Maps and Legends Read Online Free PDF

text of the natural world and finds messages and secret connections, the agency of elves and demons and other liminal beings. Charles Doyle burdened his son with a legacy of failure and a treasure as rich and irrelevant as the ritual left by Sir Ralph Musgrave to his baffled heirs: an eccentric way of looking at the world, of making it, against all reason, cohere. The father’s fecklessness, epilepsy, alcoholism, and eventual commitment to an institution were for Conan Doyle the black axioms of existence, never acknowledged, sometimes denied.
    Conan Doyle’s mother, Mary, whom he always called “the Ma’am,” seems to have been a model of Victorian motherhood, beribboned and cased in whalebone. She was also a storytelling Irishwoman who thrilled and terrified her children by the fireside on long winter evenings with ghost stories and legends of heroes and the Sidhe. A mother of ten (seven surviving childhood), a model of propriety, modesty, and self-sacrifice, she nonetheless maintained a lifelong relationship with a male lodger fifteen years her junior. Evidence of a sexual liaison between her and the lodger, a pathologist named Bryan Waller, is scanty but suggestive.
    Waller’s residence in the Doyle house predated the institutionalization of Conan Doyle’s father, as did the birth of Mary’s last child, a girl who was carefully labeled with the name of Bryan Julia Doyle, Julia being the name of Waller’s mother. It does not require “the most perfect reasoning and observing mind the world has ever known” to draw the readiest conclusion. When Waller bought a house in the Yorkshire countryside, he took Mary and Bryan Doyle to live with him. He supported young Arthur financially, and Conan Doyle’s fateful decision to attend medical school was almost certainly determined by the wishes of his mother’s mysteriously powerful lodger. A reading of Daniel Stashower’s biography of Conan Doyle suggests that Bryan Waller was, in practical terms, the most important personage in Conan Doyle’s early life. And yet in all his subsequent published autobiographical writings and letters he never mentioned him, not once, neither to thank him nor to settle a score. There is an enigmatic reference in his memoirs: “My mother had adopted the device of sharing a large house, which may have eased her in some ways, but was disastrous in others.”
    A number of Holmes stories center around the activities of sinister lodgers in boarding houses, machinating stepparents, or people who keep their loved ones locked away. Reproachful ghosts of the immured father, imprisoned for his own supposed good, can be glimpsed in the eponymous figure of “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier”—the Boer War veteran hidden in a “detached building of some size” on the family estate in the belief that he had contracted leprosy in Africa. It can be seen as well in the forlorn inhuman visage of the mysterious captive in “The Yellow Face,” and in the ruined figure of “The Crooked Man,” a former soldier who haunts and kills the English officer who, years ago in India, betrayed him into the hands of torturers.Detective Freud might well conclude that Conan Doyle never entirely recovered from the pain and humiliation first of watching his mother cuckold his demented father in his own house and then of being obliged to stand by as the old man was packed off to the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum, never to return.
    The braided pair of Conan Doyle’s family history and home life played out in a city that precisely mirrored its duality and duplicity. Even more than London, Edinburgh in the nineteenth century embodied the Jekyll-and-Hyde impulses of the Victorian mind. In London the evil and the good, the public and the private, tended to be presented as near neighbors. They even, as with Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, shared the same body. London was figured in jumbles like The Old Curiosity Shop, or Krook’s shop in Bleak House, in landscapes