United by the Ocean? The Romantic Conan Doyle and the Transatlantic Sherlock Holmes
Abstract
Jacek Mydla
Department of Literary and Cultural Theory, Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia
Biographers describe Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a ‘Briton enchanted by America’. His letter ‘England and America’ has been called a ‘plea for Britons to understand the American point of view’. ACD entertained utopian (which is not to say, silly) ideas about the English-speaking part of the world, which made him make efforts to overcome mutual prejudices and to bring the English and the American nations together in terms of friendship. This despite the fact that he had reasons to feel sore due to literary piracies committed against him by American publishers. ACD’s fascination with merica—which was for him, in his own words, a land ‘full of romance’ shows in his greatest and enduring literary achievement: the Sherlock Holmes stories. Already the first of them, ‘A Study in Scarlet’, which in 1887 gave literary life to the now world-famous consulting detective, is set for a significant part of the plot in the U.S. But ‘transatlantic’ motifs occur also in other stories, most famously in ‘The Five Orange Pips’ (1891), ‘The Yellow Face’ (1893), and ‘The Dancing Men’ (1903). Besides this, a number of other stories contain the motifs and tropes of sea/ocean/voyaging as leading ones, e.g. The story with a ‘whaling’ motif: ‘The Black Peter’.For ACD America was a land on which he projected, as the ‘American’ and ‘voyaging’ stories make evident, his major political and ideological concerns, such as those with justice and equality. In the paper, special attention is paid to the way in which in some of the stories the ocean (also: a sea and a river) features as something like a protagonist, even as one who administers justice and settles other types of account.
References
Doyle, A. C. 1998. ‘The Five Orange Pips,’ in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Doyle, A. C. 2001. A Study in Scarlet. London and New York: Penguin.
Doyle, A. C. 2005. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Volume II. L. S. Klinger (ed). New York and London: Norton.
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Redmond, C. 1987. Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Victorian America Meets Arthur Conan Doyle. Toronto: Simon and Pierre.
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Department of Literary and Cultural Theory, Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia Poland
Jacek Mydla is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures (University of Silesia, Katowice and Sosnowiec, Poland). Currently, he is Director of the Institute. He conducts research and lectures in the history of British literature, specifically British drama (Shakespeare through romanticism), Gothic fiction and drama, and theory of narrative. His book-length publications are: the Dramatic Potential of Time in Shakespeareand Spectres of Shakespeare, a study of appropriations of Shakespeare’s drama by early English Gothic authors and playwrights. Also, recently he has published a collection of essays on the dynamics of human time in Shakespeare. In his recent articles, in Polish and English, Mydla has been concerned with romantic drama (e.g. Scottish playwright Joanna Baillie), aspects of British empiricism in the eighteenth century, and the supernatural in fiction.
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