Doyle's father failed to achieve either fame or fortune, working most of his life as a poorly paid minor civil servant while suffering from epilepsy, alcoholism, and worsening bouts of depression. While Doyle was generous to his father in his autobiography, he was often bitter elsewhere about his father's emotional withdrawal and financial failures. His mother was the strength and center of the family, successfully sustaining and nurturing the family despite a life of poverty.
Doyle was her eldest and favorite son, and her early influence on him was profound. She wanted him to be a gentleman and passed on to him an obsessive concern with genealogy and a romantic conception of the feudal past. The tales of adventure, chivalry, and romance he heard from her as a child (such as Sir Walter Scott's novels) considerably shaped his ideals of behavior, his concept of the heroic, and the content and style of his historical fiction.
Beginning in 1869 Doyle was sent to Jesuit schools, Hodder and Stonyhurst, where he received an education consisting of authoritarian methods, corporal punishment, spartan living conditions, and the tedious study of Latin and Greek that left him hating the classics.
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