According to the Guinness Book of Records, Sherlock Holmes has been portrayed on screen more than any other literary character. Olivia Rutigliano ranks the 100 best, worst, & strangest screen portrayals of the great detective…
“Holmes’s stories […] have a surprisingly grounded view of crime, & one that arguably fits better into the hardboiled tradition of Hammett & Chandler than the cozy tradition of Christie.”
Doyle didn’t just write #CrimeFiction … Alan Brown looks at Arthur Conan Doyle’s “vain, volatile, & brilliant” Scottish adventurer-scientist-explorer & dinosaur hunter Professor George Edward Challenger
After THE LOST WORLD, Challenger’s other adventures include the novels THE POISON BELT and THE LAND OF MIST, & the short stories “The World Screamed” & “The Disintegration Machine”. Alan Brown digs deeper into Doyle’s #sciencefiction
(Conan Doyle personally preferred Professor Challenger over Sherlock Holmes – even dressing up as the Professor for a photograph of Challenger’s Amazonian expedition)
When Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, “20,000 people cancelled their subscriptions to the Strand”. Public pressure – & a huge fee – brought Holmes back from the dead; did this fictional immortality influence Doyle’s spiritualism?
In 1912, “Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the world’s most celebrated fictional detective, had turned detective himself in an actual murder case – in the process liberating a man who had spent nearly twenty years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”
In March 1927, Arthur Conan Doyle put together a list of his own top 12 Sherlock Holmes stories, sealed it in an envelope, & left it with the editor of the Strand magazine…
“THE DYNAMITER is a hugely inventive & brilliant book, at once a political thriller, a blackly comic satire, & a female adventure”
Robert Louis Stevenson & Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne married #OTD, 19 May, 1880. In this article, Prof Penny Fielding explores the dangerous #collaboration between RLS & his wife: granting female agency on the page & in life
CFP: ‘We Are Amused’: Victorian Humour & the Digital
7–8 Nov, Université Caen Normandie
Exploring intersections between #19thcentury#humour & the digital, & investigating the migration of jokes, squibs, spoofs & parodies, verbal & visual, from the pages of #Victorian comic periodicals to 21st-century screens
The Scottish Novel in 1824
1 July, University of Edinburgh – free
This one-day in-person symposium marks the bicentenary of 1824, an ‘annus mirabilis’ in the history of Scottish fiction that saw the publication of two experimental masterpieces: James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner, & Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet.
Save the date! The next 19th Century Dress and Textiles Reframed "At Home" online talks will be on Sunday, June 30, "focused on photography and its connections to 19th century fashion".
Programme:
📸 Robyne Calvert: Artists & Photographic Fantasies
📸 Erika Lederman: 'Counterfeit Specimens'. Isabel Agnes Cowper's Needlework Photographs for the South Kensington Museum
📸 Beatrice Behlen: Mrs Broom's photographs of suffragettes
A SCANDALOUS 1865 DIVORCE case offers a window into New York high society—the defendant was a cousin of Edith Wharton, no less—and the time’s changing attitudes about marriage, women’s rights, and sexuality. Great balance of gossip and context. B PLUS
“I was in love with the book. In pure, ignorant defiance of the decree of the Iowa Writing School that controls almost all modern fiction, Galt tells without showing.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin discusses John Galt’s ANNALS OF THE PARISH
“[Galt’s] realism is hard-headed, his compassion is tough-minded, his humour contagious but tainted with the sense that chaos and catastrophe are never far away.”
The Doings of Doyle podcast
Episode 50: The Surgeon of Gaster Fell (1890)
A close look at a deeply personal story that draws on the sad case of Arthur Conan Doyle’s father. Featuring redactions, dreamy rooms, the Foreign Legion, fairy art, & dodgy lodgers …
Finally, on Sunday April 28, there'll be another "At Home with c19th Dress and Textiles Reframed" event!
Programme:
🧵 Linda McShannock - A Living for the Earnest, A Fortune for the Capable: Dressmaking in Minneapolis, 1880-1920
🧵 Cecilia Soares - A transatlantic wardrobe: an analysis of the Belle Époque sartorial goods from the Ivy House Museum, in Vassouras, Brazil (1870-1910)
🧵 Alden O'Brien - TBD
“No Englishman of Byron’s age, character, and history would have had patience for long theological discussions on the way to fight for Greece; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days kept their influence to the end.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson, MEMORIES & PORTRAITS – available on @gutenberg_org