Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859. He belongs to a canon of notable authors and poets, including Anton Chekhov, W. Somerset Maugham, Abraham Verghese, Mikhail Bulgakov, and William Carlos Williams whose principal or initial vocation was the practice of medicine. Chekhov famously characterized his relationship to his two passions in terms of commitment and romance: “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other."
Rather than focus on Sherlock Holmes as icon or archetype (though surely he is), in a nod to his birthday we thought we might highlight in Conan Doyle’s background an episode in which the physician and author stepped, so to speak, into the shoes of the creator of arguably one of the most recognized, translated and adapted figures in modern literature.
In late 1906, George Edalji, wrote to Conan Doyle to ask for help in clearing his name from a crime he insisted he did not commit. Edalji, a solicitor and the son of a vicar in Staffordshire, had been convicted in October 1903 of maiming a pony and was given a sentence of seven years. Without explanation, he was released after three years. He had received no pardon and no compensation, which meant he could not return to the practice of law.
The conviction had rested on a flimsy circumstantial case, contested handwriting analysis, and a wave of local prejudice against the mixed-race family (Edalji’s father was Parsee and his mother an Englishwoman) in the village. By the time of his appeal to Doyle, Edalji had exhausted ordinary remedies and was relying on Conan Doyle’s profile of England's most famous detective novelist to make his case visible.
Upon meeting Edalji at a London hotel in January 1907 to discuss the case, the author reportedly observed that Edalji suffered from severe myopia and astigmatism, a fact which would raise serious doubt about claims that the supplicant had stalked and mutilated livestock in the dark of night across Staffordshire fields. Conan Doyle threw himself into reviewing the investigation and several weeks later published in The Daily Telegraph a two-part essay, “The Case of George Edalji,” in which he called into question the prosecution’s case and its reliance on questionable testimony from a discredited handwriting analysis expert and the knife Edalji allegedly used in the commission of the crimes.
Edaldji was pardoned in May 1907 after Conan Doyle’s examination of the case garnered the attention of the government. He was later readmitted to the roll of solicitors and able once again to practice law. The Edalji case has a corollary in the author’s A Scandal in Bohemia, published in 1891. It dovetails nicely with how we think about what we do at 221B Partners, where it’s essential that we see both the forest and the trees. Holmes reproaches Watson when the latter is unable to answer how many steps there are from the hall to their rooms at 221B Baker Street: “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. No, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed.”