ACD Grave

1. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Righter of Wrongs or Exposing the Crimes of the MormonsMikel Vause, PhDWeber State University

2. ACD Grave The epitaph on his gravestone in the churchyard reads, in part: "Steel true/Blade straight/Arthur Conan Doyle/Knight/Patriot, Physician, and man of letters."

3. A collection of letters between Arthur Conan Doyle (author and creator of Sherlock Holmes) and his mother, covering most of his life, written between 1867 and the year of her death in 1921.

4. George Edalji Conan Doyle read about the Edalji case and felt compelled to act. In December of 1906 he began to investigate the matter and everything he found confirmed his initial feelings that an innocent man had been convicted. As he reviewed the facts it seemed to Conan Doyle that the evidence was overwhelming. Edalji was innocent. 

5. What aroused my indignation and gave me the driving force to carry the thing through was the utter helplessness of this forlorn little group of people, the coloured clergyman in his strange position, the brave blue-eyed grey-haired wife, the young daughter, baited by brutal boors, and having the police, who should have been their natural protectors, adopting from the beginning a harsh tone towards them and accusing them, beyond all sense and reason, of being the cause of their own troubles and of persecuting and maligning themselves. Such an exhibition, sustained, I am sorry to say, by Lord Gladstone and all the forces of the Home Office, would have been incredible had I not examined the facts. (538-539) • Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, Lellenberg, Stashower, and Foley

6. Marion Gilchrist About seven o’clock one Monday evening, just after Nellie had gone out to buy a newspaper, Miss Gilchrist was attacked and beaten to death in her dining-room by an intruder. The murder weapon was a heavy mahogany chair; possibly also a metal auger which the killer had brought into the first-floor flat. As far as the police were concerned, suspicion fell immediately upon Oscar Slater, a ‘foreign-looking’ man of 36, who had just made plans to sail to the USA.

7. Oscar Slater • “Let me say in conclusion that I have had no desire in anything said in this argument, to hurt the feelings or usurp the functions of anyone, whether of the police or the criminal court, who had to do with the case. … Meanwhile it is on the conscience of the authorities, and in the last resort on that of the community that this verdict obtained under the circumstances which I have indicated, shall now be reconsidered.” • Arthur Conan Doyle, Windlesham, Crowborough. • On November 8, 1927, the secretary of state for Scotland issued the following statement: "Oscar Slater has now completed more than eighteen and a half years of his life sentence, and I have felt justified in deciding to authorize his release on license as soon as suitable arrangements can be made."  Within a few days Oscar Slater was a free man.

8. The Titanic and Captain Edward J. Smith As he brooded over Shaw’s insensitivity, Conan Doyle found himself “moved to write a remonstrance,” matching Shaw’s cool detachment with high emotion. His letter, headed “Mr. Shaw and the Titanic,” was apparently written in some haste. “I have been reading the article by Mr. Bernard Shaw upon the loss of the Titanic,” Conan Doyle began. “It is written professedly in the interest of truth, and accuses everyone around him of lying. Yet I can never remember any production which contained so much that was false within the same compass. How a man could write with such looseness and levity of such an event at such a time passes all comprehension. (284) Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales

9. George Bernard Shaw  “The worst I think or say of Mr. Shaw is that his many brilliant gifts do not include the power of weighing evidence; nor has the that quality — call it good taste, humanity, or what you will — which prevents a man from needlessly hurting the feelings of others.”

10. HMS Titanic

11. Thomas Hardy The loss of the Titanic, in the words of Thomas Hardy “jar[red] two hemispheres.” “The Convergence of the Twain”

12. Victorian Pornography The nineteenth century saw the flowering of the English novel as an instrument portraying a middle-class society. Thus, fiction both created and reflected middle-class values; Victorian women and the men associated closely with the literate, and had the leisure to read, and the money to buy books or join subscription libraries. Under the moral guise of improving their minds, they could find not only entertainment but also expressions for sexual thoughts and feelings that their society denied existed for them. “The reader” observes literary critic Jon Stratton, “reads as voyeur.” Those who read the numerous exposes—and anti-Mormon literature was only a fraction of a flood of “tell all” narratives—were able to project their own hope, fears, fantasies, and sexual desires safely on others. (Foster 131) “Victorian Pornographic Imagery,” Craig L. Foster

13. Chivalry and Derring-Do While writing the early Holmes stories, Doyle also began what he considered his most important work: chivalric, historical novels based on British history, primarily, Micah Clark, Sir Nigel, and The White Company. Although these novels were widely admired, none of them created the stir caused by the first series of short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes and John Watson that appeared in The Strand Magazine, starting in 1891. Despite their overwhelming success, Conan Doyle never suspected that these stories would be the foundation of his literary legacy.

14. Given his rigid Victorian morality, drilled into him by his mother and the Jesuit teachers, and not shaken even by his freer life of the medical student, Conan Doyle must have been very much against the Mormons in their search for moral freedom. Later he was to take an equally strong stand against suffragism.“The Last Struggles of the Mormons.”

15. Highamlists an article likely to have influenced Doyle’s feelings about Mormons. The article appeared in The International Review of February, 1882 by John H. McBride entitled, “Utah and Mormonism,” which, “is steeped in fanatical hatred of Mormons, condemning them for murder and pillage, which unhappily Conan Doyle simply echoed without much evidence of further research” (954).

16. Charles Higham points out is: “equally ill-informed … which appeared in 1885 … the parallel is remarkable close, since one of the several narrators of the tale, written during the Fenian terrorist explosions which were shocking mid-Victorian London, talked of his life in the Mormon settlements” (54).

17. Fanny Stenhouse ANN ELIZA YOUNG

18. John and Lucy Ferrier Meet the Mormons • He had always determined, deep down in his resolute heart, that nothing would ever induce him to allow his daughter to wed a Mormon. Such marriage he regarded as no marriage at all, but as a shame and a disgrace. Whatever he might think of the Mormon doctrines, upon that one point he was inflexible. He had to seal his mouth on the subject, however, for to express an unorthodox opinion was a dangerous matter in those days in the Land of the Saints. • Yes, a dangerous matter—so dangerous that even the most saintly dared only whisper their religious opinions with bated breath, lest something which fell from their lips might be misconstrued, and bring down a swift retribution upon them. The victims of persecution had now turned persecutors on their own account, and persecutors of the most terrible description. Not the Inquisition of Seville, nor those in Germany, nor the secret societies of Italy, were ever able to put a more formidable machinery in motion than that which cast a cloud over the state of Utah. (Doyle, A Study in Scarlet 148-49)

19. Brigham Young’s Destroying Angels Strange rumours began to be bandied about—rumours of murdered immigrants and rifled camps in regions where Indians had never been seen. Fresh women appeared in the harems of the Elders—women who pined and wept, and bore upon their faces the traces of an unextinguishable horror. Belated wanderers upon the mountains spoke of gangs of armed men, masked, stealthy, and noiseless, who flitted by them in the darkness. These tales and rumours took substance and shape, and were corroborated and recorroborated, until they resolved themselves into a definite name. To this day, in the lonely ranches of the West, the name of the Danite Band, or the Avenging Angels, is a sinister and an ill-omened one. (150) [spelling is Doyle’s]

20. The Prophet Joseph Smith Willard Richards and Heber C. Kimball—Early Mormon Missionaries to England The first missionaries landed in Liverpool in 1837 and by 1839 had succeeded in converting more than 1,500 new members. By the early 1850’s membership counts for the Mormons exceeded 33,000 and was continuing to grow. At the same time about 12,000 British converts had already made their way to America.

21. Mormon Polygamy

22. Charles Dickens On January 7, 1852 Dickens visited the emigrant ship the Amazon as it was preparing to leave for America. He had hoped to discover some information critical of the Mormons, many who had booked passage on the Amazon. What he found, after interviewing the Mormon passengers, was “they were above reproach and instead of finding what he had expected he rather found a brotherly love that he had never seen before.” He said, “instead of drinking and carousing the Mormons were all trying to help one another. Instead of being the scum of England as they had been represented, they were the very cream of the British Isles” (The unpublished Autobiography of George Brown) (The complete account of Dickens impressions of the Mormons can be found in his book The Uncommercial Traveler, Chapter XXII). The Amazon

23. “Of course, Conan Doyle was not to know it at the time but this was the most important book he ever wrote” (108). The Doctor and the Detective, Martin Booth

25. ACD and Family on the way to salt lake city, utah Mark Booth: “He was welcomed everywhere, even in Salt Lake City, where Mormons had taken a dim view of his portrayal of them in A Study in Scarlet, which he now agreed did them and injustice” (330)

26. Hotel Utah“The Hotel Beaufiful”Geo. O. Relf,ManagerSalt Lake City Dear SirI shall draw the Mormons as Ifind them when I write of my presentexperiences. All I said of the DaniteBand and the murders is historical so I cannot withdraw that, tho’ it is likely that in a work of fiction it is stated more luridly than in a work of history. It is best to let the matter rest, I think, and draw the Mormons as they now are Yours sincerely A Conan Doyle May 10.

28. Doyle knew that his story was extremely uncomplimentary about Utah and Brigham Young the notorious (at least for most of the world) Mormon prophet. He even admitted that this story “could have been easily brought up to prejudice opinion against me.” Salt Lake City changed dramatically from the time Doyle wrote A Study in Scarlet in 1886 to 1923 when he brought his spiritualist crusade to Utah. The most significant change was the abandonment of polygamy in 1890. Although Doyle was extremely pleased with the reception he was given in Utah he continued to believe that polygamy had “done so much harm to the movement.” But he also reminded the British Press that the current inhabitants of Utah were not guilty of “sexual immorality, or murder or other depravity, or of tyrannous control in the fields of religion, commerce, morals, or society.” Brigham Young

29. Levi Edgar Young Levi Edgar Young, University of Utah History professor and Mormon General Authority. Young introduced Doyle’s lecture and later spoke to Doyle having apologized for A Study in Scarlet: “In later years, Prof. Young, in casual conversation with a Salt Lake Tribune reporter, was asked how Conan Doyle could have been so well received in Utah in light of A Study in Scarlet. ‘He apologized for that, you know,’ Young replied. ‘He said he had been misled by writings of the time about the Church’" (Schindler D1).

30. This biography examines the extraordinary life and strange contrasts of sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the struggling provincial doctor who became the most popular storyteller of his age.

31. Wooden headstone of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle originally from the church at Minstead, at a special display in the Town’s museum, Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK. That inscription reads: "Blade straight - Steel true - Arthur Conan Doyle- Born May 22nd 1859 -Passed on 7th July 1930."

32. Dame Jean Doyle “The last direct link with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, has been severed with the death of his younger daughter, Jean Conan Doyle. She was born in 1912 and spent her youth in Crowborough, Sussex, and in the New Forest. Her character was fixed from an early age. "Something very strong and forceful seems to be at the back of that wee body. Her will is tremendous," her father wrote of her when she was five. "As a rule she sits quiet, aloof, affable, keenly alive to all that passes and yet taking no part in it save for some subtle smile or glance. And then suddenly the wonderful grey-blue eyes under the long black lashes will gleam like coy diamonds, and such a hearty little chuckle will come from her that everyone else is bound to laugh out of sympathy." The ringing laugh, the smiling eyes, the good nature, charm, and humour were essential elements of her character, but it was tempered by a strong and narrow moral code and in later years by a steely determination to protect the reputation of her father from real and imagined slights. Obituary: Air Commandant Dame Jean Conan Doyle by Richard LancelynGreen Saturday 22 November 1997 

33. ACD—The Great Man