"Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Doyles were a prosperous Irish-Catholic family, who had a prominent position in the world of Art. Charles Altamont Doyle, Arthur's father, a chronic alcoholic, was the only member of his family, who apart from fathering a brilliant son, never accomplished anything of note. At the age of twenty-two, Charles had married Mary Foley, a vivacious and very well educated young woman of seventeen.
After Arthur reached his ninth birthday, the wealthy members of the Doyle family offered to pay for his studies. He was in tears all the way to England, where for seven years he had to go to a Jesuit boarding school. Arthur loathed the bigotry surrounding his studies and rebelled at corporal punishment, which was prevalent and incredibly brutal in most English schools of that epoch.
A third novel, written at that time, was a very strange and confusing tale about the afterlife of three vengeful Buddhist monks called The Mystery of Cloomber. This story illustrates the most serious and incomprehensible schism in Conan Doyle's personality. Under one hand, he was capable of writing brilliantly about deduction and pure logic, on the other, he was obviously fascinated by and inexorably drawn to the paranormal and ultimately to spiritualism.
Read more at the Conan Doyle estate website.
