Doyle · 1886
Conan Doyle creates Sherlock Holmes
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.
It is twenty past nine on the evening of an unrecorded Wednesday in March 1886, in the upstairs back-bedroom of 1 Bush Villas, Elm Grove, Southsea, in pale early-spring light through the east window. He is twenty-six years old. He is Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, born at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, on the twenty-second of May 1859, son of the Edinburgh-civil-servant Charles Altamont Doyle (an alcoholic by his mid-thirties) and Mary Foley, schooled at Stonyhurst Jesuit College in Lancashire and the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary 1876–81 (MB 1881, the same medical-class as J. M. Barrie though Barrie did not take the medical training), in his fourth year of a private medical practice at Southsea since the 1882 release from his Greenland-whaler ship's-surgeon contract.
On the writing-desk in front of him is the handwritten manuscript of the detective novel he has been drafting for the past two and a half weeks: forty-three thousand words on cream foolscap, in his careful clerk's hand, with the pencil corrections of the evening's working pass. The novel is titled, on the cover page, A Study in Scarlet, being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., late of the Army Medical Department.
He thinks: the medical practice at Southsea will, on the 1886 account-books, not pay the rent of the Bush Villas premises beyond the Christmas of 1886. The private practice is, in plain reading, failing. The Edinburgh-medical-graduate of 1881 is going to have to find a secondary income source within the twelve months.
He thinks: the fiction writing has been, for the five previous years, the supplementary-income hobby. The Lippincott's-magazine short-fiction sales of the 1882–1885 period have paid about thirty pounds a year. The fiction is not, at thirty-pounds-a-year, the living. The detective novel is the experiment in the novel-length form.
He thinks: the detective in the novel is Sherlock Holmes. The Holmes character is the Joseph Bell of the Edinburgh Infirmary clinical-tutorial of 1878–80. Bell's clinical method is the careful observation of small physical details that reveal the patient's recent history. Bell, in the 1879 ward-round, identified a Patient's recent return from a French-Polynesian Catholic-mission posting from the pattern of tanning on the forearms, the Catholic medal at the collarbone, and the fragment of French-island-tobacco in the cuff. The method translates directly to the criminal-investigation fictional-form.
He thinks: the novel will go to Lippincott's, Cornhill, Blackwood's, and Ward Lock. The rejections will come back over the summer. The acceptance, if it comes, will be from the junior of the four houses (Ward Lock) on the twenty-five-pound outright-copyright basis the house typically offers for a first novel.
Conan Doyle sent the finished manuscript of A Study in Scarlet to the Edinburgh house of James Payn at the Cornhill Magazine in late April 1886. Payn rejected it in May. He sent it to Arrowsmith of Bristol in June; Arrowsmith rejected it in August. He sent it to Frederick Warne in September; Warne rejected it in October. He sent it to Ward, Lock and Company at the Salisbury Square offices in October. Ward, Lock offered the twenty-five-pound outright-copyright purchase on the thirty-first of October 1886. Conan Doyle, against his better-financial-judgement, accepted.
A Study in Scarlet was published in the Beeton's Christmas Annual of 1887 (the twenty-eighth issue of the annual; price one shilling) in November 1887. The initial press-run was about ten thousand copies. The Christmas-1887 sales of the annual were brisk; Ward, Lock reprinted the Holmes novel separately in 1888 as a cloth-bound volume at three-and-sixpence. Conan Doyle received the twenty-five pounds and not a penny of royalties on the 1888 reprint or any subsequent edition of A Study in Scarlet in his lifetime.
The second Holmes novel The Sign of the Four (1890) was commissioned at the better fee of one hundred guineas by Lippincott's of Philadelphia after a publisher's dinner in London at which Conan Doyle had also met Oscar Wilde (who at the same dinner had been commissioned by Lippincott's to write The Picture of Dorian Gray; both novels were published in Lippincott's of July 1890). The twelve-story Holmes sequence in the Strand Magazine, beginning with A Scandal in Bohemia in July 1891 (fee thirty-five pounds a story) and running through The Final Problem in December 1893, ran the Strand's circulation up from about three hundred thousand to over five hundred thousand monthly. By 1893, by the Conan-Doyle-Smith Memoirs of 1924, Conan Doyle was earning about a thousand pounds a year on Sherlock Holmes alone.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (knighted in 1902 for his South-African-War medical service and his political-defence of the Boer-War policy) wrote about sixty Sherlock Holmes stories in total (the four novels and the fifty-six short stories). He died at his Sussex home Windlesham, Crowborough, on the seventh of July 1930, seventy-one years old. He is buried at the New Forest churchyard of Minstead in Hampshire (he had moved the grave from Crowborough to Minstead in 1955 by the family's private petition). The Sherlock Holmes legend has continued in the public domain since the Conan Doyle copyrights lapsed in 1980–2000; the character has been adapted in over two hundred and fifty films, the most-filmed fictional human character in cinema history.