Conan Doyle’s connection to Aston, Birmingham
Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries was born 22 May 1859 in Edinburgh and studied medicine at the University there. Doyle also for several months each year, from 1879 to early 1882 lived and worked in Aston (now part of Birmingham, but as a dispensing assistant to a chemist while studying at Edinburgh University. Always a writer his first published story appeared in Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal .
He left Birmingham when he graduated as a doctor, to open a practice in Portsmouth, but not being too successful with too few patients he spent much of his time with his first love of writing. . .
Robert Louis Stevenson recognized his talent sent his compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Series
Sherlock Holmes
A Study in Scarlet (1887)
The Sign of Four (1890)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905)
The Valley of Fear (1914)
His Last Bow (1917)
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927)
The Complete Sherlock Holmes (1930)
The Aston, Conan Doyle once knew would be much different today – though he would have known Aston Hall = There is a Blue Plaque on the site of his former home at 63 Aston road North commemorating the time he spent in Aston. – and supposedly another one unveiled in the 1950’s but don’t know where?
(Conan Doyle died of a heart attack in 1930 at his home in Sussex and was buried at All Saint’s Churchyard, Minstead, Hampshire,)
