ABSTRACT
As an exponent of the late-Victorian adventure culture which served to fashion the masculinities of the British Empire between 1880 and 1920, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) structured his own life to embody the chivalric, comedic and competitive manhood that was the subject of all his writing. His career was an attempt to promote the profession of letters as a definitively masculine pursuit, one that combined literature with an active engagement in those fields of public endeavour - medi cal, legal, military, political and religious - which would situate his name among the larger inscriptions of nation and empire. It was the career of someone who, in the heroic iconography of the time, wanted to be seen as ‘a great man’ but who was, at the same time, pathologi cally afraid of the the attributes of genius and subversively opposed to the politics of greatness. His writing, whether as fiction, history or propaganda, taught the attributes of self-effacing leadership to a read ing public not, by and large, born to lead. Doyle’s autobiography, Memories and Adventures (1924, 1930), provided a model of the mas culine life - one based on his extensive and critically articulate study of life-writing genres. As a follower and defender of Thomas Carlyle, he was fascinated by those genres through which the cultural meaning of masculinity was expounded and commodified.
