HERE comes a time in the life of every Sherlock Holmes fan that I call “the Grand Disillusionment,” coinciding with that moment when one learns about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his pursuit of Spiritualism. How could the creator of the world’s greatest thinking and reasoning machine –the one whose mottos include the need for data before theory, and “no ghosts need apply”– be taken in by a faddish movement dedicated to the discovery of what lay beyond the visible world, which proposed that knowledge was passed from the dead to the living via seances, and which was populated by charlatans and hucksters of every variety, employing gimmicks, fake photography, ingenious mechanical devices and scary voices in the dark to hook those eager to believe (and to pay)? How could this manly model of chivalry and good sense spend the last decades of his life –a time when most writers’ skills are keenist– championing such flaky ideas and promises using “evidence” such as photographs of spirits and fairies that a modern, more cynical eye can easily perceive as simplistic hoaxes?

It is at this point that many Holmes fans lose respect for Doyle and even walk away from the stories, for many readers have a deep-seated need to link the author with the work that they enjoy, and in this case, it can be difficult to reconcile the two. Even at the time, many readers grew tired and disillusioned by Doyle’s vehement championship of his cause.

This illustration by Bernard Partridge originally appeared in Punch Magazine, May 12, 1926. Doyle had mentioned more than once that he believed the popularity of Holmes was taking away from his more “serious” work. (Although in the latter years of his life, he reconsidered this opinion.) Here is the author, head in the clouds and shackled to the Great Detective. The accompanying poem reads (in part):

Your own creation, that great sleuth
Who spent his life in chasing Truth –
How does he view your late defiance
(O Arthur!) of the laws of science?

He disapproves your strange vagaries,
Your spooks and photographs of fairies;
And holds you foot-cuffed when you’re fain
To navigate the vast inane.

But, like many of the cases of his detective, what seems readily apparent at first can be quite deceiving in the bright light of the the full story.

The fact is that Doyle had always been fascinated by the world of the mysterious, the occult and the unexplained. This, we can glean simply by scanning his vast output of short and long fiction over the years, including the very early novel The Mystery Of Cloomber). As early as 1889, he became a vice-president of the fledgeling Hampshire Psychical Society, and was even called upon by a local paper to bring together his detective story-telling skills with his interest in psychic phenomenon in an effort to help track down Jack the Ripper, through communication with the spirit of the latest victim. (See The Real World of Sherlock Holmes: The True Crimes Investigated by Arthur Conan Doyle by Peter Costello.)

Always fascinated by psychic and otherworldly phenomenon, Doyle joined the Spiritualism movement sweeping the world, something that many biographers feel satisfied his need for solace over his son’s death and a belief for something beyond the base materialism so prevalent in an opulent society. He had abandonned Roman Catholicism at an early age, and many biographers suggest that Doyle’s inherently introspective and spiritual nature was searching for fulfillment, something which could fill the gap left by religion, and Spiritualism not only provided an answer to this, but was readily supported by a plethora of so-called “scientific evidence,” and even documented by the modern technology of film. Doyle was indeed a strong advocate of the movement, lecturing frequently about it throughout the world and writing a series of books on the subject, and was certainly not alone among the highly-educated people of his time who believed in what it had to offer.

Today, it’s a little hard to read some of Doyle’s later work, including The coming of the fairies and A History of Spiritualism, and not wince or feel something akin to pity for the naivity of such a talented man, but newcomers should keep matters in perspective. After all, we can look at a film like Jurassic Park and see the dinosaurs as patently fake (since we have learned to distrust our eyes), but when The Lost World came out in 1925, the stop-motion dinosaurs actually fooled many intelligent audiences into believing such creatures actually existed. Likewise, the photographs depicting cut-out paper fairies, double-exposures with disembodied faces, and even vague shapes caused by amateurs unfamiliar with their cameras –or film development procedures– may seem rather silly today, but at the time were often seen as strong physical evidence of other-worldly presences. Pair that with a deep-seated societal need for meaning in the materialistic world prior to the Great Depression, especially among those who (like Doyle) lost loved ones in the First World War, and you have a movement which provided hope and purpose to millions.

We’ll be looking at Sir Arthur’s Spiritualist callings again in the near future, along with his relationship with the grand debunker of all things mystic, Harry Houdini, and the somewhat embarrassing incidents of the Cottingley Fairies, but for now, I’d advise those exploring the author for the first time to keep a proper perspective of both personal and historical matters, and not allow these to detract from his fine writings until they learn a little more.