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Special Issue

on

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

FEBRUARY 2015

From the Willing Suspension of Disbelief to the Embracing of Pretence:

Doyle’s Use of the Press to Create a Primordial Version of Virtual

Reality

Peter Calamai

“The Press, Watson, is a most valuable institution, if only you know how to use

it.”

Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Six Napoleons”

In Will in the World, his artful reconstruction of Shakespeare’s life and

career, Stephen Greenblatt discusses “charmed moments” such as “when a

dozen or more brilliant painters all seemed to converge at the same time on

Florence.” He draws a parallel with the extraordinary group of playwrights

that emerged in late sixteenth-century London. In addition to sheer genetic

accident, “there are always institutional and cultural circumstances that

help the accident make sense” (Greenblatt 199). A similar “charmed

moment” occurred in Great Britain for writers and journalists in the late

Victorian and early Edwardian eras, roughly from 1880 to 1910. An

explosion of readers, a proliferation of outlets and a widespread preference

for facts rather than opinion – dismissively called the “New Journalism” by

Matthew Arnold (638) – all converged. One product of this cauldron was

Sherlock Holmes, about whom the doyen of Sherlockian scholarship,

Richard Lancelyn Green, wrote four decades ago that he was “a figure who

jumped at once from the printed page into the living consciousness” (Letters

1).

Michael Saler has recently greatly enriched and extended this observation

into a complex and demanding book about “virtual reality” – imaginary

worlds which readers transformed into virtual worlds. He proposes that

the first was the world created by Arthur Conan Doyle in the four novellas

and fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes and Dr. Watson, a corpus

known as the Canon among aficionados. As Saler writes:

Sherlock Holmes was the first fictional creation that adults openly

embraced as real while deliberately minimizing or ignoring its creator, and

this fetishization of Holmes has continued for over a century. The cult of

Holmes focuses not just on a singular character, but on his entire world:

fans of the ‘canon’ obsess about every detail of the fictional universe Conan

Doyle created, mentally inhabiting this geography of the imagination in a

way that was never true for partisans of earlier characters .… Sherlockian

devotion is thus a departure from preceding public infatuations with

fictional characters and a template for subsequent public infatuations for

imaginary worlds and their protagonists. The public fascination with

Holmes commenced the transformation of certain imaginary worlds into

virtual worlds. The question is, why Holmes? (107).

Saler answers his own question, giving primacy to “the discourse of

disenchantment that circulated among intellectuals during the waning

decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth”

(107).

In my view, the reasons for the widespread public acceptance of the

Canon’s pretence are broader than mere disenchantment among

intellectuals. After all, it is not only readers in the late Victorian and

Edwardian periods who suspended disbelief to embrace Sherlock Holmes

as real. Many people still do so today, as evidenced in the continuous

torrent of Sherlockian pastiches, high-profit Hollywood movies and the

popularity of two television shows, the American Elementary and the

British Sherlock. In addition, a steady stream of letters continues, addressed

to 221B Baker Street, asking Holmes to investigate, a reality that provided

the basis for a recent crime book.1

This continuing embrace alone sets Doyle and Sherlock Holmes apart from

other authors cited by Saler in his “virtual reality” catalogue. The Cthulhu

Mythos of H P. Lovecraft and the Middle Earth of J.R.R. Tolkien exist today

primarily as spheres which aficionados treat as imaginary.

Other factors also justify considering Doyle and his created worlds as sui

generis in the virtual reality stakes. For starters, he can be seen, as Douglas

Kerr convincingly argues, as Britain’s last national writer (1). Kerr also

comments on how Doyle reflected the spirit of the times – and the interests

of the public – with his many evocations of sport and the Empire. As well

Doyle took full advantage of the public’s marvelling at what science could

do, and fears about what it might do (Calamai, “Sherlockian Science” 27-

30). Both Professor Challenger and Sherlock Holmes are modern scientific

investigators combating dangerous antagonists. Then there is the powerful

story-telling itself, as Kerr says:

Whether it is a historical or a contemporary setting, his fiction is marked

above all by strong narrative, punctuated by striking incident. When the

meticulously furnished scene of realism is to be found in a Conan Doyle

story – like the drawing-room at Baker Street – it is an anteroom to the

unexpected and unsettling. The prosaic everyday world does feature in his

stories, but it is there to be interrupted and transfigured by the

extraordinary, by mystery and crime and adventure, by the exotic, the

eccentric. or the supernatural. (Kerr 15-16)

In addition to these factors, I propose that Doyle’s adroit and well-observed

use of press accounts and the activities of journalists contributed to the

realism of not only his Sherlock Holmes stories but also of The Lost World

and subsequent Professor Challenger tales as well as a score of other short

stories.

First, a tour de horizon. This particular “charmed moment” starts with an

explosion of the urban population: in 1850 nine cities in Great Britain had

populations greater than 100,000; in 1891 there were twenty-three. As well,

literacy levels were rising in this urban population as a result of a series of

Education Acts between 1870 and 1891; the Industrial Revolution had

enlarged the middle class; the extension of voting rights to working-class

men translated into greater interest in political affairs; burgeoning rail

commuting provided a captive daily audience for quick reads; and most

important, the expanding lower middle class “would have time, the

commodity that only the rich had had before” (Ferris 3).

An explosion in print media was also fed by the realization that all those

new readers could be lured by advertising into becoming new consumers

At least 125,000 periodicals were established in Great Britain – and perhaps

as many as 150,000 – between 1824 and 1900, according to Kate Jackson (13).

The number of newspapers also increased. In 1895, London alone had

eleven morning daily papers and eight general-interest evening papers

(Lake British Newspapers 89-93).2

Many daily journalists wrote for the weeklies and monthlies and, as Mark

Hampton says, “virtually every writer had some connection with

journalism” [emphasis in original] (7). For example, the Canadian-born

Grant Allen described himself as “the busiest man in England” largely

because of his writing for weeklies (Morton, Busiest Man). He and Doyle

first met though journalism and later became friends, neighbours and

(posthumously) collaborators (Calamai, “Grant”)

Yet the premier example of a writer-journalist in this period is Arthur

Conan Doyle, whose output runs to a 726-page bibliography. Gibson and

Green, the compilers of that bibliography and arguably the best-informed

persons about Conan Doyle’s work, also edited a selection of Doyle’s letters

to the press. (Unabridged, they totaled 271,574 words.3) In the Introduction

to that volume, they state: “Probably no other popular writer has ever

before revealed quite such a wide range of interests or believed so fervently

that he had the ear of society, and therefore the right to address it on a

diversity of topics, as did Arthur Conan Doyle” (Letters 1).

No other fiction author of the period was immersed in journalism as

intensively and comprehensively as Doyle. He acquired and nurtured a

vast array of friends and acquaintances among the journalistic fraternity.

Partly this was because Doyle was a natural at what today we would call

networking. Ralph Blumenfeld, effectively the editor of the Daily Express

for 30 years, wrote in his memoirs: “I like to think of this big, burly boy with

the inquiring mind, the belief in fairies; the never-ending searcher and the

story-teller (168).

Doyle was readily accepted by journalists because he had been one of them,

reporting and transmitting news accounts to newspapers on deadline,

sometimes under trying conditions. For example, in April 1896 Doyle and

five other British pressmen made an arduous and potentially dangerous

journey up the Nile to Wadi Halfi, the British army’s staging base in the

south of Egypt from which Lord Kitchener planned to launch his assault

on what the British press called the “Mohammedan fanatics” in Sudan.

Elsewhere I have analyzed in detail the eight dispatches which Doyle filed

to the Westminster Gazette alongside reports from other “special

correspondents” and against the background of having myself reported

more than a dozen armed conflicts. My conclusion was that “Arthur Conan

Doyle bested some of the outstanding war correspondents of the day at

their own game” (Calamai, “Not a Shot” 29).

Doyle produced journalistic work for almost a half-century, from his

earliest published writing in the British Journal of Photography on 14 Oct.

1881 entitled “After Cormorants With a Camera” (Gibson and Green,

Essays 1-12) to the posthumously published “Conan Doyle on the War”

printed July 27, 1930 in the New York Herald Tribune (Green and Gibson,

Bibliography 496).

From the start, he used the press to further his causes and, occasionally, for

self-promotion. Consider the Late Local News clipping below from the

front page of the 2 Nov. 1882 Portsmouth Evening News. The last account,

ACCIDENT IN ELM GROVE, was written by Doyle himself who sent his

younger brother Innes to deliver the item in time for the newspaper’s

second edition. In a letter to his mother the same day, Conan Doyle wrote

“You could not imagine a finer advertisement” (Lellenberg, Stashower, and

Foley, Arthur Conan Doyle 179).

Causes on which his journalistic pen was unsheathed ranged from

popular pamphlets fighting perceived injustices, such as the wrongful

convictions of Oscar Slater (Stashower 411)4 and George Edalji (Stashower

258), to a sixty-thousand-word polemic defending British conduct in the

war in South Africa (Stashower 245)5, to a relentless stream of newspaper

articles in his later years defending spiritualism.

As his stature as a novelist and short story writer grew, Doyle also became

a sort of celebrity journalist. He reported on Queen Victoria’s funeral for

the 3 Feb.1901 New York World (Lellenberg, Stashower, and Foley 474) and

on a controversy which marred the marathon at the 1908 London Olympic

Games for the July 25 Daily Mail.

Fame also meant that Doyle became the focus of attention from journalists

himself. A good friend, the Canadian-raised Robert Barr, conducted a less-

than-serious interview with Doyle for the October 1894 issue of The Idler

magazine on the eve of his departure for an extensive lecture tour in the

United States. Barr suggested he “fake” the interview to save them both

bother, and when Doyle objected, Barr noted cynically that he “is an honest

man […] who has never had the advantage of newspaper training” (343).

Throughout that nine-week tour, in which he delivered the same lecture

thirty-four times, Doyle also gave numerous interviews to American

journalists, as Christopher Redmond details in his reconstruction of the

tour (27-151).

In summary, Arthur Conan Doyle was “embedded” with the press for

most of his life. He was personally well acquainted with at least thirty

British journalists, whom I have identified from the Egypt and South Africa

campaigns described earlier and from the authoritative Bibliography

(Pugh), four of the many biographies (Carr, Lycett, Nordon and

Stashower), Doyle’s letters to the press (Gibson and Green) and his

Memories and Adventures. These pressmen ranged from the editor of his

local newspaper, the Evening News in Portsmouth, to the editors of several

of the most influential London papers, with whom he hobnobbed at the

Reform Club (Green, “Doyle London” 25). In addition to the glamorous

war correspondents, Doyle also knew plenty of journalists who slaved in

the trenches, such as those on the Press team against whom he scored a

century when batting for the Authors in a cricket match at Lord’s on 17

September.1896.6

Doyle was hardly alone in having no newspaper “training.”7 Yet he shared

with most journalists, trained or otherwise, a deep attachment to

newspapers. In his ground-breaking work about Conan Doyle’s struggling

early days as a doctor in a Portsmouth suburb, Geoffrey Stavert illustrates

the strength of Doyle’s attachment to the halfpenny local Evening News: “At

one brief period he was so hard up that he even gave up smoking – a real

sacrifice for any Victorian gentleman, and with pipe tobacco at threepence

an ounce – rather than go without his paper” (26).

For many journalists, but not for Doyle, that attachment was to undergo a

strain as the New Journalism brought fundamental changes in newspapers

and in the way journalism was practised.8 What one observer has called

“an epistemology of speed and sensationalism” (Hampton, Visions of the

Press 92) in the New Journalism combined with its emphasis on concise

prose, personal interviews and facts, facts and more facts dovetailed neatly

with Doyle’s approach to story-telling. It is little wonder then that

invocations of the press have a significant place in his fiction from the very

start.

The fifth story which Doyle managed to get published introduced a device

that he would repeatedly apply – a fictional press account as the story’s

denouement. “That Little Square Box” appeared in the 1881 Christmas

number of London Society. A confused narrator misleads readers into

believing that something nefarious is about to take place involving two

men and a mysterious box on a ship 100 miles off the eastern seaboard of

the U.S. But an article supposedly from the sporting correspondent of the

New York Herald, reproduced as the lengthy closing paragraph, reveals that

the box merely contained two pigeons competing in the first ship-to-shore

race (Conan Doyle Stories 443-444).

A press account is also used as the conclusion for the final piece of original

Doyle fiction to appear, published posthumously in Liberty on 16 Aug. 1930

in the U.S. and in Britain in the December issue of The Strand Magazine.

Appropriately entitled “The Last Resource,” it features Kid Wilson, an

engaging American petty criminal, who relates a story about retributive

justice and then reveals it was a “vision.” The story closes with a “curt

paragraph in a morning newspaper” reporting the police discovery of

Wilson, with fatal stab wounds. (Gibson and Green, Uncollected 453-454). In

the intervening five decades, Doyle regularly used the same technique in

his short stories, usually to great effect by providing a surprise twist

ending. Since that twist appeared in the form of an ostensibly factual

newspaper account, a reader in the era of New Journalism was primed to

accept it.

So in “The Ring of Toth” from the January 1890 Cornhill Magazine, Doyle

employs a “concise narrative in the Paris correspondence of The Times” to

lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative of an

Egyptian who lived for four millennia and a mummy that comes to life

(Captain 303-304). Equally outré is “The New Catacomb,” which originally

appeared in the 1898 Sunlight Year Book and closes with a paragraph that

“made the rounds of the European press” about the body of Kennedy, an

English student, being found in a new catacomb in Rome. The press

account presumes he ventured there without candles or matches and so

could not find his way out. In an example of classic irony, the reader knows

he was abandoned there by a supposed friend as revenge for Kennedy

having seduced and then abandoned the friend’s betrothed (Conan Doyle

Stories 494-495).

Similar bizarre closing twists are featured in 1894’s “The Third Generation”

about venereal disease (Round 63-64), the hunting fable “The King of the

Foxes” in the July 1898 issue of Windsor Magazine (Green Flag 187), the

adultery revenge tale “The Retirement of Signor Lambert” in the December

1898 issue of Pearson’s Magazine (Gibson and Green, Uncollected 369) and

“The Lord of Falconbridge,” a boxing match cheered on by a scorned

woman which appeared in the August 1909 Strand (Conan Doyle Stories 76).

Much rarer are instances where Doyle employed the technique of a closing

press allusion for a happy ending. In “The Black Doctor” from the October

1898 Strand, a thin plot (dependant on a previously unknown twin brother)

concluded by having an apparent murder unconvincingly tidied up with

the announcement of a marriage ceremony “from a prominent column in

the Morning Post” (Conan Doyle Stories 643). A more successful surprise

press ending occurs in “A Shadow Before,” published in the December 1898

issue of Windsor Magazine. Conan Doyle’s story-telling is in top form as he

sketches the annual horse fair in an Irish town and introduces two men who

bid apparently preposterous amounts for all the horses, acting on

encrypted telegrams. A young London financier on the brink of

bankruptcy, present for a rest, deduces that the horses are being bought for

an impending war between France and Germany and cables his partner to

short-sell stock from those two countries. The story ends with the partner

in London reading a poster which a newspaper boy has fastened to a lamp

post, “France Declares War on Germany” (Green Flag 170).

Doyle also employs fictional press accounts at the beginning of short stories

where they act as an establishing statement and also nudge the reader at

the onset to move beyond the willing suspension of disbelief onto the

embracing of pretence. He first tried this with a sort of apprentice piece,

“The Winning Shot,” published in Bow Bells on 11 July 1883 (Gibson and

Green, Uncollected 85), but used the opening technique to far greater effect

in the first piece of fiction to bring him widespread notice. “J. Habakuk

Jephson's Statement,” from the January 1884 issue of Cornhill Magazine,

purports to reveal the true story of the celebrated brigantine Marie Celeste,

found abandoned at sea. After a few words, the narrator then quotes at

length from an unsigned article supposedly from the Gibraltar Gazette

(Doyle, Conan Doyle’s Best Books, Vol. II 421). In his memoirs Doyle says the

acceptance of that story by James Payne, the Cornhill editor, “for the first

time made me realize that I was ceasing to be a hack writer and getting into

good company (Memories 73). A less successful story featuring a drifting

vessel is “The Fate of The Evangeline” from the 1885 Christmas Number of

Boy’s Own Paper which uses a newspaper report for an establishing

statement and incorporates two further press accounts (Gibson and Green

Uncollected 200-203).

Doyle also experimented with press accounts as a device to move the plot

forward in several short stories – the 21 March 1891 “A Straggler of the ’15”

in Black and White and two Strand stories in June and July 1898, “The Beetle-

Hunter” and “The Man with the Watches” (Conan Doyle Stories 142-143, 572,

596-599). His most novel device might have been using the absence of press

reports as the opening hook for readers, as he did in The Tragedy of the

Korosko, published as a book in 1898 after being serialized in The Strand

Magazine.

“The public may possibly wonder why it is that they have never heard in

the papers of the fate of the passengers of the Korosko. In these days of

universal press agencies, responsive to the slightest stimulus, it may well

seem incredible that an international incident of such importance should

remain so long unchronicled. Suffice it that there were very valid reasons,

both of a personal and of a political nature, for holding it back” (Tragedy of

the Korosko 6).

At least three Doyle stories are known to have been inspired by actual press

accounts, and there are almost certainly more.9 The best-known is “The

Three Correspondents,” which appeared in the October 1896 issue of

Windsor Magazine. It tells of three London “special correspondents” under

fire in the Egyptian desert and their race to file a scoop (Green Flag 188-214)

and is drawn from Doyle’s own stint in April that same year as a war

correspondent in Egypt, recounted earlier in this article. Elsewhere I have

praised the story’s earthy and accurate portrayal of Victorian war

correspondents (“Three Correspondents”).

The second story of this ilk is less successful, perhaps because Doyle was

asked by Cassell’s Saturday Journal in 1884 to write a story which played off

a contemporary cause célèbre, an octogenarian Welsh follower of the

ancient Druid cult who was facing criminal charges for burning his dead

son in a campaign to legalize cremation. Although Doyle “went at it

furiously and finished it in three days” (Lellenberg, Stashower, and Foley

222), when “The Blood-Stone Tragedy” appeared in the magazine’s Feb. 16

issue, a judge had already dismissed the charges (“Blood-Stone 3809-

4021”).

The third story harkens back to that self-promoting news brief which Doyle

engineered into the Portsmouth Evening News on 2 November 1882. A

similar well-publicized intervention by a struggling medical practitioner is

key to the comic “Crabbe’s Practice,” which appeared in the Christmas 1884

issue of Boy’s Own Paper (Conan Doyle Stories 1081).

In Doyle’s Professor Challenger oeuvre, Edward Malone, a reporter with

the Daily Gazette, narrates three of the tales – The Lost World, The Poison Belt

and “The Disintegration Machine” – and features prominently in the other

two – The Land of Mist and “When the World Screamed” (Complete

Challenger). Doyle effectively employs several of the press-account devices

developed in early short stories and invents a new one by quoting from the

blaring black-on-yellow headings on the placards (more correctly, news

bills) used by newspaper street hawkers10 (Complete Challenger 287).

In another press innovation for Doyle, Malone concludes Poison by self-

indulgently reproducing the Gazette’s eleven decks of “magnificent

headlines” atop his “greatest journalistic scoop of all time” revealing that

the Earth had been in a “coma” for twenty-eight hours. In “Disintegration,”

Doyle has Malone recount how a star correspondent from The Adviser used

subterfuge to gain access to the site of Challenger’s earth-drilling

experiment, producing a story headlined “Mad Dream of a Scientist”

(Complete Challenger 565).

Doyle’s supreme exploitation of the press occurs in the Sherlockian Canon.

London newspapers are mentioned in twenty-four of the sixty cases

(Calamai, “Headlines” 25-26). In more than half the canonical cases,

newspapers both domestic and foreign, named and anonymous, serve as

devices to advance the plot, interpolate essential information or provide

narration.11

Drawing upon his close familiarity with the late Victorian press, Doyle

sends up the hyperventilated writing style of the era with a lengthy

supposed newspaper excerpt in the first published story, “A Study in

Scarlet,” followed by similar mocking excerpts in “The Cardboard Box,”

“The Six Napoleons,” and “Wisteria Lodge”12 (Complete SH 41, 589-590, 890,

880). It should be emphasized that Doyle, even when writing in the 1920s,

largely retained the late Victorian setting for the Sherlock Holmes stories

(“where it is always 1895” in the words of a poem recited at Sherlockian

gatherings). The portrayal of the practice of journalism was similarly frozen

in time.

In addition to mocking the press, Doyle also has Sherlock Holmes

repeatedly manipulate journalists and newspaper editors. Several cases

mention keeping developments from the press, as in “The Man with the

Twisted Lip,” “The Missing Three-Quarter” and “The Illustrious Client”

(Complete SH, 242, 635, 984). A variation of this tactic is preventing

embarrassing questions from the press, used by Holmes in “The Problem

of Thor Bridge” and in “The Retired Colourman” (Complete SH 1070, 1119).

Press manipulation that approaches the level of modern spin-doctoring

takes place in “The Illustrious Client” with Watson feeding false bulletins

to the newspapers over six days about the detective’s stalled recovery from

injuries when beaten by hired thugs (Complete SH 994). The paramount

instance occurs in “The Three Napoleons” where Holmes, through

Inspector Lestrade as an intermediary, deliberately plants a false theory

about a murder case with Horace Harker, a news agency reporter.13

Harker’s deadline-written account, carried in the London evening papers,

lulls the real murderer into a false sense of security and he walks into a trap

set by Holmes (Complete SH, 587, 589-590).14

Would an experienced news agency correspondent like Horace Harker

really be as gullible as Doyle would have us believe? In a detailed analysis

of the press aspects of this case, I conclude that he likely saw through the

ploy but went along because he got a good story out of it and would then

have realistic hopes of wangling a second interview with the normally

press-shy detective (Calamai, “Journalistic” 100-101). For those who have

embraced the virtual reality where Holmes and Watson are real people,

Harker’s own account is available (Calamai, “Journalist’s Account” 11-15).

Five other fictional journalists are named in the Canon but two in particular

may have resonated with the reality chords of Strand readers. In “The Three

Gables” Holmes says he must consult with Langdale Pike whom Watson

describes as “his human book of reference on all matters of social scandal”

(Doyle, Complete SH 1028). From Watson’s unflattering description, it seems

likely that the character of Pike was based on the breed of real-life

journalists who fed tittle-tattle to the popular press. One likely candidate

who would have been widely known at the time was George Robert Sims;

under the pen name Dragonet he wrote the “Mustard & Cress” gossip

column in The Referee, a weekly.15

The second fictional journalist is Neville St. Clair in “The Man with the

Twisted Lip” (Doyle, Complete SH 229-244). Disguised as a disfigured

beggar, St. Clair cleared £2 a day, the equivalent of his weekly pay as a

reporter on an unidentified London evening newspaper. Von Eckardt,

Gilman, and Chamberlin contend – without offering any evidence – that

Doyle was inspired by a similar story written by H.M. Stanley, the reporter

with the New York Herald who “found” Dr. Livingstone in 1871 (134).16 A

more probable inspiration was the unidentified author of two first-person

articles about street-begging that appeared in Tit-Bits, the stable mate of the

Strand, in 1891, the same year that “Twisted Lip” appeared (Calamai,

“Art”).

Kerr notes that Doyle, the most famous of crime writers, paradoxically does

not seem to very interested in – or particularly knowledgeable about – how

law and order worked in the society of his time (Kerr 147). “The Man with

the Twisted Lip” and most other Sherlock Holmes stories show readers

very little directly about police procedure, the daily life of the police, the

workings of the courts and so on. When they do, it is often through the use

of press accounts, as with the newspaper account of an inquest in “The

Boscombe Valley Mystery” (Doyle, Complete SH, 205-207).

To return in closing to the concept of “virtual reality,” followers of Sherlock

Holmes have generally expressed their gratitude to Michael Saler for the

academic respectability he has added to their long-standing belief that The

Master is without equal among fictional characters who have come to life.

As Robert Veld points out, Holmes’s immortality has in turn guaranteed

the continued virtual-reality existence of The Strand Magazine, although it

ceased publication in March 1950 (Veld 95). However, literary critic Pierre

Bayard has already proposed that the Sherlockian stories occupy an

“intermediate world” between the real and the imaginary. In this

intermediate world between the world of fiction and the world of reality,

imaginary characters acquire such vividness that they become real to

readers. (124).

Devotees have recognized this uniqueness of Sherlock Holmes for a long

time. As far back as 1902, Toronto lawyer J.B. Mackenzie treated Holmes as

a real person in a four-page article critiquing his actions and his reasoning

(Mackenzie 22-25). Four decades later, in 1946, the founding editor of The

Baker Street Journal, Edgar W. Smith, anticipated Saler’s thesis of belonging

to a shared world in his column in the journal’s second issue: “For it is not

Sherlock Holmes who sits in Baker Street. Comfortable, competent and self-

assured: it is ourselves who are there in the presence of our humble Watson,

conscious of a warm well-being and a timeless, imperishable content”

(Smith 516).

So it continues to the present day. Critic and author Michael Dirda, himself

an established Sherlockian scholar (Dirda On Conan Doyle), wrote more

than 4,000 words for The New York Review of Books of May 9, 2013 surveying

thirteen books, two TV serials and a movie about Holmes. In that article

Dirda alluded to Saler’s As If and commented that Sherlockian associations

“provide an opportunity for a primordial version of virtual reality role-

playing” (“Not”, 44). A similar view is put forward in Kerr’s book,

published as recently as July 2013; he devotes significant space to Doyle’s

success in bringing an imaginary world into being and making it knowable

to his readers (2). It should be noted, however, that the portrayal of 1895

England in the Canon fails to reflect many of the gritty realities, such as

daily life of the underclass (Calamai “Where”).

If the sleuth of Baker Street continues attracting adherents at the recent rate,

it may soon be time to update the self-deprecating motto coined by

Christopher Morley for the early Baker Street Journal – “Never has so much

been written by so many for so few.”17 I have argued here that some credit

in the continued health of that shared world of 1895 belongs to the inspired

way in which Conan Doyle, throughout his long career, successfully used

the press to invoke what can be called a primordial version of virtual reality

in much of his fiction.18

Works Cited

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Reading Public 1800-1900. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1998. Print.

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Bainbridge, Cyril. One Hundred Years of Journalism: Social Aspects of the Press.

London: Macmillan, 1984. Print.

Barr, Robert. “A Chat with Conan Doyle by an ‘Idler’ Interviewer.” The

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340-349. Print.

Bayard, Pierre. Sherlock Holmes was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound

of the Baskervilles. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Print.

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of Literature, No. 2. Niagara Falls, NY: Saturday Review, 2013. Print.

---. “Where It’s Always 1895” in Sugarman, Sally ed. Sherlock Holmes: The

Man and His Worlds. Shaftsbury, VT: Mountainside Press, 2013. 12-23. Print

---.“The Three Correspondents as Living History.” The Magic Door 14.2.

Toronto: Friends of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, Summer 2012. 1,3.

Print.

---. The Real World of Sherlock Holmes: The 2010 Cameron Hollyer

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1 Robinson, Michael. The Baker Street Letters. New York: Minotaur, 2009. Print.

2 Lake’s listing of Victorian newspapers that still existed in 1900 is more comprehensive than that of the supposedly authoritative Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism. See Empire News listing for an example.

3 http://www.batteredbox.com/octoganproject/doyleomnibus.htm

4 According to Lycett (422), Doyle appropriated the job of a sub-editor by rewriting the headline on an exclusive news story about the Slater case in the Empire News.

5 The British government supported Doyle’s effort, seeing his 1902 book, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct, as a way to combat anti-war sentiment. King Edward VII personally contributed £500 to defray the expense of publication and dissemination. Three months after the appearance of the tract, Doyle was informed that he would receive a knighthood in the next Honours List (Carr 189) (Nordon 57-60).

6 Research identified eight of the Press Eleven of whom five were either sports reporters or worked for cricket reporting agencies. Despite this “stacking,” the Press side lost by 216 runs to 81.

7 Numerous reporters on rural English papers and on large Edinburgh papers started in the composing room (Bainbridge 56).

8 For biographical information about the key figures in the New Journalism, see Brack et al and Robinson. For the two key newspapers, see Goodbody, Pope and Scott. For context and the wider background, see Altick, Brown, Calamai (“New Journalism”) and Wiener. For the accompanying changes in typography see Hutt.

9 For example, Doyle wrote his mother in February 1892 with excitement about a newspaper account headed “The Creepy Drama” and “especially the dialogue about the mower inside (emphasis in original) the house (Lellenberg, Stashower, and Foley 311).

10 A black-on-yellow news bill proclaiming “Murderous Attack on Sherlock Holmes” startles Watson in “The Illustrious Client” which appeared in the Strand in March 1927, fourteen years after Poison (Complete SH 993).

11 For further examples than those given below see Calamai “Peek” 4-30, Calamai “Dispatches” and Calamai “Real”.

12 The stories are listed in the chronological order of original publication, which differs from the order of appearance in The Complete Sherlock Holmes.

13 Conan Doyle named Harker’s employer as Central Press Syndicate, which is most probably a disguised version of Central News, an agency which Doyle knew well (Calamai, “Journalistic” 95-96) and which had a distinguished history (Hart).

14 Glenn Laxton has written with considerable wit about how poorly Holmes might fare against the more questioning media of the last quarter of the twentieth century (Laxton 201-202, 245).

15 http://www.scoop-database.com/bio/sims_george_robert retrieved 6 May 2013

16 When contacted in October 1999, Chamberlin was unable to provide a source for the Stanley claim, saying the material was provided by Von Eckardt who had since died.

17 Quoted by Edgar W. Smith in “The Writings About the Writings” in in Shreffler, Philip A. ed. Sherlock Holmes by Gas-Lamp: Highlights from the First Four Decades of The Baker Street Journal. New York: Fordham University Press, 1989: 33

18 For quick response to my queries I am indebted to Doylean authors Jon

Lellenberg, Andrew Lycett and Daniel Stashower as well as to noted Toronto

Doylean/Sherlockian Doug Wrigglesworth. As always, I must express my

indebtedness to the noble profession of librarians, specifically in this instance

Peggy Purdue, the curator of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at the Toronto

Public Library, and Scott Turner, the journalism specialist in the references

services of the MacOdrum Library at Carleton University in Ottawa. Similarly I

again express my gratitude to J.A. (Sandy) McFarlane for copy-editing and advice

on article structure. Comments from an anonymous peer reviewer helped sharpen

my argument. Finally, there is Reader Number One, my spouse, former English

teacher and avid mystery fan Mary Calamai, without whose support this article

would not have been completed. Any errors or omissions are all my own work.