Sherlock Holmes In America

HOW THE CREATOR OF SHERLOCK HOLMES BROUGHT HIM TO AMERICA by Christopher Redmond

Christopher Redmond grew up in Kingston, Ontario, graduating from Queen’s University. He received his MA from the University of Waterloo, where he is currently director of internal communications, editing the university’s daily news bulletin. Redmond is the author of In Bed with Sherlock Holmes; Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes; and A Sherlock Holmes Handbook. He was formerly editor of Canadian Holmes, the journal of The Bootmakers of Toronto, Canada’s Sherlock Holmes society, and now operates the Web site Sherlockian.Net. Redmond is a member of several Sherlockian societies, including the Baker Street Irregulars of New York.

Arthur Conan Doyle-the creator of Sherlock Holmes and so many other characters and achievements-lived, from his birth in 1859 to his death in 1930, precisely 25,978 days. A little arithmetic shows that the exact middle of his life came on December 14, 1894, a winter day that saw him, at the age of thirty-five, aboard a ship in the North Atlantic, returning home from his first visit to North America.

Conan Doyle was British through and through, but nevertheless he loved America and visited the continent four times, and enthusiasts can trace many of his steps on this side of the water, and imagine how he felt as he saw views that we still can see today.

At thirty-five, Conan Doyle presumably considered himself a young man still, even if now carrying the responsibilities of middle age including two children and a wife, the former Louise Hawkins, who was slowly dying of tuberculosis. Young though he might still be, it was because of his considerable achievements already that he had been invited to come to North America to tour and lecture. He had managed to acquire an education-something not to be taken for granted by a youngster growing up in poverty in smoky Edinburgh, capital of Scotland-and then a medical training. After a few false starts in his medical practice, he had managed to earn a respectable income from it, in the Southsea suburb of Portsmouth, England’s largest Channel port. He succeeded there sufficiently, supplementing his medical income with occasional modest payments for magazine stories and newspaper articles, to become a principal source of financial support for his extended family, and be able to start a family of his own. He had married Louise in 1885, and initially they had lived in Southsea and then in South Norwood, a modest suburb of London, but Louise fell ill and they spent time at a number of resorts in the hope of finding a climate that would bolster her health.

Eventually, he abandoned medicine for writing as a career. He had produced scores of short stories in a number of magazines by then, some intended for boys and some for adults. By the time he sailed for America in 1894 he had published seventeen books of fiction, in fact, including three historical novels of which he was particularly proud. Most important, of course, he had invented his Great Detective, and had presented him to an increasingly enthusiastic public in two novels and twenty-four short stories. That little industry he had just brought to an end, however, against the advice of the author’s friends and family. The detective was not only wearing out his welcome with his creator, but taking time and attention away from what Conan Doyle considered his more important work, particularly his historical fiction. In December 1893 he published the short story called The Final Problem, in which he invented an arch-enemy for Holmes, one Professor Moriarty, and disposed of them both at an encounter in the Swiss Alps.

With Holmes making no more demands on him, ACD moved on to other projects. He and his ailing wife spent the fall of 1893 to the summer of 1894 in Switzerland, at Davos, which was not yet a ski resort, but was considered to have a splendid climate for lung patients. He spent time with her and their new acquaintances there, enjoyed winter sports and had skis shipped to him from Norway, and worked diligently at his desk. This period accounts for his semi-autobiographical novel The Stark Munro Letters, and it was also at this time that he created one of the three great characters of his literary career, Brigadier Gerard, a picaresque cavalry officer in Napoleon’s service.

In every sense, he was in the middle of his work and the middle of his life. That was the position when an invitation came from Major James Burton Pond in New York, who was in the business of bringing celebrity speakers to platforms across the United States. An earlier generation had welcomed educational lecturers, but by the 1890s the biggest audiences turned out for speakers who could be entertaining as well as improving, and Pond was the top of his profession, acting as manager to the likes of Henry Ward Beecher and Mark Twain. (He surely did not imagine that a device that had been demonstrated earlier in 1894 by Thomas Edison, a gadget that could throw an image of a moving photograph onto a wall, would soon almost entirely replace lecturing as a form of entertainment.)

Major Pond thought there would be a receptive public for Arthur Conan Doyle, and made him an offer of fixed fees for some lectures and a percentage of the box office for others. ACD agreed to go on tour from the beginning of October until the first of December. (In the end he stayed a few days extra.) He landed in New York on October 2, accompanied by twenty-one-year-old Innes Doyle, taking leave from the British Army to be his older and famous brother’s traveling companion throughout the tour.

Conan Doyle stepped off his ship into a land that perhaps was stranger to him than he realized. His idea of America had been shaped largely by his childhood reading, including the frontier novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid and the historical works of Francis Parkman; and as soon as he had the opportunity, he headed north to what he liked to call “Parkman Land,” the territory in and around the Adirondacks where the French and Indian War had been fought. In this region nearly every name was magic to him: Fort Edward, Bloody Pond, Ticonderoga. Now he was able to compare the genuine terrain with the descriptions he had already drawn in his novel The Refugees, much of it set in this borderland between America and Canada. “It was very much as I had pictured it,” he reported later, “but the trees were not as large as I thought.”

For a few days he was able to indulge himself as a tourist. He had hoped to do one other thing early in his American trip: pay a respectful visit to Boston and shake hands with Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great old man of 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 British authors. This one took the joke well: next to his signature in the book he drew a skull and crossbones, and wrote a doggerel verse about pirates. He also signed a copy of the printed menu for the event, and all the guests did likewise. That menu is still in existence, owned by a private collector.

Some souvenirs of the trip are preserved in institutions now. The public library in Niagara Falls, New York, has the autographbook maintained by the owner of the inn where Conan Doyle stayed overnight. The illustrated menu for the Lotos Club dinner, whose talk by Conan Doyle that night follows, is framed on the wall of the club’s grill-room. Among the most touching documents of all is the diary kept by Lydia Kendall, who saw him lecture at the City Hall in Northampton, Massachusetts, and wrote at length about the experience. “He is a finelooking man of thirty-five,” she wrote, “very tall and well-proportioned.” That firsthand evidence of the tour is now in the archives at Smith College, where Kendall was a student at the time.

Anyone who wishes to stand where Conan Doyle once stood, and imagine how Lydia Kendall saw him 115 years ago, can have that experience in Northampton, for the City Hall on Main Street still stands. So does Plymouth Church on East Hampshire Avenue in Milwaukee; so does the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Lafayette Avenue; so do many other halls in which audiences heard his “Readings and Reminiscences.” Similarly, today’s pilgrim can walk in the footsteps of the visiting author to Cooper’s Cave in Glens Falls (though it is no longer open to tourists as it was then), and even spend a night in Naulakha, Kipling’s house in Vermont where Conan Doyle spent the Thanksgiving holiday in 1894.

The tour ended in early December, as Conan Doyle was eager to get home for Christmas. He and his brother sailed from New York on the Cunard liner Etruria, landing in Liverpool on December 15. By this time he was the author of two more books than when he had departed for America. Round the Red Lamp was a collection of medical short stories, most of them previously unpublished, which had come out in October, in time for the reviewer in Worcester, the one who didn’t like The Lord of Chateau Noir, to complain about its sordid and painful content as well. And The Parasite, a creepy and sexual story about hypnotism, had appeared at the beginning of December.

That December, the first of the Brigadier Gerard stories, How the Brigadier Won His Medal, appeared in The Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle had apparently written it shortly before leaving for the United States, and at one of his lectures, making a change from his usual material, he read it aloud from the proof-sheets that he had been correcting. Now, back at his desk, he started turning out more adventures of the Napoleonic swashbuckler, as well as a story of English prizefighting in the same period, the early nineteenth century, that would become the novel Rodney Stone. For the toast of literary America, returned to his British roots, there was never any lack of things to be written.