Conan Doyle Influenced By The World Around Him

Anthony Alston

Mr. A. Tlumack

English Cp

1 June 2006

Conan Doyle

Influenced By the World Around Him

The entire Sherlock Holmes series isn't just about Holmes solving impossible mysteries. Doyle originally was a doctor, but found that his life was leading him in a more literary profession. Everything that happened around Doyle, historically and personally, influenced his novels. Religion had always been a major part of his life, even in his education. The Hound of Baskervilles was a sort of biographical response to what the spiritualism movement was metaphorically, and what the people who followed it had to put with.

Born Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, Doyle never knew he would later in life become the author of one of the most beloved mystery characters in all of literary history. He was educated at Stonyhurst a preparatory school, but he soon afterwards became an agnostic. From there he went on to Edinburgh University, and it was there that he met a man that he would use as the base of the Sherlock Holmes character on-a professor named Joseph Bell. While still in the field of medicine, he spent a majority of his free time writing stories. His first major work was A Study in Scarlet written in 1887, which is where he first premiered his character Sherlock Holmes. While he was working as an eye doctor he killed off the Holmes in "The Final Problem" written in 1893, to have more time to work on.

The basic breakdown of the novel's plot is rather simple. Mr. Jack Stapleton wanted the wealth of the Baskervilles' for himself, so he evoked an old curse supposedly placed on the family to arouse mystery to cover his trails so that he could get away clean. From there, the novel revolves around the mystery of an old curse, and this mysterious hound that seems to be plaguing the Baskerville family. In the end, Holmes uses a young member of the Baskervilles family as bait to lour Stapleton out of his facade and incriminate him. The hound itself was never really a ghost, but just a regular dog, given a stolen shoe give the dog the Henry's scent so that the dog would seemingly be stalking him.

The most important force behind The Hound of Baskervilles in the Spiritualism movement that took place during the time that Doyle wrote it. Throughout the case in the novel, everyone around Holmes comes to believe, at least some of the time, that the hound is supernatural. The closest Holmes ever becomes to believing this is when he says at the beginning of the case, he'd dealt with evil and that taking it on like this was more than he could handle. In the end it is not a supernatural force just another classic case of a red-herring. Interesting since the scientific Conan Doyle (like Dr. Mortimer) believed in Spiritualism.

Though Holmes never directly says it, you know that he doesn't truly believe that the hound is supernatural. His reasoning and religious beliefs kick in before he can follow along with the rest of the crowd and believe that there really is a ghost dog walking around killing people because of some old curse. Spiritually, the hound would represent the devil, and the characters in the novel show the natural fear that people have towards "satanic" things. The fact that Holmes only believes the rouse for a short amount of time shows his strong faith in the god that he worships. It makes him a god-like figure because he proves that the hound isn't supernatural and changes everyone's mind in the end about the whole situation. In reality, Doyle would have believed very well believed that there could have been a huge hound going around stalking members of a certain lineage, and then killing them in retaliation to an old crime.

Spiritualism was popularized in America by the Fox sisters who, in 1848, began telling everyone that would listen that they were able to talk to the dead through the use of sÐ"©ances. By 1855 thousands people shared this belief. Even though the two sisters admitted to lying ( then later taking back their confession), millions of continued to believe that it is possible to communicate with the dead. In our time now, the medium John Edwards claims to connect members of audience with their deceased loved ones on his TV show, Crossing Over. He is a multimillionaire, all because people will always have a curiosity of what is beyond this life, and answers about the next .Doyle was one of the many that became a sincere believer in spiritualism, also he was an active member of the British Society for Psychical Research.

In 1887, Doyle wrote several (about thirty) books and pamphlets about spiritualism In 1926 he made an encyclopedic two-volume book, The History of Spiritualism. He spent the end of his of his life preaching spiritualism to "non-believers" and showing slides of what are called "spirit photographs." Doyle explained his interest as a way to remove all fear of death. The second important thing about it, is that it makes it easier for the ones we love to deal with our passing. The hound in the novel is one of these types of bridges, but in a negative light. The dog connects the present Baskervilles back to the ancestors who made a terrible mistake that they were now paying for.

Doyle's own faith in spiritualism at first seems to contradict a Sherlock's belief in solutions that make sense and answers from the real world that come from his career as a detective. The Holmes character is based on Doyle's scientific training more, rather than his belief. The struggle for understanding in life and death, the interminable search for a rational idea of the world we live in thus links the spiritualist Doyle and his character Holmes. The character has to have a bit of illogical thinking him to be able to come up with the solutions to his mysteries.

People who believed in Spiritualism often found themselves under fire because their beliefs were so often irrational that it was hard to believe that anyone could follow this particular faith. Doyle himself at first was a skeptic, but the he began to dig further into it and became enthralled by the vastness of illogical thinking that it reached. Mediums, palm readers,