Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh. His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was English, of Irish Catholic descent, and his mother, Mary (née Foley), was Irish Catholic. His parents married in 1855. In 1864 the family dispersed due to Charles's growing alcoholism and the children were temporarily housed across Edinburgh. In 1867, the family came together again and lived in squalid tenement flats at 3 Sciennes Place.

 

   Supported by wealthy uncles, Doyle was sent to the Jesuit preparatory school Hodder Place, Stonyhurst, at the age of nine (1868–70). He then went on to Stonyhurst College until 1875. From 1875 to 1876, he was educated at the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria. By the time he left, he had rejected religion and become an agnostic, though he would eventually become a spiritualist mystic.

 

   Doyle's father died in 1893, in the Crichton Royal, Dumfries, after many years of psychiatric illness