Redmond - Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes: Victorian America Meets Arthur Conan Doyle

Other books by Christopher Redmond:

In Bed With Sherlock Holmes:Toronto, Simon & Pierre, 1984

A. Conan Doyle, manly and taking in person, manner and intellect, won steadily by his genialness, upon the favor his stories had gained in advance.... So the authors from another land who have read or discoursed to us, have so far justified in the main their appearance in such role, by preserving the supreme moment to the memory of their hearers.

Major J. B. Pond

Simon & Pierre

We would like to express our gratitude to The Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for their support.

Marian M. Wilson, Publisher

This book has been published with the assistance of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Copyright 1987 Christopher Redmond

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the pubilsher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

ISBN 0-88924-184-8

1 2 3 4 5 91 90 89 88 87

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Redmond, Christopher

Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes

Includes index.

ISBN 0-88924-184-8

1.Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir, 1859-1930 Journeys United States.

2.Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir, 1859-1930 Journeys Canada.

3.Authors, English 19th century Journeys United States.

4. Authors, English 19th century Journeys Canada. 5. United States Description and travel 1865-1900. 6. Canada Description and travel 1868-1900.* I. Title.

PR4623.R43 1987 823'.8 C87-095195-5

Cover Design: Christopher W. Sears

Photograph: Courtesy Metropolitan Toronto Library, Arthur Conan Doyle Collection.

General Editor: Marian M. Wilson

Editor: Sarah Robertson

Assitant Editor: Jean Paton

Typesetting: University of Waterloo

Printer: Les ditions graphiques Marc Veilleux Inc.

Printed and Bound in Canada

Simon & Pierre Publishing Company Limited

Order Department

P.O. Box 280, Adelaide Street Postal Station

Toronto, Ontario

Canada M5C 2J4

This book is dedicated

to my father Donald A. Redmond

and to those

who share his noble profession

of reference librarian

I could not have written this study without the help of the hundreds of librarians, colleagues and friends around the United States and Canada, and abroad, who helped me find the information. Indeed, it occurred to me from time to time that I was not so much examining a period of Arthur Conan Doyles life as demonstrating what can be mined from libraries if one has the patience to look and write and ask.

One might expect that the chief source for a study of Arthur Conan Doyles 1894 American tour would be Doyles own writings from that period, especially his frequent letters to his mother (in which, if anywhere, he poured out his heart) and his pocket diary. I have no doubt that such documents would have been very valuable to me. But they were not available; presumably they are among a large body of Doyles papers, used by some early biographers, which have for some two decades been sealed as the result of complicated legal disputes over Doyles estate. I have therefore conducted my work without access to them. Also unavailable has been a cache of letters from Doyle to his agent during the tour, Major Pond, held by a private collector in Boston. Nor have the surviving papers of Doyles brother, Innes Hay Doyle, been available; they might have shed some light on the tour from a tangential point of view, that of the young officer who accompanied his literary brother to America.

Sources which were available did include a few Doyle letters in other collections, as well as other contemporary documents. More substantially, they included the reminiscences and letters of people who met Doyle along the way; books of history, with nuggets of information or long passages which helped to set the stage; and, above all, newspaper reports of Doyles visits to town after town. Accumulation of information from such directions has enabled me to write this study, which is doubtless in places more speculative than I might have hoped. I simply do not know whether, as has been alleged, Doyle disliked Major Pond and found his tour a terrible ordeal. Certainly the detailed reconstruction which I have done and which, apparently, no previous biographer has attempted does not seem to justify a description of the whole two-month trip as an unbroken grind. I choose to provide the available facts and pay little attention to previous biographers generalizations.

For it would not be quite true to say that Doyles 1894 tour was virgin territory until I came to it; apart from what is in the standard biographies, for example, John Nieminski has privately published an exhaustive compendium of material about the aspects of it which touched on Chicago. But previous research has been sparse. It was immensely fortunate for me that, shortly after I began my work, there was published (in The Baker Street Journal) an itinerary of the trip which Richard Lancelyn Green transcribed from a record-book of the tour manager, Major Pond, which is now held in the New York Public Library.

If this book reads as a continuous narrative, I shall feel that I have triumphed, for it was made, not from a few substantial and continuous sources, but out of shreds and patches, and the joy and challenge of writing has been assembling those bits from the books and libraries in which they were hiding. Over the months I lost track of how many letters I had written and how many people had helped me? but I have, I hope, the names of all those who contributed their morsels. It was cheering to receive letters, time after time, from overworked librarians, and others, who answered the inquiries of a stranger promptly and fully and with friendly suggestions. It was notable that small institutions were particularly ready to help, perhaps because they are not daily overloaded by scholars demands and perhaps also because they saw value in letting the world learn about a great mans visit to their home town. (Inevitably, there were a few people and libraries who were unhelpful, silent or unusually bureaucratic in the face of my requests for assistance.) I am glad to note that the majority of my benefactors are at public institutions; the new knowledge I am able to present is thus a small dividend to the taxpayers in several dozen jurisdictions who have wisely invested over the years in books and records, buildings to hold them and people to maintain them.

In the Notes which follow the text, I attempt to give credit to all those who helped; to indicate the published or manuscript sources which provided the information; and to make a few additional remarks about the significance of what I have reported, or collateral matters which may be of interest. When the text consists of speculation made on my own authority, I trust I have made its nature sufficiently clear. General information of the kind found in standard biographical and historical sources is not cited; I have assumed that the reader can look things up as easily as I can.