Brian Wang presents on early Chinese pastiches at the symposium (Photo by Anne Schwan)
On 25th April 2024, the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle was officially launched in Conan Doyle's alma mater. Mark Jones reports on the event and the following day's 'Global Conan Doyle' symposium.
On Doings of Doyle, we often express our hope that Conan Doyle should receive his due credit as one of the most important writers of his generation and not just one of the most popular. This feeling is amply shared by the editorial team of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle (hereafter ‘Edinburgh Works’ in preference to the ungainly ‘EEWACD’!) who, two years ago, began issuing new critical editions of the author’s most significant works. Last week, the series was officially launched in Conan Doyle’s hometown, and followed by a Global Conan Doyle symposium which brought together a small group of editors, scholars and one grateful interloper to explore Conan Doyle’s life and legacy.
Conan Doyle in 1924
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| Douglas Kerr launches the series (Photo by Anne Schwan) |
Launching the series, General Editor Douglas Kerr set our
minds back to 1924 to put Conan Doyle’s life and literary work in context. It
was a typically busy year for Conan Doyle: alongside the publication of his autobiography,
he wrote the third Challenger novel and spiritualist prospectus The Land of Mist,
arranged a retrospective of the artistic output of his father, conducted an
early radio broadcast for the BBC, and still found time to win the Authors’
Club billiards championship. Kerr argued that one would be hard pressed to find
an author with the range of works, activities, and interests to rival Conan
Doyle.
Jonathan Cranfield, who edited the Memoirs of Sherlock
Holmes and is now tackling the Case-Book, looked at Conan Doyle’s
Sherlockian output in 1924. The three stories published in 1924 (The Sussex
Vampire, The Three Garridebs and The Illustrious Client) mark a “Victorian
twilight” for the Great Detective in which he is shown to have reached his peak
and is entering a steady decline. Drawing parallels between the two collections
he has edited, Cranfield argued that the preoccupations of the young,
successful author that are reflected in the Memoirs are replaced by an
air of decay and pessimism in the Case-Book, in which Sherlock Holmes is
already becoming a figure of cultural nostalgia.
Roger Luckhurst took us back a further thirty years to the
peak of Conan Doyle’s literary and commercial powers, and to a rare time when the
author found himself out of step with popular opinion. In his edition of Round
the Red Lamp, Luckhurst explores Conan Doyle’s controversial experiments
with naturalism which saw him lambasted by the press and the medical profession
he had only recently left. A peculiar volume that blends social realism with
Gothic horror, the collection seems to pull in opposite directions, leading to a
discussion of how far Conan Doyle could be said to have been, even briefly, on
the side of the modernists.
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| Christine Ferguson on the two scandals that influenced The Land of Mist (Photo by Mark Jones) |
In 1924, Conan Doyle once again found himself out of kilter with popular opinion and facing a crisis in the spiritualist movement. Christine Ferguson argued that Conan Doyle’s 1924 novel The Land of Mist was a response to a crisis of Conan Doyle’s own making – the Cottingley Fairies incident which tarred spiritualism by association – and moral outrage at the occultist Aleister Crowley. While Crowley and Conan Doyle never met, the two were condemned as a pair in the pages of John Bull, the populist right-wing rag edited by doomed Liberal MP Horatio Bottomley. Ferguson compellingly argued that, with his arguments failing to convince the public of spiritualism, Conan Doyle fell back on his powers of fiction to make his case.
The Great-ish Detective
With three volumes now in print, The Edinburgh Works series
is not just a reflection of a flourishing scholarly interest in Conan Doyle,
but also a spur to new scholarship in all aspects of Conan Doyle’s life, work
and impact. This was amply demonstrated and celebrated on the second day of the
launch event at the Global Conan Doyle symposium, held at Edinburgh Napier
University.
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| Douglas Kerr opening the synposium on 26 April 2024 (Photo by Mark Jones) |
No Conan Doyle symposium would be complete without Sherlock Holmes, and the Great Detective made an early appearance – in mutated form – in three excellent papers on early pastiche, parodies and translations. Işıl Baş from Istanbul Kultur University, Turkey, explored the fascinating story of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the despotic ‘Red Sultan’, whose love of the Canon was used against him by political dissident Yervant Odyan, author of a pastiche in which Holmes sides with young Turkish radicals to uncover murders at the hands of the Sultan’s spies. While scholars have tended to view the detective novel as a social palliative in which order resolves chaos, Baş demonstrated how Odyan used Holmes to promote disorder and defy convention.
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| Croatian Holmes stories found by Antonija Primorac (Photo by Mark Jones) |
The session was rounded out by an eye-opening paper from Brian
Wang of Yokohama National University, Japan, who surveyed early Chinese
translations of the Holmes stories and pastiches that propelled Holmes to
Shanghai and cast him in a far less flattering light. Published in the first
two decades of the twentieth century during a post-Qing period of Chinese national
pride, Holmes was portrayed as a “fish out of water,” his deductive skills
leading him to false conclusions and increasingly tricky situations (such as ‘The
Naked Detective’ in which Holmes’s clothes are stolen …). Holmes becomes a
figure of fun and a symbol of the failure of the West, while the stories
themselves show new China’s ambivalent attitude towards modernity.
Andamania
The keynote was delivered by Shafquat Towheed from the Open
University, UK, whose excellent Broadview edition of The Sign of Four is
a must for any Doylean. Towheed’s work seeks to place The Sign of Four
in multiple colonial contexts, and here he focused on Conan Doyle’s depiction
of the Andaman Islands and islanders. While remote, the islands were very
familiar to late Victorian domestic audiences, having been appropriated as a British
penal colony in 1789, abandoned, and then re-established in the wake of the
Indian Mutiny. J. P. Walker, the governor of Andamans, based the colony’s
regime on that of Agra where he had previously served. The settlement reached
its peak in the 1890s when, with 12,000 convicts, it became the largest penal
colony in the British Empire. A topic of frequent correspondence in the
national press, including claims of drunkenness and obscenity, Conan Doyle
internalised press reports, adapting specific incidents for Jonathan Small’s
back story.
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| Shafquat Towheed discusses the Portman photograph that graces the cover of his edition of The Sign of Four (Photo by Mark Jones) |
The Andaman islanders were the subject of intense anthropological
study which would have been familiar to Conan Doyle and his contemporaries and
which reinforced views of White superiority. Towheed showed how British museums
acquired an immense volume and range of Andaman artefacts in the 1870s and
1880s, with the Pitt-Rivers in Oxford holding a 142-page index of Andaman objects.
Governor Maurice Vidal Portman “catalogued” the dwindling population (dwindling
as a consequence of syphilis, imported by the British) as he sought to “save”
the islanders who were driven to servitude, in a mirror of Small and Tonga. Portman’s
many chilling photographs can be accessed in the British Museum, one of which graces
the cover of Towheed’s edition of Sign.
Towheed’s lecture raises difficult issues for Conan Doyle
scholars, who struggle to balance the author’s opposition to racial prejudice
with his clear use of stereotypes in both his depiction of Tonga and Jonathan
Small’s history. Whether this was an exotic embellishment or something more
sinister was a theme we would return to throughout the symposium.
Beyond the sea
The third session focused on global connections within the works of Conan Doyle. Rosario Arias from the University of Malaga, Spain, opened the talks with a paper on Conan Doyle’s psychic vampire, Miss Penclosa, the mesmerist from Trinidad in The Parasite. Arias showed how Penclosa subverts gender roles, being female and predatory, and reflects the invasion and contamination narratives of late Victorian gothic fictions such as Dracula. Arias compared Penclosa with psychic vampires in Spanish literature, such as those in the works of Emilia Pardo Bazan, which the added the dimension of Spanish folk beliefs.
James Machin of Birkbeck University and the Royal College of
Art, UK, explored the American connections in The Stark Munro Letters, the
volume he has just concluded editing for the Edinburgh Works series. Machin explored
how the foil of an American correspondent allowed Conan Doyle to hold a mirror
to and challenge ideas and religious beliefs well established in Britain. Stark
Munro demonstrates Conan Doyle’s early Christian-spiritualist ideas, his
argument for “intelligent design” and rejection of atheism, and his ambition
for a global Anglophone spiritualist union far before he would make these
points explicit in the post-War period.
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| Oceanic journeys in Pole-star and Other Tales (Photo by Mark Jones) |
Depictions
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| Southport sands doubles for Utah in A Study in Scarlet (d. George Pearson, 1914) |
Clifford Goldfarb, Chairman of the Friends of the Arthur
Conan Doyle Collection at the Toronto Reference Library, Canada, explored the
depiction of Jewish characters in Rodney Stone, the novel he is editing
for the Edinburgh Works. While the majority of references are to Jewish boxers,
notably Daniel Mendoza who famously sparred with Lord Byron, there are other
more disparaging depictions here and elsewhere in Conan Doyle’s work. Goldfarb
explored these, Conan Doyle’s association with the Jewish writer Israel Zangwill,
and his views on the practical difficulties of establishing a Jewish homeland
and concluded the author was not antisemitic, but traded on contemporary stereotypes.
Lost Boys of the Empire
The final papers explored two of Conan Doyle’s most celebrated
adventure stories and his conflicted views of Empire. Simon James of Durham
University, UK, argued that The Lost World shows Conan Doyle’s desire to
set the clock back. The author shows male friendships to be the counter to the threat
of the new woman, with Ed Malone redeemed by growing out of his infatuation
with Gladys and finding solace in the companionship of Roxton and others. Conan
Doyle’s celebration of masculinity is a tacit acceptance of Imperial decline
and even degeneration which accelerated following the humiliation of the Boer
Wars.
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| Male friendships were the focus of Simon James' paper on The Lost World |
Switching focus to the earlier Sudan campaign, Douglas Kerr explored Conan Doyle’s depiction of the “good native” Tippy Tilly in The Tragedy of the Korosko. Kerr showed how the story was closely imbricated in contemporary events, being written while the Sudan campaign was unfolding, which perhaps boosted the story’s appeal. Tippy Tilly is shown to be resourceful, brave and, above all, loyal to the Europeans, but despite playing a pivotal role in the story, his heroism is reported and not seen. By reimagining Tippy Tilly as a foreground character, Kerr was able to give the character agency that is otherwise not apparent.
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| Shafquat Towheed giving the symposium's keynote (Photo by Anne Schwan) |
Mark Jones
3 May 2024
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