St. Martin's Press

Conan
Doyle’s father does not make an immediately sympathetic figure. Various accounts have accused him of being a “chronic, violent drunk,” a “bearded madman” who neglected his large family, and who, as his wife noted years later, would steal from both her and the children to buy drink or, failing that, resort to imbibing furniture varnish

A rationalist, or increasingly scientific, view of the world (Darwin had published his Origin of Species in 1859, the year Conan Doyle was born)

In 1877, a notable character called Dr. Joseph Bell came into Arthur’s life at Edinburgh. The frock-coated Bell was thirty-nine years old when Conan Doyle first attended one of his lectures, a thin, white-haired Scot with the look of a prematurely hatched bird, whose Adam’s apple danced up and down his narrow neck. Bell is said to have spoken in a piping voice and to have walked with a jerky, scuttling gait suggestive of his considerable reserves of nervous energy. He was “practically in perpetual motion,” an Edinburgh student recalled. “He was always in a hurry to get to the next whatever-it-was.”