It’s strange to face the mental pictures that we make of our favorite authors. We each have certain expectations about the people who wrote the books we love: assumptions about how they lived their lives and the kind of people that they were. This only makes it all the more shocking when we find out what they were really like.
Arthur Conan Doyle is perhaps best known for his stories about the super-rational Sherlock Holmes. He’s an endearing character, never taken in by the simple ruses that baffled the officials he worked with, and introduced some of the first elements of modern crime scene investigations into literature. The great detective was so popular, in fact, that he has been portrayed on screen more often than any other literary character in history.
Doyle, on the other hand, has often been accused of not being half as rational as his famous character. Most of his accusers point to his embrace of Spiritualism, a movement that took America and the UK by storm in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. It started in the “Burned-Over” District in New York- a district that had birthed so many religious revivals during the Second Great Awakening that the area was deemed burned: it had no one left to convert and thus no more fuel to burn.
Spiritualism at the time straddled the line between religion and belief and it might have been this compromise that that appealed to him. Even though he was spiritual he had early on found himself at odds with his Catholic faith. In fact it was because of his agnostic beliefs that he refused the help of his father’s family in establishing his medical practice, knowing that they would recommend people from their church, making him a hypocrite.
This is one of the reasons that we even know Doyle’s name at all, actually. The only reason that he started writing was because so few patients graced his doors that he found himself desperately bored and needing something to do.
But it wasn’t just the way that Spiritualism blurred the boundaries between religion and belief that drew Doyle to the movement. It was the distinguishing belief, unique to Spiritualism, that spirits of the dead reside in a world parallel to ours… and that they’re able and eager to communicate the truths that they have learned in their passing to the mortal realm.
Continued on Friday