Sherlock Holmes Research Paper

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is much like his most famous character, the detective Sherlock Holmes. They both believe in logic and deductive reasoning while still entertaining the supernatural, unwilling to eliminate an idea until there is absolute proof it is incorrect. He also differs from Holmes; he married not once, but two times. Doyle is also a physician, which plays out strongly in his 1986 novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Multiple characters are physicians, and Holmes himself eliminates theories for the hound much in the same way a physician would diagnose an illness. Doyle’s genuine belief in spiritualism and the supernatural but lack of religious faith impacts the way Sherlock Holmes and the rest of the characters approach the

Even though Doyle himself was a general physician before he was publishing his works, he grew up in a family extremely interested in the supernatural world. Both his father and his uncle were artists who painted fairies; his uncle Richard Doyle was a well-known artist for painting fairies. (Owen 50). His interest in the supernatural is not limited to fairies and mythical dogs, however. In April of 1848, two teen girls, Margaret and Kate Fox, reported to have communicated with a spirit that was murdered in their house (Chism and Doyle 299). Their story blew up and was ran in the New York Tribune along with other newspapers. This started the Spiritualism movement of which Arthur Conan Doyle ardently championed throughout his life. Doyle wrote back and forth with “perhaps the most prominent spiritualist in Arkansas history… Lessie Stringfellow Read” (Chism and Doyle 301). In his first letter he asks her to have Alice (Lessie’s adoptive mother) ask her dead son Leslie reach out to Oliver Lodge’s dead son and to transcribe the event as proof of their true abilities (Chism and Doyle 303-04). He believes that her transcription was truthful and continues his letters with them, discussing in detail the conversation between the two deceased individuals. Doyle’s son Kingsley died in WWI, giving him the will to fully advocate

Mortimer is a physician who believes in the myth of the hound. In 1917, two young girls supposedly took pictures with fairies. According to Alex Owen, these photographs would not be existent in the public eye if it weren’t for Arthur Conan Doyle (Owens 48). When Doyle heard about these photographs, he was ecstatic. Not only did he believe them to be real beyond a doubt, he then wrote a book titled The Coming of the Fairies. Since the book was released, the girls have come forward and stated that the photographs are not completely truthful, but they did hint that one of the pictures could show actual evidence that fairies were there (Owens 50). These confessions and Doyle’s ever-loyal dedication to the fairies leaves it up in the air on whether the fairies exist and were there or they were fabricated. One can see how Doyle’s dedication to the fairies plays out in Hound of the Baskervilles in Dr. Mortimer’s character; he is a physician who has no doubt that the supernatural exists. Dr. Mortimer employs Sherlock Holmes to go to Devonshire and explore the mystery of the local legend of the hound. To convince Holmes of the veracity of his request, he brings with him a document from 1742, a statement from Baskerville Hall about the hound haunting the Baskerville family (Doyle 10-11). The statement contains the details of events that happened one night in 1742 to a one Sir Hugo Baskerville and his friends; one evening they