Debate on the Truth of Spiritualism

DOYLE & McCABE. Sir A. Conan & Joseph, London: Watts
& Co, 1920. Octavo size hardcover. Small newspaper
clipping pasted on front end-page reading: ‘Houdini
Attacked by Conan Doyle “Never Genuine”’. A good copy.

Early life

Arthur Conan Doyle was born the third of ten siblings on 22 May 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland.^[3] His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, who was born in England of Irish descent, and his mother, born Mary Foley, who was Irish, had married in 1855. Doyle's father died in 1893, in theCrichton Royal, Dumfries, after many years of psychiatric illness.^[4]

Although he is now referred to as "Conan Doyle", the origin of this compound surname (if that is how he meant it to be understood) is uncertain. The entry in which his baptism is recorded in the register of St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh gives "Arthur Ignatius Conan" as his Christian name, and simply "Doyle" as his surname. It also names Michael Conan as his godfather.^[5]

Conan Doyle was sent to the Roman Catholic Jesuit preparatory school Hodder Place, Stonyhurst, at the age of nine. He then went on toStonyhurst College until 1875. From 1875 to 1876 he was educated at the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria.

From 1876 to 1881 he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, including a period working in the town of Aston (now a district ofBirmingham) and in Sheffield.^[6] While studying, Conan Doyle also began writing short stories; his first published story appeared inChambers's Edinburgh Journal before he was 20.^[7] Following his term at university, he was employed as a ship's surgeon on the SSMayumba during a voyage to the West African coast. He completed his doctorate on the subject of tabes dorsalis in 1885.^[8]

Spiritualism

One of the five photographs of Frances Griffiths with the alleged fairies, taken by Elsie Wright in July 1917.

Following the death of his wife Louisa in 1906, the death of his son Kingsley just before the end of World War I, and the deaths of his brother Innes, his two brothers-in-law (one of whom was E. W. Hornung, creator of the literary character Raffles) and his two nephews shortly after the war, Conan Doyle sank into depression. He found solace supporting spiritualism and its attempts to find proof of existence beyond the grave. In particular, according to some,^[25] he favoured Christian Spiritualism and encouraged the Spiritualists' National Union to accept an eighth precept – that of following the teachings and example of Jesus of Nazareth. He also was a member of the renowned paranormal organisation The Ghost Club.^{[citation needed]} Its focus, then and now, is on the scientific study of alleged paranormal activities in order to prove (or refute) the existence of paranormal phenomena.

On 28 October 1918 Kingsley Doyle died from pneumonia, which he contracted during his convalescence after being seriously wounded during the 1916Battle of the Somme. Brigadier-General Innes Doyle died, also from pneumonia, in February 1919. Sir Arthur became involved with Spiritualism to the extent that he wrote a Professor Challenger novel on the subject, The Land of Mist.

His book The Coming of the Fairies (1921) shows he was apparently convinced of the veracity of the five Cottingley Fairies photographs (which decades later were exposed as a hoax). He reproduced them in the book, together with theories about the nature and existence of fairies and spirits. In The History of Spiritualism (1926), Conan Doyle praised the psychic phenomena and spirit materialisations produced by Eusapia Palladino and Mina "Margery" Crandon.^[26]

Conan Doyle was friends for a time with Harry Houdini, the American magician who himself became a prominent opponent of the Spiritualist movement in the 1920s following the death of his beloved mother. Although Houdini insisted that Spiritualist mediums employed trickery (and consistently exposed them as frauds), Conan Doyle became convinced that Houdini himself possessed supernatural powers—a view expressed in Conan Doyle's The Edge of the Unknown. Houdini was apparently unable to convince Conan Doyle that his feats were simply illusions, leading to a bitter public falling out between the two.^[26]

Richard Milner, an American historian of science, has presented a case that Conan Doyle may have been the perpetrator of the Piltdown Manhoax of 1912, creating the counterfeit hominid fossil that fooled the scientific world for over 40 years. Milner says that Conan Doyle had a motive—namely, revenge on the scientific establishment for debunking one of his favourite psychics—and that The Lost World contains several encrypted clues regarding his involvement in the hoax.^[27]

Samuel Rosenberg's 1974 book Naked is the Best Disguise purports to explain how, throughout his writings, Conan Doyle left open clues that related to hidden and suppressed aspects of his mentality.