The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free

irrelevant. This absence of any reference to orthodox religion is matched by the equal absence of any spiritual references or overtones at all. The world of Holmes is a purely material one, unconcerned with anything beyond.
    However, the stories had something of a nostalgic tinge to them even when new; they appeared just as a wholesale turning-away from the positivistic ideal and a revolt against rationality were getting under way. Holmes was setting out his creed about the ideal reasoner at the moment that the realism of Émile Zola was being challenged by the mysticism of Joris-Karl Huysmans, that William James was lecturing on the varieties of religious experience, that physicians such as Jean-Martin Charcot, who had spent their life attacking religion, were beginning to send patients on pilgrimage to Lourdes and write on the power of faith. Conan Doyle himself abandoned the rationalism of Holmes to turn to spiritualism and a willingness to believe in fairies. The logicality of the stories became little more than an ideal, a reassurance that reality could be subjected to reason even when all the evidence suggested otherwise. This insistence on the explainability of life, the belief that it can be controlled and ordered through logic,is one of the relatively few points of contact between the stories and their twentieth-century successors in England. The difference, however, is stark once more. For all their great value as entertainment, which has ensured Holmes and Watson a vast audience ever since, underlying the stories there was if not exactly a serious purpose then at least a serious intellectual framework: the cases embody a fascinating moment in the evolution of ideas and convey something of that excitement. By the time of the ‘golden age’ after the First World War all this subterranean content had been stripped out, and as a result the detective story – including the last appearance of Holmes himself – had become little more than a clever game.
    FURTHER READING
    The Annotated Sherlock Holmes
, ed. William S. Baring-Gould, 2 vols. (1968) is indispensable.
BIOGRAPHIES
    Booth, Martin,
The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle
(1997)
    Coren, Michael,
Conan Doyle
(1995)
    Dudley Edwards, Owen,
The Quest for Sherlock Holmes
(1983)
    Higham, Charles,
The Adventures of Conan Doyle
(1976)
    Lellenberg, Jon L.,
The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(1987)
    Stashower, Daniel,
The Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle
(2000)
    Symons, Julian,
Portrait of an Artist: Conan Doyle
(1979)
    Weller, Philip, and Roden, Christopher,
The Life and Times of Sherlock Holmes
(1992)
ALSO OF INTEREST
    Symons, Julian,
Bloody Murder
(1992)
    Watson, Colin,
Snobbery With Violence
(1971)
    CHRONOLOGY
    A chronology of Arthur Conan Doyle’s life and work is likely to be skeletal. As a highly professional writer, a medical specialist, a public campaigner against injustice, a would-be politician, as well as a sportsman, spiritualist, and well-meaning amateur in fields ranging from skiing to weaponry, he threw himself with generous energy into a variety of lives, any one of which would have satisfied most people. A brief account of his activities can, at best, only suggest the range of an extraordinary life.
1859
Arthur Conan Doyle born at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, on 22 May, second of ten children of Charles Doyle, a civil servant, and Mary Doyle, née Foley. (This year also saw the publication of Darwin’s
The Origin of Species
.)
1868–70
Spends two years at Hodder Preparatory School, Lancashire.
1870–75
Spends five years in secondary education at Stonyhurst, the leading Jesuit school, in Lancashire.
1875–6
Attends Jesuit college at Feldkirch, Austria.
1876
Enters Edinburgh University to study medicine. Taught by Joseph Bell, a surgeon at the Edinburgh Infirmary, on whom he later bases some of Sherlock Holmes’s powers of detection.
1878
Begins first job, assisting a Dr Richardson in