatism; and his uncle resigned from his position as main cartoonist for Punch after the journal launched an attack on the Pope. Consequently, British imperialism, Irish nationalism, and Catholic allegiance converge uneasily in his works. / This book examines the resulting tensions between imperialism and colonialism in his writings. It argues that his thematic obsessions with topography, race, psyche, and sexuality stem from his ambivalence toward his own heritage. The volume repositions Doyle and redresses current critical approaches that have seen him solely as the advocate of empire and have ignored his colonial background. It explores how his fictions occur within a colonial context, the complexity of which is evident in gothic tropes of shifting landscapes, disguised criminalities, spiritualism, and sexual anomalies and conflicts.’ (Available on Amazon; 07.12.2025.)

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Quotations

‘The Irish Brigade’ (1903): ‘The purest Celtic and Catholic breed is in Munster and Connaught, and it was from those two provinces that the recruits chiefly came ... As to the language of the Brigade, its was usually Gaelic... officers who knew nothing of it were compelled to learn it ... We know that up to [17]45, when it was to a Gaelic war cry that the Brigade broke the column at Fontenoy, Gaelic was the speech of the soldiers ... As to the view that the Irish regiments took of their own position, it cannot too often be insited on that, though no doubt they became embittered later on, in these early years of their existence there appears to have been no strong national feelings as Irishmen against Englishmen. Ireland had never been an independent whole, and the idea of nationality was not one which was familiar to the age. They looked upon themselves as loyal British subjects who were supporting wha they believed to be their rightful king against their enemies. They no more had thought of the independence of Ireland than the highlanders who supported Charles Stuart though of the independence of Scotland. they were Jacobites – with Scotch and English officers among them – and they had no objection at all to the British Crown if they could get the man of their own choice to wear it. By a chivalrous fiction they endeavoured always to show that they were not in the serevice of Louis but in that of James ... [In the War of Spanish Succession, 1701] Villeroy had an army of 45,000 men including the Irish Brigade regiments of Galmoy, Burke, Berwick, and Dillon, and Sheldon’s Horse. ... The Irish led the unsuccessful assaults [against Eugene] and were terribly punished. Out of four regiments, two had their Colonels killed.’ (See ‘The Irish Brigade’ [Irish Times, c.1945], a newspaper cutting slipped into a copy of Gwynn’s History of Ireland in library of Albert le Brocquy, which includes a text-box inserted in the above that reads: ‘This account of the Irish Brigades written about 1903 by the creator of Sherlock Homes, has bever been published previously.’ Taking advantage of a ‘pause in history’, the author gives details of the Irish regiments corresponding to those ‘human touches’ usually omitted by their historians. The historical portion of the article is however missing.

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References
Dictionary of National Biography [ODNB]: John Doyle (1797-1868), author of satiric ports. of contemporary England, 1829-31; pseud. H.B. Also James William Edmund Doyle, s. of John Doyle, author of Official Baronage of England (1886); and Henry Edward Doyle (1827-1892), Director of National Gallery of Ireland, 1869-92; hon. sec. Nat. Portrait Gallery, London, 1865-69; CB, 1880.

John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Harlow: Longmans 1988); Doyle’s parents were Irish and Catholic; [?]son of caricaturist John Doyle.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2; included among literary Irish ‘London exiles’ by W. J. McCormack, [ed.], 845; Conan Doyle’s ‘wild book’ on séances influences W. B. Yeats’s writing of The Words upon the Windowpane, 852; Bram Stoker moved to London where Conan Doyle (the son of an Irish artist) was already engaged in writing popular fiction, 948. But see note in Irish Book Lover, 2.

Hyland Books (Cat. 214) lists The Green Flag and other stories of war and sport (1st US ed., NY 1900).

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Notes
Elementary, my dear Joyce: Note the role of Sherlock Holmes in Hugh Kenner’s reading of Ulysses in Joyce’s Dublin (1955).

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