Mothering Sunday
Sunday 22nd March is Mothering Sunday in the UK, a day when we celebrate the love our mothers have shown us during their lives.
Conan Doyle had a very strong relationship with his mother, Mary Foley who was the recipient of a stream of startlingly frank letters from her devoted son. Over a thousand letters between them survive from the time Arthur was sent away to boarding school in 1867 until her death in 1920. His letters to her reveal a man whose early career was marked by a distinct lack of success as Conan Doyle struggled to establish a medical practice of his own, filling days by scribbling short stories that would result in the creation of Sherlock Holmes.
Mary Foley was remarkable in her own right. She had a better education than most women in Victorian Britain, and spoke French and had great interest in genealogy and history.
‘My real love for letters, my instinct for storytelling, springs from my mother,' said Conan Doyle, ' who is of Anglo-Celtic stock, withe glamour and romance of the Celt very strongly marked. In my early childhood the vivid stories she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life. It is not only that she was a storyteller, but she has an art of sinking her voice to a horror stricken whisper when she came to a crisis in the narrative, which makes me goose-fleshy when I think of it. In attempting to emulate these story of my childhood that I began weaving dreams myself.’
Mary was small in stature and was a commanding personality who raised seven children largely on her own, in what were certainly strained circumstances. Conan Doyle said his childhood had been spent in 'the hardy and bracing atmosphere of poverty', and that was a rather sunny way of looking at it. Mary’s influence is evident in every aspect of Arthur’s character.
Throughout his life Conan Doyle felt a powerful debt to his mother, and a keen awareness of the many sacrifices she made to secure his education and start in life. Conan Doyle gave an admiring portrait of his mother:
“You must remember her sweet face, her sensitive mouth, her peering short sighted eyes, her general suggestion of a plump little hen, who is still alert about her chickens. But you cannot realise all that she is to me in our domestic life. Those helpful fingers, that sympathetic brain! Ever since I can remember her she has been the quaintest mixture of the housewife and the woman if letters, with the high bred spirited lady as a basis for either character. Always a lady, whether bargaining with the butcher, or breaking in a skittish charwoman, or stirring the porridge, which I can see her doing with the porridge stick in one hand, and the other holding her Reveux Des Deux Mondes within two inches of her dear nose. That was always her favourite reading, and I can never think of her without the association of it’s browny-yellow cover! She is a very well read woman is the mother; she keeps up to date in French literature as well as in English, and talk by the hour about the Goncourts, and Flaubert, and Gautier. Yet she is always hard at work; and how she imbibes all her knowledge is a mystery. She reads when she knits, she reads when she scrubs, she even reads when she feeds her babies. We have a little joke against her, that at an interesting passage she deposited a spoonful of rusk and milk into my little sister's ear hole, the child having turned her head at the critical instant. Her hands are worn with work, and yet where is the idle woman who has read as much?”