Sherlock Holmes In America

American literature, whose name he had borrowed for his own detective. But Oliver Wendell Holmes died on October 7, 1894, at the age of eighty-five, while ACD was deep in the northern woods, staying at a six-bedroom hunting lodge near Saranac Lake made available by a friend of a friend. By the time he emerged from Parkman Land and was able to visit Boston, the best he could do was to place a wreath on Holmes’s grave.

It is exhausting just to list the places Conan Doyle visited during his lecture tour that fall. He spoke repeatedly in New York and Chicago, and made single appearances in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Detroit, Washington, Baltimore, Elmira, Glens Falls, Schenectady, Jersey City, and some twenty other places. He gave the same lecture thirty-four times in two months, and other lectures or readings a total of five times, and the biggest variation seems to have been the opinions of local reporters about what his accent was like. One of them called it “a mixture of English, Irish, Scottish, and cold,” and it is no wonder if he came down with a virus after so many nights consisting of straining his voice to speak in a gigantic hall, being delivered to the railway station at midnight, catching a few hours’ sleep aboard a train, arriving in a new city the next morning, seeing a few of the local attractions, having dinner with local literary figures or social climbers, then lecturing once again, and repeating the process, day after day with few breaks.

A typical day of the trip was Thursday, November 1, when ACD travelled from Boston to Worcester, Massachusetts. He was a guest of the Woman’s Club of Worcester, which had invited him to give one of the lectures in the series it was sponsoring that season. All 827 seats in the downtown Association Hall were filled when Conan Doyle appeared at eight o’clock on a stage decorated with large palms, ferns, and white chrysanthemums. The speaker was introduced by the president of the club, the wife of a local manufacturer and state legislator, and she explained Conan Doyle to the audience as “the author of those famous detective stories which have entertained, delighted, and mystified two continents.” After the lecture, which lasted about an hour, the ladies carried their guest off to a reception at the home of another local industrialist and his wife. Arthur and Innes, as well as the leaders of the Woman’s Club, shook the hands of about 175 people in the receiving line before there was finally a chance for some rest. Experiences of this kind, in which local dignitaries missed no opportunity to meet the celebrity author, were repeated day after day through the exhausting ten weeks of the trip.

As for Conan Doyle’s lecture itself, it was the same almost every night, under the title “Readings and Reminiscences.” He had come to North America hoping to give several literary talks in rotation, including one about the novelist George Meredith, whom he considered to be the greatest author of his time-but sponsors and audiences were not interested in George Meredith. What they wanted to hear about was Sherlock Holmes, and Holmes is what his obliging creator talked about, time and again. Newspaper reports of his successive lectures quote various sentences and paragraphs, to the point that it is possible to reconstruct the entire hour’s ramble about how he became an author, together with some comments on Holmes and some on the writing of his historical novels. Many sentences and whole paragraphs of his talk later found their way into his autobiography, Memories and Adventures.

Here is one anecdote from childhood mentioned only briefly in the autobiography, but told more fully in the lecture from 1894: “I can remember that into the little flat in which we lived there came one day a great man- gigantic he seemed when viewed from the height of two-foot-nothing. His shoulders, I remember, spanned the little door and his head was somewhere up near the gas chandelier. His voice, too, was as big as his body and I have since learned that his heart was in the same proportion. I can still remember the face of the man, clean-shaven, pugilistic, with an old man’s hair, a young man’s eyes, and a child’s laugh. Above all I remember his nose, which fascinated me by its strange distortion. Long after I had been tucked into my little crib I could hear him roaring and rumbling in the next room, and his bare personality left as vivid an effect upon my three-year-old mind as his name and fame could do upon the thousands who knew him as William Makepeace Thackeray.”

Along with the reminiscences came the readings, which included two passages from Sherlock Holmes-the classic section from The Sign of the Four in which Holmes examines Watson’s pocket watch and deduces more about Watson and his family than Watson was prepared to hear, and a brief section from “The Greek Interpreter” in which Holmes and his brother Mycroft match observations about people in the street below, from at the window of the Diogenes Club in Pall Mall. Then, just about at the end of his performance, Conan Doyle set Holmes aside to read an entire short story from his other work, which seems generally to have been one that had only just been published in The Strand Magazine in England and a number of American newspapers, The Lord of Chateau Noir. It would eventually form part of the collection The Green Flag and Other Stories, issued in 1900. The tale is fairly gruesome, in keeping with a theme of physical mutilation that surfaces repeatedly in Conan Doyle’s writing, especially his stories of crime, including The Cardboard Box and The Crooked Man, but also his general and historical fiction. After the lecture in Worcester, for example, the local newspaper, the Evening Gazette, complained that it had been a mistake for the visitor to read such a thing, calling it “painful,” “brutal,” and “unpleasant.”

What emerges from these sources is not just the story of one lecture tour, but a portrait of social and literary America in 1894. [2] He did not see the whole country, going no further south than Washington, D.C. and no further west than Milwaukee, but within that scope there was plenty for him to see, plenty of people to meet, and plenty more he might have enjoyed meeting if the pressure had not been so intense and continuous. After shaking those 175 hands at the reception in Worcester, he may have felt mixed enthusiasm for getting up the next day, traveling to Amherst, and giving the same talk all over again, this time for an audience of college men. But there were clearly good times as well. One of the best may have been his day in Indianapolis, where he stayed at a hotel that was also home to the local poet laureate, James Whitcomb Riley. They met with mutual enthusiasm, and apparently spent several hours talking in one or both of their rooms upstairs-and anyone who knows of Riley’s habits will suspect that while they talked, a bottle and a couple of glasses were not far away.

In Yonkers, New York, Conan Doyle had dinner with John Kendrick Bangs, the writer best known now for using Sherlock Holmes as a character in his comic novel The Pursuit of the House-Boat. A biography of Bangs tells how everyone went upstairs to change for dinner, and what happened after Conan Doyle came down and took a seat in Bangs’s library: “As Bangs crossed the hall to the wide doorway of the library, he saw the back of Doyle’s head above the plush comfort of a chair which had been drawn up before a blazing fire on the library hearth. At the same moment he was shocked to see his son move swiftly upon Doyle from the rear, and, with a Gollywog Doll poised on high, bring it down upon the crown of the distinguished creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle like a flash seized the boy and went to the floor in a wrestling match, easily bringing the attacking party to complete subjection. Looking up and smiling, Doyle eternally subjected Bangs also. ‘Oh, never mind, Mr. Bangs,’ he said. ‘This is only another example of the irrepressible conflict between Old England and Young America!’”

Newspaper reporters sometimes asked him about exactly that sensitive issue. Conan Doyle told an audience of American literary men at New York’s Lotos Club that Britons “exult in your success and in your prosperity,” but at a dinner in Detroit he took exception to some derogatory remarks about the British Empire made by an intoxicated speaker late in the evening. “You Americans,” he rose and said in reply, “have lived up to now within your own palings, and know nothing of the real world outside. But now your land is filled up, and you will be compelled to mix more with the other nations. When you do so you will find that there is only one which can at all understand your ways and your aspirations, or will have the least sympathy. That is the mother country which you are now so fond of insulting.”

Conan Doyle visited Brattleboro, Vermont, to have Thanksgiving dinner with an expatriate Briton, Rudyard Kipling, and his American wife and in-laws, and they astonished local residents by playing a game of that newfangled sport, golf, across a nearby cow-pasture. In Philadelphia, he had dinner at the home of publisher Craige Lippincott in Rittenhouse Square. In New York City, he met with a less affluent publisher, S. S. McClure, and gave him a check for a thousand pounds sterling by way of investment in his struggling magazine-an amount he afterwards said accounted for the entire net proceeds of his lecture tour, worth about $100,000 in today’s money.

And there were a number of literary luncheons at which he met the writers and would-be writers of the day. These tended to be events for gentlemen only, but there was one particularly festive lunch in Chicago, at the home of a distinguished banker, at which ladies were present as well as businessmen, a prominent clergyman, and two noted authors of the time, Eugene Field and Hamlin Garland. Field took the opportunity to tease Conan Doyle a little by asking him to sign a copy of one of his books-a cheap, badly printed, pirated edition of The Sign of the Four, at a time when copyright and literary piracy in America were continuing aggravations for