On the Eye Colour of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Characters
On the Eye Colour of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Characters is an article written by Hugh T. Harrington & Susan J. Harrington published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 2, No. 1) in spring 1991.
This article statistically analyses the eye colour of 200 Conan Doyle characters to determine whether moral alignment correlates with physical description. It finds that blue-eyed characters are significantly more likely to be portrayed as "good," suggesting deliberate artistic choice possibly influenced by Conan Doyle's family and personal associations.
On the Eye Colour of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Characters
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a master at creating and describing his characters. Not only are the characters interesting in their actions and speech, but they are described in remarkable physical detail. Conan Doyle even included such detail as eye colour. Wondering if there was a pattern to these eye colour selections, we charted the eye colours and sex of two hundred characters and added a value judgement as to whether the characters would be considered good or bad. Fifty-nine of these characters are from the Sherlock Holmes stories and the remainder from non-Sherlockian sources.
As there is only one character with green eyes, three with yellow, one with violet, five with hazel and eleven with brown eyes, these colours are not adequately represented to make meaningful analysis possible. Referring to the chart, one can see how the eye colours, sex and good or bad tendencies occur. Note that of the two hundred characters, 69.5% are good and 30.5% are bad. We have combined the eye colours of black, brown, dark and hazel into one category called darkish, as these colours are similar and sometimes used interchangeably in the narratives.
Blue eyes predominate with 62 examples divided between 46 males and 16 females. It is interesting that 83.8% of these blue-eyed characters would be considered good people. Blue-eyed people include such characters as Micah Clarke, Mary Morstan, Sir Nigel, Sebastian Moran and Capt. John Sharkey. Only one bad female has blue eyes — Madame de Montespan in The Refugees. The question arises as to whether the higher percentage of good characters among blue-eyed people is unusual when compared to the overall sample of 200.
Taking our sample of 200 characters, 69.5% are good and 30.5% bad. Therefore, the sub-group of blue-eyed people (numbering 62) would be expected to have 69.5% x 62 = 43 good, and 30.5% x 62 = 19 bad people, but because of simple randomness in the sample, we would not expect to find these numbers exactly. We could easily accept 41 good and 21 bad as suggesting that blue-eyed people are no different from the overall sample. However, simple random variation must be accounted for in the sub-group; i.e. a sub-group will not necessarily have characteristics in exact proportion to the population.
However, if there is something unusual about blue-eyed people, we may find a larger deviation from these numbers than would be expected by simple randomness. How to differentiate between simple randomness and deviations that are significant can be determined by a statistical test called chi-square. A chi-square analysis was performed on the blue-eyed group and resulted in the finding that there is something unusual, more than simple randomness, in the blue-eyed group. Alternately, chi-square was performed on the darkish eyes and the grey eyes group, and nothing more than expected randomness was found to be in operation.
One wonders what may have influenced Conan Doyle's propensity for blue-eyed people to be good as our analysis has indicated, it may be that he was influenced by the blue eyes of his first wife, Louise. (1) Alternatively, perhaps, Conan Doyle considered his own eyes as they were more blue than grey. (2) It should also be noted that Lady Jean Conan Doyle had hazel-green eyes, (3) and that all characters with hazel eyes were good.
Grey eyes are the next most common eye colour with a total of 50. Of these, 64% were good and 36% bad people. Among Conan Doyle's characters who have grey eyes, we find: Sherlock Holmes, Professor Moriarty, Professor Challenger (in The Lost World his eyes were blue-grey, and in The Land of Mist they were grey), Mycroft Holmes, Alleyne Edricson and Jack Stapleton. Again, there is only one bad woman (Hetty Cullingworth) who has grey eyes. A high percentage (88.8%) of the females with grey eyes were good people. As further support for the contention that Conan Doyle's characters' eye colours were influenced by his family, it is of interest that his mother, Mary Foley Doyle, had grey eyes. (4) Conan Doyle himself, as previously mentioned, had some grey in his own eyes.
Whilst we do not presume to be able to determine how Conan Doyle chose the eye colours for his characters, we must assume that the choices were deliberate. Conan Doyle was interested in eyes as a doctor. In fact, he gave up his medical practice in Southsea to study the eye in Vienna, and so he surely must have been more aware of eyes than most observers would have been. For whatever reason, he selected eye colours that, in his own mind, would enhance the depiction of the characters he had created. Our evidence indicates the probability that Conan Doyle was influenced by the eye colours of his own family members. It must be considered our privilege to attempt to pierce the veil and see what he saw in his marvellous characterisations.
References
1. Carr, John Dickson; The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Harper & Row, 1949. Reprint by Vantage Books, 1975, p.65
2. Letter of Dame Jean Conan Doyle, December 11 1989, to the author.
3. Carr, John Dickson; The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, p. 151
4. Conan Doyle, A; Memories and Adventures; Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1924; Reprint by Greenhill Books, 1988, p. 12
Eye Colour Analysis
| Male | Female | Male | Female | |||
| Blue Eyes | ||||||
| Good | 52 | 37 | 15 | 83.8% | 80 | 93.7 |
| Bad | 10 | 9 | 1 | 16.1% | 19.5 | 6.2 |
| Total | 62 | 46 | 16 | |||
| Grey Eyes | ||||||
| Good | 32 | 24 | 8 | 64.0% | 58.5 | 88.8 |
| Bad | 18 | 17 | 1 | 36.0% | 41.5 | 11.1 |
| Total | 50 | 41 | 9 | |||
| Black Eyes | ||||||
| Good | 16 | 13 | 3 | 59.3% | 59.0 | 60.0 |
| Bad | 11 | 9 | 2 | 40.7% | 40.9 | 40.0 |
| Total | 27 | 22 | 5 | |||
| Brown Eyes | ||||||
| Good | 9 | 8 | 1 | 81.8% | 80.0 | 100.0 |
| Bad | 2 | 2 | 0 | 18.2% | 20.0 | 0 |
| Total | 11 | 10 | 1 | |||
| Dark Eyes | ||||||
| Good | 23 | 15 | 8 | 57.5% | 48.3 | 88.9 |
| Bad | 17 | 16 | 1 | 42.5% | 51.6 | 11.1 |
| Total | 40 | 31 | 9 | |||
| Hazel Eyes | ||||||
| Good | 5 | 3 | 2 | 100.0% | ||
| Violet Eyes | ||||||
| Good | 1 | 0 | 1 | 100.0% | ||
| Yellow Eyes | ||||||
| Good | 1 | 1 | 0 | |||
| Bad | 2 | 2 | 0 | |||
| Total | 3 | 3 | 0 | |||
| Green Eyes | ||||||
| Bad | 1 | 1 | 0 | |||
| Darkish Eyes — Black, Brown, Dark and Hazel | ||||||
| Good | 53 | 39 | 14 | 63.8% | 59 | 82 |
| Bad | 30 | 27 | 3 | 36.1% | 41 | 17 |
| Total | ||||||
| Good | 139 | 69.5% | ||||
| Bad | 61 | 30.5% | ||||
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
