A Novelist's Views on Fiction
A Novelist's Views on Fiction is an article published in the North-Eastern Daily Gazette on 17 november 1893.
Report of a lecture "Facts about Fiction" given by Arthur Conan Doyle on 16 november 1893 at the Cleveland Literary and Philosophical Society (Middlesbrough, UK).
Report
Middlesbrough was honoured with a visit from one of our best known story tellers last night, and the lecture hall of the Literary and Philosophical Society, in Corporation-road, was filled with members and their friends anxious to hear what the author of "Sherlock Holmes" thought about books from other pens. Dr. Walker presided. — The LECTURER chose for his subject "Facts about Fiction." England, he said, had a permanent asset in her literature which for all time would show how high the tide of thought had surged in these islands. Whilst marble of men's shaping vanished like a dream, the dreams of men's shaping outlived the marble. Referring to the false cry of decay in British literature, he admitted that it was impossible to deny that we had no living writers to compare in the hold they had on the general estimation of the public with either Dickens or Thackeray, but if name for name they compared badly with those who cast a lustre upon the first half of the Victorian era it was an indisputable fact that fiction as an art had improved since then, and the writers had a more clear conception of the laws which governed it. The sympathies of the younger school had been broadened by the growth of the British Empire, and made their ideas less insular than their predecessors. Our literature had become wonderfully cosmopolitan, and was destined to become more so year by year. If greater writers were wanting, the average was possibly as high as ever. Incidentally Dr. Doyle spoke in terms of warm praise of the polished style of Mr Hornung, who is connected with Middlesbrough by family ties.
