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139 years ago today, on November 20, 1886 (for God's sake check the math: it's never my strong point), British publisher Ward and Lock accepted a manuscript, for the princely sum of £25 and for which the 27-year-old author gave up any subsequent rights to the narrative, from the newly qualified Scottish Doctor of Medicine, Arthur Conan Doyle. The story told by this already-prolific, but so-far unsuccessful, writer was A Study in Scarlet.
It was another year before the story appeared before the public, in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887. (Yeah. The husband of that Mrs. Beeton.)
Although the Beeton's tradition ended in 1898, the "Christmas Annual" was a staple of my childhood, a hardback book published for the season, with the intention of gift-giving, and which focused on the stories of the then-popular youth magazines, comics, and television shows. The Z-Cars Annual. The Rupert the Bear Annual. The June Annual. The Look and Learn Annual. And so on. I really loved them. And I still have a few treasured copies of a few of them.
But I think such things are largely no more, when it comes to matters of popular culture. After all, reading takes a bit of effort. Especially when it's not being thrust into either your line of sight or into your realm of hearing, via Kindle, Audible, or some other immediately gratifying "push" schema.
Still, I remember my childhood.
It was early 1964, and only a couple of months after my family and I had moved from Nigeria and the UK to Boston, Massachusetts. I was in the fourth grade. I developed a bad case of whooping cough (as many did, who'd not been vaccinated against such a thing, owing to their being in the wrong place at the wrong time over the years when such measures were introduced and then mandated). Whooping cough was (rightly) viewed at the time as a very serious illness, and I was quarantined and removed from school for several weeks.
I couldn’t do much else to amuse myself in our tiny third-floor apartment, but read. Dad introduced me to C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series. I avidly read all those published to that date. I read (at the age of almost ten) Gone With The Wind. And Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. (Lord preserve us, at least from the last.)
And then (thanks to Dad again), I encountered Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. Beginning with A Study in Scarlet.
By the time I went back to school, I’d read all the Holmes adventures, short stories, novels, and all. And I'd found faithful and loyal friends that have lasted me a lifetime.
Looking back on it, and when I remember the dark and the cold, it wasn't such a “bleak winter” after all.
Do young folks still read like this, and find comfort for the ages by doing so?
I hope that's the case.
Discussion (16)
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Some do. A 14 year old friend at church told me the school library didn't have the complete Holmes. I immediately gave him a copy of the Baring-Gould Annotated Holmes, and gave another copy to the school library. When I visited to present the gift, I told them how outraged I was that it wasn't there already. I remember that library being a lot better when I was a student assistant there in 1970.
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Were the Beaton publications for kids something offered in England? If not, somehow my parents, aunts and uncles missed knowing about them, so my small library never included them.
They sound wonderful.
As far as Mrs Beaton, I noticed how wikipedia weighs in on the supposition that this woman would not have died of child bed fever in 1868 unless her husband had cheated on her and had contracted syphilis. What a rude supposition. Across many Western societies, women frequently died from this ailment. It often had far more to do with the bad hygienic practices of the doctors who delivered the babies than the health status of the husbands.
The Nineteenth Century was a time when surgeons took off their blood and bacterial coated lab jackets in the hospital dining rooms, to make wagers on which crusty garment could manage to stand straight up longer than the others. In that era, Dr Samuelweiss came along, to try and promote a practice of washing one's hands before going from the bed of one patient to another. He became a laughing stock, even though he kept careful records of patients he had treated who only rarely died from puerperal fever. The records were made available to any of his colleagues who were interested.
Samuelweiss is now a hero among activists in the 21st Century who often attach the quote "First they ignore you.
"Then they laugh at you.
"Then they fight you.
"Then you win" to the mention of his name.
He may have been driven into poverty and into an insane asylum that ended his life, but these days, there is no health professional who would avoid washing his or her hands, or changing used gloves for clean ones, when going from one patient's bed side to another.
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Egad.
My mother was born and raised in Devon, England. She came across with my father when he repatriated after the war.
I was raised on Rupert the Bear illustrated books. It’s been so long ago that I read them. I thought only I was the only Rupert fan this side of the pond. Thanks for the warm memories.
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The Editor of the Ricochet yearbook has disappeared again.
If anyone knows of his whereabouts, or even his or her name, please try to inform him that there is another prime candidate for The Best of Ricochet — 2025.
(I’ve heard there’s a limit on the number of posts from a single author, but that administrative detail is not my concern.)
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I got my hand on an omnibus tome of all the Sherlock Holmes stories. I read them all in order. Like Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, there are backstories that arc throughout the series, which might be missed if you only read one story or two . . .
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