A Tubercular Family
Jeremiah Hawkins was a landowner and farmer who worked the land in Minsterworth, Gloucestershire. His brother died without heir, and his unmarried sister was beyond childbearing age. The task of preserving the family line therefore fell on Jeremiah’s shoulders. He dutifully married Emily Butt, the daughter of a neighboring farmer just across the River Severn. She was only nineteen years old. Jeremiah was fifty.
Despite their age difference, the two were fruitful and they did multiply. Over the next fourteen years Emily gave birth to seven children. She was pregnant, nursing, or both, for a decade and a half. In the end, she outlived her husband, which was to be expected, and she outlived four of her children, which was tragic. Only one of her children, Louise, would provide grandchildren, neither of whom would marry. That branch of the Hawkins family tree came to an end, unremarkable in its entirety except for the recent revelation that you are reading of, that Louise created Sherlock Holmes.
Born in 1857 on the family’s farm in Wales, Louise was the sixth of seven siblings. Five would die before their time, perhaps in each case from some form of tuberculosis.
In Out of the Shadows, Georgina Doyle tells us that Mary, Louise’s oldest sibling, died at age thirty-six not long after moving to New Zealand.
Poor Mary must have endured a painful voyage, dying of a disease of the bone in two vertebrae which she had suffered for several months, and also an abscess on the brain.
Mary’s symptoms are consistent with tuberculosis of the spine, an affliction known as Pott’s disease, such as that suffered by Mark Twain’s wife, Olivia Clemens.
Jeremiah, hereafter referred to as Jeremy to minimize confusion with the father, was Louise’s oldest brother. Georgina Doyle tells us that he died at age forty-seven of “diarrhoea lasting five days and long-standing general debility.” His symptoms are consistent with tuberculosis of the abdomen. One of the classic symptoms of abdominal tuberculosis is long-standing diarrhea, and another certainly is general debility.
Charles died in the same year and at the same faraway location as Mary, who had followed him to New Zealand.
John, Louise’s only younger sibling, died at age twenty-five, a resident patient of Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle. John succumbed to cerebral meningitis, a common secondary infection of galloping tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis can reside patiently and quietly inside its hosts for years or even decades, then turn active and aggressive for no apparent reason. When the disease was developing and spreading rapidly, the Victorians described it as galloping.
Because tuberculosis ran in families, people long believed it to be hereditary. After Robert Koch’s identification of its bacterial origin, people came to understand that families shared the disease because they breathed the same air and ate the same food. Tuberculosis of the lungs usually spreads through the air. The extrapulmonary forms can spread via contaminated milk and contaminated meat.
Bovine TB affects a broad range of mammalian hosts, including cows, badgers, and humans. Not only did infected cattle spread bovine TB among their own herd, badgers spread the disease from herd to herd. This was a particular problem in rural Victorian Britain where the badgers were drawn to the oil cakes used to feed the cows, where the milk was not pasteurized, and where neither the cows nor their milk was tested for TB. Modern pictures of cows and badgers sniffing one another nose-to-nose make it easy to understand how badgers can transmit the disease from herd to herd.
Since each of the Hawkins children, other than John, had been born on a farm, Mycobacterium bovis provides a feasible explanation for Mary’s spinal affliction, Jeremy’s debility and fatal diarrhea, and Charles early death. Even children such as John, born and raised in a suburban area, were at risk of bovine TB from the milk imported and consumed.
Thomas Dormandy explained all this in The White Death: The History of Tuberculosis (2000).
Tuberculosis may infect any part of the body, but most commonly occurs in the lungs (known as pulmonary tuberculosis). Extrapulmonary TB occurs when tuberculosis develops outside of the lungs. […] General signs and symptoms include fever, chills, night sweats, loss of appetite, weight loss, and fatigue, and significant finger clubbing may also occur. […] In many people, the infection waxes and wanes. Tissue destruction and necrosis are often balanced by healing and fibrosis. Affected tissue is replaced by scarring and cavities filled with caseous necrotic material. […]
Intestinal tuberculosis […] in children was the typical presentation of the bovine strain. It could be an agonisingly painful illness, a succession of episodes of acute or subacute intestinal obstruction […] Death was often due to progressive malnutrition and general debility.
The bovine organism may also have been responsible for nearly half of all cases of tuberculosis meningitis, the most rapidly fatal form of the system; and it was probably a frequent cause of tuberculosis of the bones and joints, the genitourinary system, the cervical lymph-nodes and lupus vulgaris. In some parts of the world it was—and still is—the chief killer of babies and young children.
Louise would suffer from multiple forms of tuberculosis, including pulmonary and, late in life, laryngeal. When her doctor determined that her pulmonary tuberculosis had turned “galloping and wasting,” he explained to Arthur that there was little hope, particularly given her family history.
When Louise was only two years old, her father retired from farming and moved the family to Leckhampton Road, an affluent street in an affluent suburb of the affluent English town of Cheltenham. The 1861 census records John being born there and Louise living there, noting that she was a "Scholar.” The notation indicates that Louise was already attending school or being formally educated, though she was only three years old.
Louise’s father is described as a retired farmer, wealthy enough to afford a governess and a house servant. As late as 1866, local directories record Jeremiah still living on Leckhampton Road. Sometime before 1870, however, the family might have fractured. Local directories show that Jeremiah had returned to Minsterworth. The 1871 census reveals that the blind, seventy-six-year-old Jeremiah was living separately from his forty-five-year-old wife.
Emily, the mother, was by then living with, or perhaps just visiting, her sister and Louise’s aunt in Whitchurch, one hundred miles to the north of Jeremiah. None of her children are listed as living with her.
Mary, aged twenty-four, and Emily, aged sixteen, were living with their father on his farm in Minsterworth; under “Rank, Profession, or Occupation,” the census records Mary as “housekeeper” and Emily as “daughter.”
Jeremy, aged twenty-three, was living in the Barnwood House Hospital, a private asylum in Gloucester. Joseph, aged twenty-one, was working as a civil engineer, far away near the Bristol Channel in Neath. The mysterious Charles may have moved to Australia or New Zealand.
John, aged eleven, was at Camden House School in Bristol. Herbert Fry, in Our Schools and Colleges (1868), described the school thusly:
Bristol, Camden House School, Kingsdown. Instructs in Classics, Mathematics, French, German, &c., boarders at Forty to Fifty Guineas, day boys at Twelve to Sixteen Guineas per ann[um]. William Bentham, Ph. D., Master.
Interestingly, in the Sherlock Holmes Canon, Camden House is located directly across the street from 221B Baker Street, that residence being the eponymous structure of The Empty House (1903). In reality, Camden House School was tantalizingly close to the Badminton School for Girls, just a mile distant. At the same time that John Hawkins was the second youngest of twenty-three resident “scholars” at Camden, thirteen-year-old Louise Hawkins was the youngest of twenty-three resident “pupils” at Badminton.
Established in 1858 by Miriam Badock, Badminton was an independent boarding and day school for girls. An advertising flyer from 1861 summed up the curriculum:
Mrs. William F. Badock superintends the education of a limited number of Young Ladies. The general course of Study includes French (which is made the medium of conversation) with a sound English Education comprising Writing, Arithmetic, Grammar, Composition, Elocution, Biblical Knowledge, Geography, Ancient and Modern History, Natural Philosophy, Botany, Astronomy, Calisthenics, Deportment, Plain and Fancy Needlework.
Nigel Watson, in Badminton School: The First 150 Years (2008), wrote of the school:
Girls could also learn German and Italian for an extra fee. Latin was added three years later. […] The inclusion of science was unusual. The subject was often ignored in girls’ schools although it scarcely fared any better in many boys’ schools of the period. When Badminton began, it was the responsibility of William, Miriam’s husband, who gave lectures and conducted elementary experiments in an amateur laboratory.
When Dr. Watson first meets Holmes, Holmes is busily at work in a chemistry laboratory. After the appropriately named Nigel Watson mentioned the laboratory, he detailed the excellent instruction that was provided at Badminton:
The school was among the earliest to enter girls for the Junior and Senior Cambridge Local Examinations. When the local committee asked Mrs Badock to send in pupils for the exams, she had no hesitation, calling for volunteers from among the girls. Her daughter remembered that “it was considered a most advanced and dangerous thing to do and there was great excitement about it.” Competitive examinations, remember, were regarded as injurious to female health. All those first entrants passed. They were taught largely by unqualified staff because women could not graduate from an English university until 1878. One girl at the school in the late 1880s recollected that there was only one mistress on the staff with a degree. […] Mrs Badock was by all accounts an outstanding maths teacher.
According to the 1871 census, the oldest resident student at Badminton was nineteen years of age. Assuming Louise attended Badminton until she was just as old, she would have spent six years there, graduating in 1877.
Similarly, the 1871 census records the oldest resident student at Camden House to have been seventeen years of age. Assuming John attended Camden House until he was just as old, he too would have spent six years there, just a mile from Louise, graduating just when she did.
Louise and John appear together again four years later, in 1881, at least according to one interpretation of The Stark Munro Letters (1895). The book is purportedly a semi-autobiographical epistolary novel based on Arthur’s young adult life. In Memories and Adventures, Arthur explained, “I drew in very close detail the events of the next few years […] I would only remark, should any reader reconstruct me or my career from that book, that there are some few incidents there which are imaginary.”
In the novel, in 1881, Arthur (in the guise of Stark Munro) is riding on a train, sitting across from an elderly lady (obviously Louise’s mother), Louise herself (in the guise of Winnie LaForce), and one of Louise’s brothers (called Fred), who was “a year or two older.” Arthur’s fellow travelers have given up housekeeping, finding life more pleasant living in apartments. The trio is traveling to Southsea (Birchespool in the novel) to take up residence there. Suddenly, the brother experiences an epileptic fit, kicks Arthur in the leg, and thereby frightens his sister and mother. Arthur saves the day by tearing open the epileptic’s collar, unbuttoning his waistcoat, and holding his head down on the seat. After a heel crashes through the carriage window, Arthur sits across the knees and holds on to the wrists. In gratitude, Louise’s mother gives Arthur her card, and Arthur promises to call on her should he ever be in Southsea.
As of October 1884, Emily, Louise, and John Hawkins were indeed living in Southsea, at No. 2, Queen’s Gate, as close to the English Channel as one could reside in Southsea. In March of 1885, John would be struck with cerebral meningitis, become Arthur’s resident patient, die soon thereafter, and be buried on the twenty-seventh of the month.
The Stark Munro Letters raises multiple issues of interest to us. First and most obviously, the book calls into question Arthur’s autobiographical claim of when and under what circumstances he first met Louise. In Memories and Adventures, Arthur glosses over the issue.
In the year 1885 […] I was married. A lady named Mrs. Hawkins, a widow of a Gloucestershire family, had come to Southsea with her son and daughter, the latter a very gentle and amiable girl. I was brought into contact with them through the illness of the son, which was of a sudden and violent nature, arising from cerebral meningitis.
Arthur explained that he volunteered to accept the son as a resident patient. Not long thereafter, in the same paragraph, the son succumbed while under Arthur's roof, and the police investigated, but only briefly.
The family were naturally grieved at the worry to which they had quite innocently exposed me, and so our relations became intimate and sympathetic, which ended in the daughter consenting to share my fortunes. We were married on August 6, 1885, and no man could have had a more gentle and amiable life's companion.
Arthur said nothing about meeting them earlier on a train. In fact, it is clear that he claimed to have never met any of them before being asked to care for the ailing John Hawkins. The date of their meeting in The Stark Munro Letters, however, is nearly specified. The letter in which Stark Munro tells his pen pal of the epileptic encounter is dated 7 March 1882. The contents of the letter place the encounter no earlier than two days previous. We are therefore left with a discrepancy of three years. Did Louise and Arthur first meet in March of 1882 or three years later, early in 1885? Can we ever take Arthur at his word?
Louise and Arthur
Arthur managed to compress the entirety of his meeting, engagement, and marriage to Louise into a single paragraph, one he used mostly to discuss Louise's mother and brother. Louise is not even mentioned by name, neither there nor anywhere else in Arthur’s autobiography. Instead, on the rare occasion when Arthur does refer to her, he relies on impersonal nouns such as "gentle and amiable girl," "the daughter," "my wife," or (on multiple occasions) "the invalid." Consider, for example, Arthur's justification for leaving Louise behind with his sister, whom he did name, while he toured America.
In the meantime, Lottie's presence and the improvement of the invalid, which was so marked that no sudden crisis was thought at all possible, gave me renewed liberty of action.
Such rude autobiographical treatment of his first wife, Louise, resulted probably from demands of his second wife, Jean. Louise was ultimately purged not just from Arthur's autobiography, but from the family papers as well. Initial biographies were written under the supervising eye of Adrian Conan Doyle, younger son of the second marriage. Because of the great purge, later biographers were left with little material about Louise. Limited to information presumably spoon-fed by Adrian, the biographers consistently damned Louise with faint praise.
One of the earliest of Arthur’s biographers, John Dickson Carr, set the disparaging standard by describing Louise, in The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1949), as a domesticated, unenlightened, fawning personality, thrilled to listen as Arthur talked down to her.
Of Louise, twenty-seven years old—"Touie," her nickname was—he saw a great deal. Though not beautiful, she was of a type which appealed to him; the round face, the wide mouth, the brown hair, the wide spaced blue eyes, shading to sea green, which were her finest feature. Her gentleness, her complete unselfishness, roused all his protective instincts. Louise, or Touie, was what they called a home-girl, loving needlework and an armchair by the fire. He met her in sorrow; and ended by falling deeply in love. Towards the end of April they were engaged.
Carr wrote that the two settled into Arthur's medical office and residence where, in the upstairs sitting room, they passed their free time.
"Shall we read aloud together, my dear," he would suggest, "and improve our minds? Say Gordon's Tacitus? Or perhaps, in a lighter vein, Boswell's Johnson or Pepy's [sic] Diary?"
"Oh, do!" cried Touie, who would have been just as eager to hear him read in Sanskrit if he had possessed that accomplishment.
Charles Higham, in The Adventures of Conan Doyle (1976), was more direct and thorough with his derision.
Louise was not gifted or well-read, but she made the ideal Victorian housewife, with sewing, mending, and cleaning her chief interests. […] When he was racked by some complex question of metaphysics, Louise could fix a cup of tea. When he came home from a long walk or from a séance, or sank back pale and exhausted from writing some horrific story, she could ease off his shoes and massage his feet and brow. He loved her with all the passionate adoration of a Victorian man for a little woman who adored him worshipfully. For this tormented genius, as brooding and abstracted as Poe behind the respectable mask of a sports-living Times reader, the relationship worked perfectly.
Martin Booth was exceptionally spare with his words, at least when it came to Louise. Without ever mentioning their meeting or wedding, he dispatched her with a single sentence in The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle (1997).
His marriage was happy, if perhaps unexciting, Louise playing her part as doctor’s spouse and housewife, welcoming patients, entertaining visitors and not intruding upon either her husband’s creative or his social existence.
The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes (2007) deals with Louise more fairly than had the earlier biographies. Therein, Andrew Lycett records:
Arthur found himself drawn to Louise, a quiet jolie-laide woman with wispy brown hair, an appealing rounded face and soft green eyes. Almost twenty-seven at the time of her brother's death, she was two years older than Arthur. Her helplessness and his nagging guilt combined as aphrodisiacs.
Lycett portrayed Louise as a helpless jolie-laide, a French term (literally “pretty-ugly”) used to describe someone who is somehow attractive despite being not conventionally beautiful. Photographs present Louise in variable fashion. She could be pretty, but she was neither ideally beautiful nor particularly sophisticated in terms of aesthetics.
In Out of the Shadows, Georgina Doyle provides a particularly alluring photograph of Louise attired in an all-black dress with long sleeves and a high collar. Louise’s back is turned three-quarters to the camera, and her head turned only slightly, allowing her face to be lit in almost perfect profile. Her hair is straight and tied up, revealing the curve of her back and a pleasing figure, even soon after childbirth. On her left hip she holds her baby Mary, plump, bald and dressed in an overly long white gown.
I provided a copy of that image to my talented friend and artist, Dean Williams, who used it as a model to paint the portrait of Louise that I use frequently throughout my work.
At my request, Dean transformed Louise from holding a child on her hip to holding a pipe to her mouth. The smoke and the backlit individual strands of hair are simply spectacular. We agreed that her dress should be red. As for the pattern on the dress, he informed me later that used some of his linen as a model. His physical painting of Louise, done in old fashion with brush and palette, is one of my most cherished possessions.
Though Arthur's biographers tend to dismiss Louise's intellect and sophistication, no one has ever questioned her kind and gentle nature. Her daughter Mary provided Arthur’s biographer Pierre Nordon this touching recollection, found in Conan Doyle (1966):
My mother was a tiny little woman with dainty hands and feet, and lovely shadowy eyes that always seemed to see beyond what she was looking at. There was a gentle all-lovingness about her that drew the simple folk, children, and animals to her, as to a magnet. She had the quiet poise that comes rather from the wisdom of the spirit than from the knowledge of the world, and there ran through her a bright ripple of fun, that would glint in the eyes, and hover round her mouth. It was a sense of fun rather than a more sophisticated sense of humour, because Mother never smiled at a joke at anyone else's expense. At such moments a shadow passed over her face, and her silence would rebuke the joker. But she loved the comical aspects of life and the unconscious humour in people and things.
Georgina Doyle was the widow of John Doyle and thereby a daughter-in-law to Arthur’s only brother, Innes. She had access to family knowledge unavailable to other biographers. Her biography focused, at least more than did the others, on Louise and her two children, and she aptly entitled it Out of the Shadows: The Untold Story of Arthur Conan Doyle's First Family. Louise has indeed been a shadowy figure, but Georgina’s book brings some light.
The Doyle family adored Louise. Again and again I have had clear indication of this: from my husband, John, whose inherited knowledge of her came from her daughter, Mary, and also indirectly from Innes; from Claire Oldham [daughter of one of Arthur's sisters]; and from Barbie Foley through her mother-in-law, Ida [another of Arthur's sisters]. Between them, down through the years, they have kept alive the memory of a beautiful, charming, and unaffected woman, who had a warm, gentle, and loving personality.
Georgina Doyle was the first biographer to paint Arthur with something other than a completely flattering brush. She was also the first to suggest that Louise was not quite the vapid homebody that Arthur's biographers portrayed. Georgina, for example, was the first to note that the 1861 census recorded the young Louise as a "Scholar." The notation means that Louise was already attending school or being formally educated, though she was only three years old. Everyone though, including Georgina Doyle, seems to have missed the obscure entry in the 1871 census, the one listing Louise as a resident student at the prestigious Badminton School for Girls.
Everyone, including Georgina Doyle, also failed to realize the Louise was one of Arthur’s multiple ghostwriters.
Louise and Arthur were wed at St. Oswald's Church, Thornton-in-Lonsdale, Yorkshire, on 6 August 1885. After John’s death in Southsea, Louise had been sent north to await the wedding as a guest of Arthur’s mother. Arthur arrived no earlier than two days before the marriage, having spent the previous months in Southsea, working on his dissertation, bowling, and playing cricket.
Within days of the wedding, Arthur was off to Ireland, unable to stay long off the cricket field. Most biographers who bother to mention Arthur’s foray to Ireland claim that Louise and Arthur honeymooned there. Some suggest that Arthur managed to fit in a bit of cricketing. Both positions amount to little more than speculation; no evidence places Louise in Ireland with Arthur. Only Andrew Lycett seems to have considered the alternative.
So Louise may have spent the first week of married life involuntarily bonding with her new mother-in-law at Masongill Cottage. This would have been in keeping with Arthur's unthinking presumptions about the relative merits of his sporting life and her emotional needs.
When Arthur returned to Southsea, his fellow bowlers threw him a celebratory dinner. The 18 September issue of Portsmouth's Evening News described the fête.
Presentation to a Southsea Doctor. At the Bush Hotel last evening a presentation was made of a handsome dinner service by members of Southsea Bowling Club to their popular President, Dr Conan Doyle. Mr T. Reynolds […] alluded to the recent marriage of their President, and wished him every happiness in his future career. The dinner was a slight token of the esteem in which Conan Doyle was held by members, not only in his capacity as President but for his private character.
It seems obvious that Louise was not invited, particularly since Arthur’s mates wished only “wished him every happiness in his future career.”
As a member of the fairer sex, Louise was excluded also from the meetings of the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, the major social organization in the area. Geoffrey Stavert, in A Study in Southsea (1987), described the social climate that then prevailed.
This was the period, of course, when Queen Victoria's reign still had another twenty years to run; when men were men and women knew their place. […] A certain amount of chauvinist piggery, therefore, was only to be expected. Ladies were not eligible to become members of the Literary and Scientific Society. They could attend the meetings, and often did in quite considerable numbers, but only as guests. This meant, however, that since they were only guests they were not allowed to speak; they could not raise questions or join in any discussion.
By 1887, the dues-paying membership of the Society dropped to precipitously low numbers, and the few remaining members considered the previously unthinkable: perhaps women should be allowed to join if they paid the same dues as men. The editor of the Hampshire Post wrote of the prospect, with barely contained distaste.
Whether the ladies will care to be taxed in this way, for the bare recognition of their equality with men, when they know very well, without any payment at all, that they are greatly superior, remains to be seen. But, since they are admitted with gentlemen to witness the performances, there is no reason why they should not be asked, the same as in the case of gentlemen, to pay for the privilege. The subscription will of course confer upon them the right of participating in discussions, but we sincerely trust that they will refrain.
Sherlock Holmes was born eight months after Louise married Arthur, as though a month premature. We learn of the delivery from a joint letter of April 1886 that the proud parents sent to Arthur's sister, Lottie. “Arthur has written another book,” Louise wrote in her part, “a little novel about 200 pages long, called ‘A Study in Scarlet.’ It went off last night.” Also in that letter, Louise mentioned that everyone else had gone off to church and that she and Arthur were left “alone in our glory.”
Arthur was an apostate Catholic and Louise a nonconformist Protestant. At least, the Badminton School was nonconformist in its teachings. Nigel Watson wrote of the school’s religious leaning while describing its move to Worcester Terrace, where Louise attended:
A number of staunch Anglican residents were appalled that they not only had another nonconformist family in their midst (one was already living on the Terrace) but also a nonconformist school.
It is interesting that Louise would brag of missing church when all those about her were in attendance. Sherlock Holmes seems equally indifferent to religion, the subject being first mentioned in his twenty-fifth published adventure, The Naval Problem. Arthur’s questioning led him to a life committed to spiritualism. Louise, on the other hand, seems to have regained a more conventional faith sometime before she died, apparently being baptized and adopting a new name. Though born Louisa and preferring Louise, the name on both her death certificate and her casket is Mary Louise Conan Doyle.
On 28 January 1889, while still living in Southsea, Louise gave birth to a daughter named, not surprisingly, Mary Louise Conan Doyle. Astonishingly, Arthur seems never to have informed his mother that Louise was pregnant. We learn of that shocking withholding of vital information in a letter that Arthur sent his mother on the day of his daughter’s birth.
Toodles [Louise] produced this morning at 6.15 a remarkably fine specimen of the Toodles minor, who is now howling her head off in the back bedroom. […] Forgive me for not telling you dear. I knew how trying the suspense would be, and thought that on the whole it would be best that you should learn when it was too late to worry yourself.
Given that Arthur's mother had weathered nine pregnancies of her own, his excuse of protecting her is suspect. Perhaps Arthur withheld the information because he realized from the beginning that Louise’s pregnancy would be unusually risky.
(To be continued.)