Sherlock Holmes In America

THE ROMANCE OF AMERICA by A. Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was the creator of the most successful detective of all time, Sherlock Holmes, whose exploits took on a life of their own to thousands of mystery readers around the world, and still resonate with a large audience today. His creator studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, served as a senior physician at a South African field hospital during the Boer War, and was knighted in 1902. His writing career had been well established by then, with the tales of Holmes and his chronicler and companion John Watson passing from literature into legend.

(Toward the end of his first trip to America, on November 18, 1894, Conan Doyle was given a dinner in his honor at New York’s distinguished Lotos Club, attended by many leaders of New York public and literary life. “Dr. Doyle is not more than thirty-five years of age, closely fulfilling his own conditions of the man most to be envied-‘a writer of romances who has not passed his thirty-third year,’” said the club’s twenty-fifthanniversary history (A Brief History of the Lotos Club by John Elderkin, Lotos Club: 1895). In his remarks, Conan Doyle demonstrated that if some Americans were unfriendly toward the British Empire, as he found on his speaking tour across the country, he was nonetheless a Briton enchanted by America.)

There was a time in my life which I divided among my patients and literature. It is hard to say which suffered most. But during that time I longed to travel as only a man to whom travel is impossible does long for it, and, most of all, I longed to travel in the United States. Since this was impossible, I contented myself with reading a good deal about them and building up an ideal United States in my own imagination. This is notoriously a dangerous thing to do. I have come to the United States; I have traveled from five to six thousand miles through them, and I find that my ideal picture is not to be whittled down, but to be enlarged on every side.

I have heard even Americans say that life is too prosaic over here, that romance is wanting. I do not know what they mean. Romance is the very air they breathe. You are hedged in with romance on every side. I can take a morning train in this city of New York; I can pass up the historic and beautiful Hudson; I can dine at Schenectady, where the Huron and the Canadian did such bloody work; and before evening I have found myself in the Adirondack forests, where the bear and the panther are still to be shot, and where within four generations the Indian and frontiersman still fought for the mastery. With a rifle and a canoe you can glide into one of the black eddies which have been left by the stream of civilization.

I feel keenly the romance of Europe. I love the memories of the shattered castle and the crumbling abbey; of the steel-clad knights and the archer; but to me the romance of the redskin and the trapper is more vivid, as being more recent. It is so piquant also to stay in a comfortable inn, where you can have your hair dressed by a barber, at the same place where a century ago you might have been left with no hair to dress.

Then there is the romance of this very city. On the first day of arrival I inquired for the highest building, and I ascended it in an elevator-at least they assured me it was an elevator. I thought at first that I had wandered into the dynamite gun. If a man can look down from that point upon the noble bridge, upon the two rivers crowded with shipping, and upon the magnificent city with its thousand evidences of energy and prosperity, and can afterward find nothing better than a sneer to carry back with him across the ocean, he ought to consult a doctor. His heart must be too hard or his head too soft.

And no less wonderful to me are those Western cities which, without any period of development, seem to spring straight into a full growth of every modern convenience, but where, even among the rush of cable cars and the ringing of telephone bells, one seems still to catch the echoes of the woodsman’s axe and of the scout’s rifle.

These things are the romance of America, the romance of change, of contrast, of danger met and difficulty overcome, and let me say that we, your kinsmen, upon the other side, exult in your success and in your prosperity, and it is those who know British feeling-true British feeling-best, who will best understand how true are my words. I hope you don’t think I say this or that I express my admiration for your country merely because I am addressing an American audience. Those who know me better on the other side will exonerate me from so unworthy a motive.