 Arthur Conan Doyle Licensed by Creative CommonsFrom RLS, 5 April 1893, to Arthur Conan Doyle:
"I hope you will allow me to offer you my compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes. That is the class of literature that I like when I have the toothache. As a matter of fact, it was a pleurisy I was enjoying when I took the volume up; and it will interest you as a medical man to know that the cure was for the moment effectual"
Doyle responded:
"I'm so glad Sherlock Holmes helped to pass an hour for you. He's a bastard between Joe Bell [a famous Edinburgh surgeon] and Poe's Monsieur Dupin (much diluted). I trust that I may never write a word about him again. I had rather that you knew me by my White Company. I'm sending it on the chance that you have not seen it".
(Correspondence between RLS and Arthur Conan Doyle, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol viii [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], pp. 49-50)
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a Scottish novelist. He is best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories, such as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). His fictional detective was based on Dr Joseph Bell (1837-1911) a professor at Edinburgh University (who both RLS and Conan Doyle knew).
Conan Doyle also wrote a series of science fiction stories, the Professor Challenger adventures (such as The Lost World [1912]). In addition, he wrote historic (for example The White Company [1891]) and supernatural (for example The Parasite [1894]) novels.
Conan Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. In the early 1880s he set up a practice, but his time was soon taken up with writing his detective stories. Besides working on his fiction, Conan Doyle was also a political campaigner and an active spiritualist. The author married Louisa Hawkins in 1885 and the couple had two children. After his wife’s death, Conan Doyle married Jean Elizabeth Leckie in 1907. They had three children. Conan Doyle was knighted in 1902.
It was his famous Sherlock Holmes stories that sparked the correspondence between Conan Doyle and RLS. RLS complimented him on his detective (see the quotations beginning this section) and the authors stayed in touch, commenting on each other’s writing.
Conan Doyle later wrote about Stevenson’s writing in Through the Magic Door (1907): “And Stevenson? Surely he shall have two places also, for where is a finer sense of what the short story can do? He wrote, in my judgment, two masterpieces in his life, and each of them is essentially a short story, though the one happened to be published as a volume. The one is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which, whether you take it as a vivid narrative or as a wonderfully deep and true allegory, is a supremely fine bit of work. The other story of my choice would be 'The Pavilion on the Links' – the very model of dramatic narrative. That story stamped itself so clearly on my brain when I read it in Cornhill that when I came across it again many years afterwards in volume form, I was able instantly to recognize two small modifications of the text – each very much for the worse – from the original form. (Arthur Conan Doyle, Through the Magic Door [London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1907], pp. 116-17).
Conan Doyle went on to pose the question: “Is Stevenson a classic? Well, it is a large word that. You mean by a classic a piece of work which passes into the permanent literature of the country. As a rule you only know your classics when they are in their graves. Who guessed it of Poe, and who of Borrow? The Roman Catholics only canonize their saints a century after their death. So with our classics. The choice lies with our grandchildren. But I can hardly think that healthy boys will ever let Stevenson’s books of adventure die” (Arthur Conan Doyle, Through the Magic Door [London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1907], pp. 269-70).
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