Through the Magic Door by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A contagious enthusiasum for classic books

Although Arthur Conan Doyle is primarily known as an author of fiction, he also wrote a couple dozen nonfiction books, most of them about military history or his beliefs in spiritualism and the supernatural. He wrote one book of essays, however, that will appeal particularly to fans of his novels and short stories. That book is Through the Magic Door, published in 1907. Though the title may sound like a children’s fantasy novel, the “door” in question is actually the entrance to Conan Doyle’s personal library. The esteemed author invites the reader into his inner sanctum and introduces him to the most treasured volumes on his library’s shelves.

Unlike a typical work of literary criticism, Through the Magic Door is not only educational but also surprisingly lively and entertaining. Conan Doyle injects witty personal anecdotes into the discussion and occasionally goes off on tangents that are relevant enough to be quite interesting. In addition to a list of Conan Doyle’s favorite books, the reader comes away with an inside glimpse of how those works have influenced the author’s writing career.

Many of the writers covered here are to be expected. Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, both clearly influences on Conan Doyle’s work, are each given their due consideration. Other chapters are devoted to the usual suspects of the English canon. Thomas Macaulay’s essays, James Boswell’s biography of Samuel Johnson, the diary of Samuel Pepys, and Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire are classics that couldn’t go unmentioned in the literary memoir of a 19th-century English gentleman. In addition, however, Conan Doyle brings up some personal choices that are more unfamiliar, at least to the American reader. For instance, he pronounces The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade the greatest historical novel in the English language. (Scott’s Ivanhoe has to settle for second place.) He also extols the merits of George Borrow and George Meredith, the latter of whose novel Richard Feverel is deemed by Conan Doyle “one of the three novels which I admire most in the Victorian era.” Though foreign authors like Balzac, Hugo, Tolstoy, and Melville are mentioned briefly in the text, Conan Doyle mostly reserves his extended discourse for British authors. The exceptions are Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant, whom he dubs the greatest and second-greatest artists of the short story.

Conan Doyle doesn’t confine himself to fiction but discusses works of history and science as well. In the former category, he delves as far back as the medieval chronicles of Froissart and de Comines. Having written historical novels on the Napoleonic Wars (The Great Shadow, Uncle Bernac) and medieval times (The White Company, Sir Nigel), it is not surprising that Conan Doyle has a large collection of histories and memoirs pertaining to those eras. Another chapter is devoted to exploration narratives, with an emphasis on Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. The science books he admires also tend to have an element of exploratory adventure to them, such as Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Alfred Russell Wallace’s Malay Archipelago.

I expected to walk away from this book with a short list of recommended readings, but Conan Doyle delivers much more than that. Through the Magic Door was truly an enjoyable reading experience. For the brief length of the book, one feels as if he were Conan Doyle’s personal friend, spending a pleasant afternoon of conversation in the gentleman’s study.
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