Our Portrait Gallery
Our Portrait Gallery is an article published in The Walsall Advertiser on 24 june 1893.
Article
Among the distinguished men who, we under stand, will visit our Literary Institute during the ensuing Session, is the Rev. Dr. A. Conan Doyle, whose writings of late have made so popular. His subject will probably be "Facts about Fiction," and the lecture will deal more especially with the work of some of the younger writers of the day, such as J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Jerome K. Jerome, and others.
DR. CONAN DOYLE, who published another historical novel, "The Refugees," was a doctor at Southsea, who began to contribute anonymously to the magazines, and then wrote "Micah Clarke." He has told how it went unsuccessfully round the publishers. Blackwood found that the people did not talk so in the seventeenth century; Bentley that its principal defect was a complete absence of interest; Cassells that experience had shown that a historical novel could never be a commercial success." At last it reached Mr. Andrew Lang at Longmans, and the result was that Dr. Doyle forsook medicine for literature. He has been a constant writer since 1890, perhaps his best known work being the detective stories of "Sherlock Holmes," which have made the fortune of the Strand Magazine. The great detective is based on his creator's recollections of a former tutor at Edinburgh, Mr. Joseph Bell, who had a singular power of close observation. Dr. Conan Doyle is a grandson of John Doyle, the famous caricaturist "H. B.," and was born in Edinburgh in 1859. Но was educated at the Roman Catholic College, Stonyhurst, in Lancashire, and afterwards in Germany. He is foud of cycling, and lives at Norwood.
