Some Wednesday Readings

Papa’s Century – David Warren at Essays in Idleness. 

“The Sensation of Seeing”: How T.S. Eliot Defamiliarizes the Christmas Story – Carter Johnson at Front Porch Republic. 

 

“Twelfth Night,” poem by Sally Thomas – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Inside Columbia University’s ‘Museum of Terror’ – Maya Sulkin at The Free Press.

 

Sherlock Holmes vs, the KKK: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Civil War, and Slavery – Kevin Donavan at Emerging Civil War.

 

Faith on the Hill: The religious composition of the 119^th Congress – Jeff Diamant at Pew Research Center.

 

Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates by Mark Neel – review at Civil War Books & Authors.

 

In the Winter Garden – Spitalfields Life.

 

Poet Laura: New Year, New Lists – Dheepa Maturi at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Je suis Charlie, ten years on – Freddie Attenborough.

 

Top photograph: Edward Bates, Attorney General under Abraham Lincoln. 

The Museum of London’s “Sherlock Holmes”

For five months in 2014-2015, the Museum of London hosted an exhibition about that most famous of all fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes. Since the first Sherlock Holmes story appeared in the Strand Magazine in the early 1890s, the literary creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has been imitated, replicated, adored, borrowed wholesale by other authors, and filmed and recorded countless times in movies, radio, and television.

And his popularity endures. Consider Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, or the television series Elementary. The Museum of London’s exhibition, Sherlock Holmes under the Microscope, was an extraordinarily popular event.

For the exhibition, the Museum published a companion book, Sherlock Holmes: The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die, a collection of essays edited and compiled by Alex Werner, head of the museum’s History Collections. The museum wisely did not tie the book to the exhibition, and instead brought together six essays (and a considerable number of illustrations) that will stand the test of time and add to the literature about the famous detective.

The introductory essay, “A Case of [Mistaken?] Identity,” is by Sir David Cannadine, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University. It is a fine contextual setting piece, placing Holmes in his historical context of late Victorian London and drawing a detailed picture of what London was like socially, politically, and culturally at the time, and how it influenced both Doyle and his detective.

John Stokes, Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature at Kings College London, delves into “The ‘Bohemian Habits’ of Sherlock Holmes.” In 1980s London, “Bohemia” was both a specific place – embracing Covent Garden, the Strand, and Fleet Street – and a way of life.

In “Sherlock Holmes, Sidney Paget and the Strand Magazine,” the museum’s Werner introduces us to Sidney Paget, the illustrator who has as much to do with our picture of Sherlock Holmes as Doyle himself. It was Paget who gave Holmes many of his distinguishing features, including the famous deerstalker cap (which Doyle had never included). Werner also describes the Strand Magazine and the role it played, and how it achieved the popularity it did. (The book includes a complete reprint of an article published by the Strand in 1892, “A Day with Arthur Conan Doyle.”)

Pat Hardy, Curator of Paintings, Prints and Drawings at the Museum of London and the Sherlock Holmes exhibition’s curator, examines “The Art of Sherlock Holmes,” the art, photographs, drawings and prints of the period. He provides ample detail of those which included London’s famous fog (and includes some beautiful examples of photographs).

The Museum of London

Clare Pettet, Professor of Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture at Kings College London, looks at “Throwaway Holmes,” a discussion of communication methods in the 1890s and how new developments were fundamentally changing daily life (and how they were used in the Holmes stories).

The final essay, “Silent Sherlocks: Holmes and Early Cinema” by Nathalie Morris, Senior Curator of the British Film Institute’s National Archives Special Collections, consider the early forerunners to Benedict Cumberbatch (my words, not hers). American actor William Gillette essentially set the image of Holmes on screen for his own and future generations, and John Barrymore also played the detective in an early film.

The subtitle of the book, “The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die,” is a concise summary of the world’s fascination with Sherlock Holmes. It’s difficult to think of a fictional character who has had more of a pull on our imaginations than Sherlock Holmes. The Museum of London’s Sherlock Holmes goes a long way to explaining the “why” of that influence.

Note: The Sherlock Holmes exhibition ended in April of 2015, but the Museum of London is well worth a visit. Located in the Barbican Centre about three blocks north of St Paul’s Cathedral, the Museum has outstanding exhibits on pre-Roman and Roman London (including a view of a piece of the original Roman Wall still standing), Victorian London, and the Lord Mayor’s gilded coach, among many other exhibits.

Illustration: Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes in “Silver Blaze,” Strand Magazine, December 1892. Drawing by Sidney Paget.

“Arthur & George” by Julian Barnes

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, received thousands, if not tens of thousands of pleas for help in solving unsolved crimes, righting wrongs, and setting justice right. The pleas came from all over the world, from people who believed he could help. Often the pleas were written directly to Sherlock Holmes – a testament to the power that a fictional character could hold over the imagination.

Grieving for his recently deceased wife, grieving more for the guilt he carried for having been in love with another woman for the decade leading to his wife’s death (she suffered from consumption or tuberculosis), he opens the mail one morning to find a plea from a man named George Edjali, a barrister, born in England of a Parsee father (native of Bombay) and a Scottish mother. Edjali had been arrested, tried and convicted of mutilating horses and cows in rural Staffordshire, where his father was an Anglican vicar. 

Doyle immediately sees the miscarriage of justice. Perhaps because of the guilt he was carrying, perhaps because of the need to break away from the depression he has experiencing, perhaps because of the outrage he felt at what had happened to Edjali, Doyle does not give the letter to his secretary to send a polite dismissal. He accepts the request. And because he does, British justice will ultimately change.

This is a true story. In 2006, novelist, essayist, translator and art critic Julian Barnes wrote a phenomenally well-researched novel of what happened, entitled Arthur & George. Earlier this year, ITV broadcast a three-part series in Britain based on the book, staring Martin Clunes (“Doc Martin”) as Doyle and Arsher Ali as George. The series recently aired in the U.S. as well.

The book is a wonder. And it’s also a wonder that the TV series could extract the story it did from the novel.

Barnes tells the stories of the two men from childhood forward, because so much of what their entwined story becomes originated in their childhoods. And he tells it in the present tense, which adds an immediacy and a dramatic effect to the narrative. He gets inside the heads of both of his leading characters, something a television program couldn’t succeed as well as doing and so didn’t try. But the program does succeed at telling the story, focusing on the mystery of what actually happened.

Julian Barnes

Edjali, the barrister, has an almost childlike faith in British justice, a faith that survives his arrest and imprisonment experience, but just barely. Doyle, the writer whose involvement would lead rather quickly to a review and investigation by the British Home Office, is less taken with British justice, and fully understands how it could go off the rails, with biased police investigators desperate to find the culprit and an incompetent trial judge. (Because of this case, Britain would create a court of appeals.)

Barnes has written numerous novels, collections of essays and short stories, and art criticism. He received the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for his novel The Sense of an Ending, only one of his many prizes and recognitions

What is clear from Barnes’ account of Doyle and Edjali is that Doyle needed Edjali as much as Edjali needed Doyle. They would not become lifelong friends, although Doyle did invite him to the wedding to his second wife. But their need of each other at the coinciding time of their lives was mutual and, ultimately, beneficial.

The story of Arthur & George is fascinating. How Julian Barnes tells that story is equally fascinating.

Top photograph: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edjali at the time Doyle investigated his case.