Conan Doyle's Father

 

Michael Baker. The Doyle Diary (1978) Reproduction of one of Charles Altamont Doyle’s sketchbooks, made while he was at Sunnyside, a lunatic asylum in which he spent most of the last years of his life. He was Arthur Conan Doyle’s father. Arthur in his early reminiscences dealt harshly with his father, who was not the financial success he could perhaps have been. Later, Arthur mellowed, perhaps because both his medical and his personal experience showed him that Charles was a sick man, badly treated. Baker tells the story at length, not easy to do, because there is little documentary evidence of Charles life, and partly because there was a good deal of reticence about the details of his ill health. Baker concludes that Charles suffered from epilepsy made worse by alcoholism. Charles was not a pushy man, he lacked his older brothers’ ambition and energy. Dicky Doyle had a successful career as a cartoonist for Punch, for example. Perhaps alcohol was self-medication for his sense of failure.
     The drawings and text of Charles sketchbook show us a man of gentle feelings and sometimes mischievous humour. He describes himself as a “harmless old gentleman”, which on the evidence he was, He certainly wasn’t a lunatic, even by the vague standards of the time. Long-term care homes existed, but were little more than hotels with some medical services, so the asylum was the only place to tend him when he became unable to care for himself and his family.
     I don’t recall where I found this book, or when. And addition to a collection of Holmesiana, and a document relevant to the study of our treatment of the harmless ones among us. **½