Arthur Conan Doyle and Medical London: Reading the Topography of Round the Red Lamp

This essay explores the short period of time that Arthur Conan Doyle spent between March and June 1891 when he moved his family into rooms in Bloomsbury and took a consulting room near Harley Street in an attempt to set up as an eye specialist. This last attempt to move up the professional hierarchy from general practitioner to specialist tends to be seen as a final impulsive move before Conan Doyle decided to become a full-time writer in June 1891. The essay aims to elaborate a little on the medical contexts for Conan Doyle’s brief spell in London, and particularly to track the medical topography in which he placed himself, situated between the radical, reformist Bloomsbury medical institutions and the fame and riches of the society doctors of Harley Street. These ambivalences are tracked in the medical fiction he published in Round the Red Lamp, his peculiar collection of medical tales and doctoring in 1894.

Of Time and the City: The Doyles and London Print Culture

This article examines Arthur Conan Doyle's status as a ‘London’ writer. It places his own experiences of the city within the same historical frame as that of his father, his uncles, and his grandfather. The Doyles had spent decades working in London print culture before Conan Doyle had even been born, and it is helpful to understand his early struggles to make his name as part of this longer literary-historical narrative. The London Doyles were able to establish their names as artists, illustrators, and writers before the tectonic plates of printing technology and public taste shifted beneath them. The article also focuses on the Doyles' status as a family of immigrant Irish Catholics who found that their faith, as well as their politics, made them perpetual outsiders.

‘A great traffic was going on, as usual, in Whitehall’: Public Places and Secret Spaces in Sherlock Holmes’s London

Arthur Conan Doyle is rarely considered a master of spy fiction, but several Sherlock Holmes stories were highly influential in the development of this genre in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. This paper examines three of these stories – ‘The Naval Treaty’, ‘The Second Stain’, and ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ – and shows how they use the topography of London to explore themes of secrecy, concealment, and political power. Holmes investigates place and space in two ways: he discovers what happens behind the closed doors of government buildings like the Foreign Office in Whitehall and the Woolwich Arsenal, and he reads public spaces (like the London Underground and the streets of Westminster) to detect relationships not apparent to those lacking his criminological skills. These stories inspired contemporary and later authors of espionage fiction as they exemplify some of the purposes and pleasures of the genre – the romanticisation of bureaucracy and insights into secret history.

Arthur Conan Doyle in Mesmeric Edinburgh and Hypnotic London

Arthur Conan Doyle's spiritualist interests are often viewed today as idiosyncratic for a medical professional and anachronistic for the late Victorian era. However, historians of the era recognise that there was widespread fascination at this time in the possibility of communicating with the dead and the development of extraordinary mental powers like telepathy. Conan Doyle studied medicine in Edinburgh where the study of mesmerism and its role in therapy continued for much longer than the rest of Britain. The university and medical school produced most of the major names of British medical mesmerism including the physician James Braid, who coined the term hypnotism. By the late nineteenth century, there were many distinguished physicians and scientists who shared Conan Doyle's spiritualist views. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was the elite London association that investigated these possibilities using a scientific methodology. Hypnotism and the trance state were important tools in this study. Over the course of his thirty-six-year membership, Conan Doyle's convictions strengthened. The backdrop of Edinburgh and mesmerism is key to Conan Doyle's story ‘ John Barrington Cowles’ (1884) , while the scientific investigation of hypnotism described in The Parasite (1894) relies upon his experiences with London's SPR based in Dean's Yard, Westminster, and Hanover Square in Mayfair.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in London's Streets

One of the attractions of the Sherlock Holmes stories is their location in real, if somewhat disguised locations. Sherlock Holmes's address in Baker Street is one of the most famous in literature. This article sketches the history of the street and looks at the attempts made over the years to identify the exact location of Holmes's apartment. Conan Doyle first came to London to set up a specialist medical practice not far from Harley Street in 1891, though he had made a number of visits to relatives in London during his youth. He did not stay long, moving to the suburbs when he gave medical practice up in favour of full-time writing. In later life he maintained a London flat and owned and ran his own bookshop and museum nearby to further his Spiritualist crusade. These links with London are examined, highlighting the various addresses in which he and his family lived or did business.