Doyle

In the spring of 1886, in a upstairs back-bedroom at 1 Bush Villas, Elm Grove, in Southsea on the south coast of Hampshire, Arthur Conan Doyle, twenty-six years old, in his fourth year of an underperforming private medical practice (about a hundred and fifty pounds a year in fees, against the three-hundred-pound annual cost of the practice), wrote, in about three weeks, a short detective novel of about forty-three thousand words titled A Study in Scarlet. The novel introduced the character of Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective of 221B Baker Street, London, modelled on the figure of Joseph Bell, Conan Doyle's former clinical-tutor at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary 1877–81 (Bell was known to the Edinburgh-medical-students of the 1870s as the physician whose diagnostic-method was the careful-clinical-observation of small physical details that revealed the patient's recent history, occupation, and circumstances). Conan Doyle sent the manuscript to four London publishers over the summer and autumn of 1886; three rejected it; the fourth, Ward, Lock and Company, offered the twenty-five-pound outright-payment for full copyright in October 1886. Conan Doyle, by his marginal financial situation, accepted. The novel was published in the Beeton's Christmas Annual of 1887 in November 1887. He never received any royalties on Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes became, by the 1890s short-stories in the Strand Magazine (the twelve-story sequence beginning with A Scandal in Bohemia in July 1891), the most-published fictional character in English-language literature.

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