Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties - Revision history

TCDE-Team at 21:35, 17 February 2026

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	\|author=Collin Brooks		\|author=Collin Brooks
	\|topic=Context		\|topic=Context
			\|summary=This essay argues that Sherlock Holmes should be valued not merely as melodrama but as a richly detailed social record of the 1890s, capturing the interiors, manners, class structures, and anxieties of late Victorian England. Comparing Arthur Conan Doyle to Jane Austen, it contends that Holmes endures as a cultural document of an age as much as a detective hero.
	}}		}}
	''Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties'' is an article written by [[Collin Brooks]] published in [[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (UK version) in december 1930.		''Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties'' is an article written by [[Collin Brooks]] published in [[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (UK version) in december 1930.

TCDE-Team at 21:54, 16 February 2026

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			{{Cargo_Research_Articles
			\|date=1930-12-01
			\|author=Collin Brooks
			\|topic=Context
			}}
	''Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties'' is an article written by [[Collin Brooks]] published in [[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (UK version) in december 1930.		''Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties'' is an article written by [[Collin Brooks]] published in [[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (UK version) in december 1930.

			This essay argues that [[Sherlock Holmes]] should be valued not merely as melodrama but as a richly detailed social record of the 1890s, capturing the interiors, manners, class structures, and anxieties of late Victorian England. Comparing [[Arthur Conan Doyle\|Conan Doyle]] to Jane Austen, it contends that Holmes endures as a cultural document of an age as much as a detective hero.

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TCDE-Team at 21:50, 16 February 2026

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	== Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties ==		== Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties ==
	[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174)]]		[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174)]]
	[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174b-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174b)]]		[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174b-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174b)<br /><br />Pall Mall East in 1894.<br /><br />Hyde Park Corner, 1894.<br /><br />Glimpses of Sherlock Holmes's England]]
	[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174c-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174c)]]		[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174c-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174c)<br /><br />With the Volunteers.<br /><br />Mr. Ira D. Sankey at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, 1892.<br /><br />Glimpses of Sherlock Holmes's England]]
	[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p175-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 175)]]		[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p175-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 175)]]

TCDE-Team at 21:45, 16 February 2026

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	== Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties ==		== Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties ==
	[[File:the-bookman-1930-12-p174-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174)]]		[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174)]]
	[[File:the-bookman-1930-12-p174b-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174b)]]		[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174b-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174b)]]
	[[File:the-bookman-1930-12-p174c-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174c)]]		[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174c-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174c)]]
	[[File:the-bookman-1930-12-p175-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 175)]]		[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p175-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 175)]]

	'''They Have Written...'''		'''They Have Written...'''

TCDE-Team: Created page with "''Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties'' is an article written by Collin Brooks published in The Bookman (UK version) in december 1930. TOC == Editions == * in ''The Bookman'' (december 1930 [UK]) 6 ill. * in ''A.C.D.'' (Vol. 4, 1994 [UK]) == Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties == File:the-bookman-1930-12-p174-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-th..."

2026-02-16T21:41:43Z

Created page with "''Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties'' is an article written by Collin Brooks published in The Bookman (UK version) in december 1930. __TOC__ == Editions == * in ''The Bookman'' (december 1930 [UK]) 6 ill. * in ''A.C.D.'' (Vol. 4, 1994 [UK]) == Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties == File:the-bookman-1930-12-p174-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-th..."

New page

''Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties'' is an article written by [[Collin Brooks]] published in [[The Bookman (UK)|The Bookman]] (UK version) in december 1930.

__TOC__

== Editions ==

* in ''[[The Bookman (UK)|The Bookman]]'' (december 1930 [UK]) 6 ill.
* in ''[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society|A.C.D.]]'' (Vol. 4, 1994 [UK])

== Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties ==
[[File:the-bookman-1930-12-p174-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[The Bookman (UK)|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174)]]
[[File:the-bookman-1930-12-p174b-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[The Bookman (UK)|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174b)]]
[[File:the-bookman-1930-12-p174c-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[The Bookman (UK)|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174c)]]
[[File:the-bookman-1930-12-p175-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[The Bookman (UK)|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 175)]]

'''They Have Written...'''

'''THE RIGHT WRONG THING'''

'''Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties'''

In "Rewards and Fairies" there is a story which displays Rudyard Kipling in the mood, but not the manner, of Thomas Hardy — much concerned with the irony of human judgments. It is called "The Wrong Thing," and tells of the knighthood which was bestowed upon Hal o' the Draft by a parsimonious king blind to the true merit and significance of the artist. One imagined, when the tale was new, that the emotion which filled Hal o' the Draft had also filled his creator, for the reward of popularity which came to Kipling came not from the work in which was shown his dearest artistry. Be that as it may, it is certain that to the day of his death [[Arthur Conan Doyle]] knew the emotion, for he held that the accolade of public acclaim, which had been his from the earliest days of "[[Sherlock Holmes]]," had obscured in the public mind his real right to appreciation. He was honoured for [[Sherlock Holmes]]; and those greater literary works which he himself held in honour received but a passing tribute from an occasional reader of discernment. He might have taken heart at the error, for the public was not wholly wrong in its judgment. [[Sherlock Holmes]] was not the wrong thing: it was the right thing acclaimed for the wrong reasons, or, as Henry James might have said had [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] been one of his fictional creations, it was "the right wrong thing."

Divers men in diverse places — "myself not least" — have borne testimony that for them and their generation the eighteen nineties, that renaissance period of English fiction, is typified not by the languishing esthetics of Wilde and not by the vigorous jingoism of Henley, but by Mister [[Sherlock Holmes]] "bowling down Baker Street in a hansom cab." The characteristic organ of that time was not the "Yellow Book" or the National Observer, but the [[The Strand Magazine|Strand Magazine]]. The memorable creation was not Lord Ormont, or Jude, or "the Woman Who Did," but [[Sherlock Holmes]]. The dominating public figure was not Gladstone with his collars and frenzies, Chamberlain with his orchid and his monocle, Balfour with his soulful droop, or Salisbury with his massive head, but [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] with his deerstalker, his pipe, his dressing-gown and his hypodermic syringe. It was the supreme merit of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s craftsmanship that with great economy he gave such reality to his creation that the personality became of more importance than the plots of which he was the pivot.

With no other man, of flesh or of fiction, has the public so intimate an acquaintance. The eccentric habits, like that of pinning correspondence to a mantelshelf by a jack-knife and that of keeping tobacco in the heel of a turkish slipper; the change of pipe or garb to suit a change of mood, the black clay for introspection and the cherrywood for disputation, the mouse-coloured gown for Baker Street and the large blue gown when a case took him from home; the love of German music and the refutation of [[Dr. Watson|Watson]]'s charge of lack of culture by the apt quotations from Taine and George Sand and Winwood Reade; the odd form of wit, Which is known now to the elect as Sherlockisimuss; the asperity with stupidity and the delight in a showman's dénouement — our knowledge of these phases of his character make him as real as Samuel Johnson and more fully known than many an historical personage enshrined for us in massive biographies and a small library of memoirs.

But it was not for this economy in creation that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] deserved the adulation which was bestowed upon [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]]. He was not alone among his contemporaries in that apt craftsmanship, for we know Captain the Reverend Sir Owen Kettle almost as intimately as we know [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]]. The thing for which [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] deserved appreciation — the right thing — can best be expressed by saying that while his contemporaries compared him with Gaboriau and Poe, posterity will compare him with Jane Austen. When the [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] canon has ceased to be read as a series of character-part melodramas, it will be cherished as a valuable costume-piece.

When, as a boy, one first read [[Sherlock Holmes]], one read as much for the plot as for the setting. A re-reading, when the plot ceases to surprise, ix an excursion into interiors. There must have been a time when "Emma" was read with a sustained interest in the amorous instabilities of Frank Churchill: "Emma" to-day is read for the human scene, not as it moves, but as it is "set." We care, again, little in 1930 for the happenings at Mansfield Park, but we care much for the places and the way in which they happened. So, in time, the Holmes canon will be read.

So much a child of his era was [[Sherlock Holmes|Sherlock]] that it comes as something as a mental shock to find him for once using a motor-car and a telephone when he is called from his Sussex retirement by topicality to befool in 1914 a German spy. Save for this startling excursion into the twentieth century, he remains essentially a representative figure of the transitional period between the mid-eighties and the late nineties. Were all other evidence destroyed, from his adventures Macaulay's New Zealander could reconstruct the kind of life that the English then lived. Those short Stories that lie between the "[[SCAN|Scandal in Bohemia]]" and the "[[RETI|Retired Colourman]]" might be adequate first authorities for a social history.

What do we find in them? A Europe in a state of constant perturbation about Naval programmes — not once or twice in his rough island story does Holmes lightly wave away titles and honours after recovering treaties and plans. A world fearful of the next erratic freak of one powerful European potentate ruffled by Britain's colonial development and apt to send messages without the cognisance of his Ministers of State. A community whose swiftest mode of road travel is the cab, whose trains go at express speeds of fifty miles an hour, whose valises and gladstone-bags have not yet been outmoded by wardrobe trunks and expanding suit-cases, whose democratic admiration of aristocratic social beauties is such that professional photographers still display their lovely photographs for sale in shop windows, not foreseeing the picture post card boom of the early nineteen hundreds or the photographic processes of the twentieth century illustrated society weekly. A world of cheap prices, in which the very best hotels charge only eight shillings for a room, half a crown for breakfast, and — unbelievably — only eightpence for a glass of sherry. A business world in which the typewriter is as yet so rare that from a few flaws in alignment [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] can deduce the personality of the possessor of any machine. A capital city which still abounds in ragamuffins but one remove in kind from the "Poor Joe" of Dickens, ragamuffins who know nothing of school-leaving ages and whose parents know nothing of a "dole." Country houses and London lodgings. still illuminated by gas-jets not yet, presumably, enhanced even by the incandescent mantle.

All these indications of the kind of life that was lived forty years ago are there. What of the people who lived it? Society then, as we see it through the hawk-like eyes of [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]], was dominated by a select aristocracy, very class-conscious and extremely jealous of its marital honour. Statesmen for the most part were drawn from this aristocracy, although many of them were beginning to find the resources of landed proprietors unequal to the pace set by rich manufacturers. (Lord Holdhurst, who was Secretary for Foreign Affairs and a future Prime Minister, Holmes noticed, had a struggle to keep up his position and was reduced to the plebeian economy of wearing shoes that had been resoled.) Below this first circle of the London Inferno — or was it Paradiso ? — were other circles, upper-middle-class circles in which honest "cits" were blackmailed or troubled by wild sons who might steal coronets pawned to their fathers' firms for vast sums by owners unmentionably great in the land; lower-middle-class circles whose homes are described for us with the vividness of Arnold Bennett, but without his photographic detail; upper-lower-class circles in which sporting poultry dealers wore side-whiskers and spent their leisure backing horses; lower-lower-class circles which still supported the Christmas goose club and went to bed by candlelight; shabby-genteel circles which revolved round lodging-houses and the females of which sought posts as governesses because the emancipation of woman had not yet opened business and trade to them.

Each of these circles had its romantic interlopers — Mutiny veterans; millionaires whose fortunes had been founded when convict ships still sailed for Botany Bay; ex-bushrangers; gold-diggers and prospectors who had fallen foul of Mormonism, that immoral religion which was perpetually stirring alarm by menaces to the English home; foreign gentlemen of dubious origin and still more dubious occupations. Communications were, by modern ideas, faulty. A hunted man could cross to Europe and lose himself with little difficulty. Transit across the high seas was dangerous, ships under sail were constantly and conveniently wrecked by storms.

The new journalism was just coming in, but the Northcliffe rates of pay had not been instituted, for while [[Neville St. Clair]] as a reporter was sent out to gather at first hand articles on begging but, even as a "stunt artist" — as we, with our graceful idiom, would call him — he could not raise twenty-five pounds when he desperately needed it, and turned professional beggar in good earnest, making two pounds a day by that work instead of two pounds a week as a star reporter. The old journalism was not yet dead, for London was not restricted to three evening papers, but had many. Holmes, wishing to publish a small advertisement, instructs his agent to use the "Globe, Star", "Pall Mall", "St. James's Gazette", "Evening News", "Standard", and any others that occur to you," giving us a total well over the half-dozen which immediately occurred to his mind.

As Jane Austen left for us pictures of a social life untroubled by railways and industrialism, so [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] has left for our children pictures of a life untroubled by telephones and " talkies." Her quiet, sequestered country-side is matched by his cosy city. England to her had been a country garden: London to him was still a township. Both gave tone to picture by a skilful use of climate. Those showers that send her heroines tripping for shelter into linen drapers' shops, those fogs which swirl down Baker Street and draw Holmes from his test-tubes to the coal fire over which the faithful Watson is already sitting, are cunningly used contrivances to create more than a sense of physical atmosphere. Each was working in a narrow medium. She neglected Napoleon and the forerunners of the Luddities to concentrate upon her warm interiors: he neglected Manning and the leaders of the Dock Strike, Wilde and the denizens of the Grosvenor Gallery, to concentrate upon his warm interiors. It is but an accident of form that her interiors housed men and women disturbed by nothing more serious than strained or complicated amatory relationships, while his housed men and women disturbed by material disaster and sudden death. The room into which Holmes walks from his own lodging in Baker Street may contain a corpse, whereas the room into which Sir Thomas Bertram walks will only contain a cad, but the essential point is that into each room we walk too.

And, let it not be forgotten, the room and its occupants in each case we shall see the better because of the quiet irony of the artist who presents it. "[[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] an ironist!" the shade of Jane might cry. Aye, lady, it was my word. [[NOBL|The Noble Bachelor]]; the [[Duke of Holdernesse]]; [[Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein]], Grand Duke of Cassel-Falstein and Hereditary King of Bohemia; the [[Trelawney Hope|Rt. Hon. Trelawney Hope]], [[Colonel Ross]], the owner of [[Silver Blaze]] — yes, and little [[Lestrade]] of the Yard — these are figures wrought by an ironist, or, if not by an ironist, by a carver of puppets who constantly forgot that the work in hand was to articulate wooden figures, because irony kept breaking in.

It is only when one compares the pictures of these two recorders that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s real stature becomes apparent. The early nineteenth century interiors of Jane Austen are filled by men of feelings: the late nineteenth century interiors of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] are dominated by a man who thinks. Jane had written for a caste which esteemed reserve and emotion; [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] wrote for a literate democracy which ardently appreciated action and intelligence. Both, in the quietest way and as if by accident, satirised and arraigned the audiences for which they were articulate. Each held a mirror to the age, and if [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] fashioned as his caryatid a gaunt and eccentric hero where Jane had used a group of gay and concentric heroines, the reflection was no whit less true and exact.

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← Older revision		Revision as of 23:50, 16 February 2026
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	== Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties ==		== Conan Doyle and the Spirit of the Nineties ==
	[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174)]]		[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174)]]
	[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174b-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174b)]]		[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174b-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174b)<br /><br />Pall Mall East in 1894.<br /><br />Hyde Park Corner, 1894.<br /><br />Glimpses of Sherlock Holmes's England]]
	[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174c-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174c)]]		[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p174c-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 174c)<br /><br />With the Volunteers.<br /><br />Mr. Ira D. Sankey at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, 1892.<br /><br />Glimpses of Sherlock Holmes's England]]
	[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p175-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 175)]]		[[File:the-bookman-uk-1930-12-p175-conan-doyle-and-the-spirit-of-the-nineties.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (december 1930, p. 175)]]