At the age of 9, Doyle bid a tearful goodbye to his parents and was
shipped off to England, where he would attend Hodder Place,
Stonyhurst — a Jesuit preparatory school — from 1868 to 1870. Doyle
then went on to study at Stonyhurst College for the next five years. For
Doyle, the boarding-school experience was brutal: many of his
classmates bullied him, and the school practiced ruthless corporal
punishment against its students. Over time, Doyle found solace in his
flair for storytelling and developed an eager audience of younger
students.
On May 22, 1859, Arthur Conan Doyle was born to an affluent, strict
Irish-Catholic family in Edinburgh, Scotland. Although Doyle’s family
was well-respected in the art world, his father, Charles, who was a life
long alcoholic, had few accomplishments to speak of. Doyle’s mother,
Mary, was a lively and well-educated woman who loved to read. She
particularly delighted in telling her young son outlandish stories. Her
great enthusiasm and animation while spinning wild tales sparked the
child’s imagination. As Doyle would later recall in his biography, “In my
early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories
she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of
my life.”
