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

236 Pages·1987·13.51 MB·English

by  Christopher Redmond

Welcome to America*
Mr. Sherloc
Holme
Other books by Christopher Redmond:
In Bed With Sherlock Holmes: Toronto, Simon & Pierre, 1984
Welcome to America*
Mr.Sherlock
Holmes
Victorian America meets
Arthur Couan Doyle
Christopher Redmond
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 appear-
ance 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 sys-
tems, without permission in writing from the publisher, 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 editions 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
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Sources and Acknowledgements
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 Doyle's 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
Doyle's 1894 American tour would be Doyle's own writings from that
period, especially his frequent letters to his mother (in which, if any-
where, 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 Doyle's
papers, used by some early biographers, which have for some two dec-
ades been sealed as the result of complicated legal disputes over Doyle's
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 Doyle's brother, Innes Hay Doyle, been
available; they might have shed some light on the tour from a tangen-
tial point of view, that of the young officer who accompanied his liter-
ary brother to America.
Sources which were available did include a few Doyle letters in other
collections, as well as other contemporary documents. More substan-
tially, 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 Doyle's visits to town after town. Accumulation of informa-
tion 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 reconstruc-
tion 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.
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Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes
For it would not be quite true to say that Doyle's 1894 tour was vir-
gin territory until I came to it; apart from what is in the standard biog-
raphies, for example, John Nieminski has privately published an exhaus-
tive compendium of material about the aspects of it which touched on
Chicago. But previous research has been sparse. It was immensely fortu-
nate 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 let-
ters 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 over-
loaded by scholars' demands and perhaps also because they saw value in
letting the world learn about a great man's 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 assis-
tance.) 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 his-
torical sources is not cited; I have assumed that the reader can look
things up as easily as I can.
For credit and thanks, the name which must head the list is that of my
father, Donald A. Redmond, whose example turned me from a Sherloc-
kian into a Doylean scholar; who showed me the way to write books on
Doyle, by writing one; who smoothed my path with all sorts of advice;
and who time after time has helped me answer knotty questions of fact,
finding information in his memory, his own collections, and the library
of Queen's University at Kingston, where he carries on the noble work
of a reference librarian. He also read the chapters of the book as they
were drafted, and made a number of helpful comments.
8
Sources and Acknowledgements
Reference librarians at the University of Waterloo have been enor-
mously helpful as well; I am grateful to Gary Draper, David Binkley and
Jo Beglo for patience with bizarre questions. The University of Water-
loo, as my employer, inevitably provided an infrastructure for my work,
and that has included the invaluable help of staff in the interlibrary
loans office and other departments of the library.
For matters connected with Arthur Conan Doyle himself I have
relied heavily on the patient assistance of Cameron Hollyer and Janice
McNabb at the Metropolitan Toronto Library, whose Doyle collection is
a valuable and still under-used resource. Other departments of the same
library have valiantly helped from time to time. I have briefly used the
collections of several other libraries:
The Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University;
the Ohio Historical Society library and archives; the Long Island
Historical Society, Brooklyn; the New-York Historical Society; the
Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; the Public
Library of the City of Boston; the Smith Memorial Library at
Chautauqua, New York; the library of the State Historical Society,
Madison, Wisconsin; the McLaughlin Library of the University of
Guelph; the Business Library of the Brooklyn Public Library; the
public libraries of Niagara Falls (New York), Niagara Falls (On-
tario), Glens Falls, and Niagara-on-the-Lake.
When I speak of dozens, indeed hundreds, of people elsewhere who
have assisted me, I am not engaging in hyperbole. The names of many
of those people appear in the notes and comments. Particular gratitude
is due to John Nieminski of Chicago, who encouraged this study,
advised me from his considerable knowledge of Doyle and the scholar-
ship about him, and made information available which his own exten-
sive efforts had unearthed. I regret that he did not live to see these
results or to read these thanks.
Information which was directly used in the text is acknowledged in
the corresponding chapters of notes. I must also acknowledge the names
of a large number of people who provided negative evidence (just as
valuable as positive evidence, any historian will agree), referred me to
sources, or gave other support:
Marlene Aig of New York; James R. Hobin of the Albany Public
Library; Daria D'Arienzo, archivist of Amherst College; Dr. John
Jones of Balliol College, Oxford; Peter E. Blau of Washington, D.
C.; Cynthia English of the Library of the Boston Athenaeum; the
Librarian of The Boston Globe; John R. Cronin, librarian of the Bos-
ton Herald; Henry Scannell of the microtext room, Boston Public
Library; Charles Niles, Jr., of the Mugar Memorial Library, Bos-
ton University; Mrs. V. E. M. Hartles of the British Embassy,
Washington;
Ray Zwick, librarian of the Cincinnati Enquirer, Kevin Grace
and Alice M. Vestal of the University of Cincinnati libraries;
Stuart W. Campbell, archivist of Clark University; Dr. Werner
Packull of Conrad Grebel College; Ann Walaskay of the Univer-
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