Scribblomania

2021 ◽  
pp. 145-161
Author(s):  
Matilda Greig
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Peninsular War ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
War Memoirs

The end of the Napoleonic Wars coincided with a phenomenal rise in the number and variety of war memoirs being written by veterans of all ranks, yet historians have mostly argued that these books made little impact on the general reading public. This chapter overturns that idea. It uses research into publishers’ archives, library catalogues, and later editions of Peninsular War memoirs to demonstrate that these soldiers’ tales sold well, made significant profits for their editors and publishers, and became increasingly imitated and parodied as the nineteenth century went on (including by Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle). It argues that these books should be seen as part of a commercial genre of war writing, with the curated representations of conflict they contained being deliberately marketed to different readers via cheap or luxury editions, illustrations, and decorative bindings.

The Adventure of the Stradivarius: Violins in the Work of Arthur Conan Doyle and William Crawford Honeyman

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachael Durkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle

Abstract The violin, despite its fleeting appearances in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, has become prominently associated with the character of Sherlock in modern TV and film adaptions. While the violin is never investigated by Holmes in the stories, it is represented in more depth in a precursory detective story by William Crawford Honeyman: a Scottish author-musician, whose work appears to have influenced Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes. Honeyman’s short story ‘The Romance of a Real Cremona’ (1884) follows detective James McGovan as he traces and returns a stolen Stradivari violin and unravels its complex provenance. The importance of the violin’s inclusion in fictional works has been little discussed in scholarship. Here, the texts of Doyle and Honeyman serve as a lens through which to analyse the meaning of the violin during the Victorian era. By analysing the violin from an organological perspective, this article examines the violin’s prominence in nineteenth-century British domestic music-making, both as a fiscally and culturally valuable object. The final section of the article explores the meaning attached to, and created by, the violin in the stories of Doyle and Honeyman.

Dead Men Telling Tales

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matilda Greig
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
The World ◽  
Peninsular War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soldier's Tale ◽  
Multiple Languages

Dead Men Telling Tales is an account of the lasting cultural impact made by the autobiographies of Napoleonic soldiers over the course of the nineteenth century. Focussing on the nearly three hundred military memoirs published by British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese veterans of the Peninsular War (1808–1814), it charts the histories of these books over the course of a hundred years, around Europe and the Atlantic, and from writing to publication to afterlife. Drawing on extensive archival research in multiple languages, the book challenges assumptions made by historians about the reliability of these soldiers’ direct eyewitness accounts, revealing the personal and political motives of the authors and uncovering the large cast of characters, from family members to publishers, editors, and translators, involved in production behind the scenes. By including literature from Spain and Portugal, it also provides a missing link in current studies of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, showing how the genre of military memoirs developed differently in south-western Europe and led to starkly opposing national narratives of the same war. The book’s findings tell the history of a publishing phenomenon which gripped readers of all ages across the world in the nineteenth century, made significant profits for those involved, and was fundamental in defining the modern ‘soldier’s tale’.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Matilda Greig
Keyword(s):  
Eyewitness Testimony ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Peninsular War ◽  
History Of ◽  
War Memoirs ◽  
Soldier's Tale ◽  
The Military

The Peninsular War (1808–1814) was one of the most colourful and brutal campaigns of the Napoleonic period. It prompted hundreds of veterans from the armies of the participating countries (Spain, Portugal, Britain, and France) to write and publish autobiographies about their experiences. These war memoirs are well-known to historians as rich and compelling sources, but relying on them for direct eyewitness testimony about the experience of war poses significant methodological problems. Military memoirs, including those from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, tend to be written in hindsight and shaped to an unknown extent by selective or traumatised memory. They may be unrepresentative of the majority of experiences, written in very different styles and formats, published immediately after the war, or only made public decades after the author’s death. Taking these challenges as a starting point, this introductory chapter lays out a new methodological framework for ‘what to do with war memoirs’, including considering closely the identities and motives of the authors, tracing the material histories of the books themselves, and employing a comparative, transnational approach to the history of the military memoir genre. It also summarises the relevant historiography, emphasising the lack of attention so far given to Spanish and Portuguese wartime autobiography, and the long-term importance of Peninsular War memoirs as a precedent for the twentieth-century ‘soldier’s tale’.

scholarly journals ALIMENTARY: ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE AND ISABELLA BEETON

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Foie Gras

In 1893, overwhelmed by readers' insatiability for Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle killed his detective off at the height of his popularity. Writing to a friend in 1896, Doyle described how literally sick he was of the figure he had created: “I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day” (Chabon 17). Holmes's (first) literary demise was marked by his creator with a culinary simile, one which recalls that his literary debut was made under the name that, above all others, stood for the culinary in late nineteenth-century Britain: Isabella Beeton. The first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” appeared in the 1887 edition of Beeton's Christmas Annual. Three other editors had rejected the story before the Beeton Annual accepted it. This Doyle-Beeton publishing encounter was an instance of one publishing phenomenon recognizing another one and ushering it into the limelight. When Doyle's reflections on his huge publishing success turn to a gustatory memory of overindulgence in a purposefully overdeveloped organ, it raises the following question: what were the relationships between the mass market, the culinary, and the production and adjudication of judgment and refinement in the nineteenth century?

Editors and Afterlives

2021 ◽  
pp. 162-187
Author(s):  
Matilda Greig
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Military Education ◽  
World War ◽  
Women Editors ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Peninsular War ◽  
War Memoirs ◽  
The Many ◽  
First World ◽  
Over Time

This chapter reveals the complex afterlives of Peninsular War memoirs, many of which outlived their authors and continued to be published and re-published in different formats over the long nineteenth century. It considers the many different groups of people involved behind the scenes in the production of a Napoleonic military memoir: family members, especially women; editors; publishers; indexers; printers; illustrators; archivists; lawyers; even luxury booksellers. It shows in detail the alterations that were made to veterans’ autobiographies over time, from omitting or adding sections of text to changing the title, inserting portraits of the author, or commissioning artist’s impressions of his battles. Along the way, some war memoirs underwent an almost total transformation, becoming dry family biographies, ‘boy’s own’ adventure stories, regimental histories, consumer objects, or, in the decades before the First World War in Britain and France, tools for national military education, targeted to children.

Wilde Crimes: The Art of Murder and Decadent (Homo)Sexuality in Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde Series

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-182
Author(s):  
Susanne Gruss
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
The Real ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Historical Detail

Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde novels (2007–12) appropriate Wilde for a neo-Victorian crime series in which the sharp-witted aestheticist serves as a detective à la Sherlock Holmes. This article explores Brandreth's art of adapting Wilde (both the man and the works) and English decadent culture on several levels. The novels can, of course, be read as traditional crime mysteries: while readers follow Wilde as detective, they are simultaneously prompted to decipher the ‘truth’ of biographical and cultural/historical detail. At the same time, the mysteries revolve around Wilde's scandalous (homo)sexuality and thus his masculinity. The novels remain curiously cautious when it comes to the depiction of Wilde as homosexual: all novels showcase Wilde's marriage, Constance's virtues, and Oscar's love for his children, and the real ‘Somdomites’ are the murderers he pursues. By portraying these criminals and their crimes, the novels evade the less comfortable, transgressive aspects of Wilde's sexuality and help to reduce him to a thoroughly amusing decadent suitable for a general reading public. Brandreth's novels can therefore be read as a decidedly conservative account of Wilde's masculinity for the market of neo-Victorian fiction.

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

What Is Left of the Genius? Sherlockian Legacy in Contemporary Crime Fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-150
Author(s):  
Jacek Mydla
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Time Of Death ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
Scientific Expertise ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Working Out

Arthur Conan Doyle famously popularised science in his series of detective stories by placing its three constitutive elements (scientific knowledge, the collection of evidence, and art of making inferences), in his protagonist Sherlock Holmes. The legacy is present in contemporary crime fiction, but the competencies have been distributed among a group of individuals involved in the investigation. This distribution has affected and changed the position of the detective vis-à-vis scientific expertise. Science, chiefly in the form of different branches of forensics, is as indispensable as the detective, and authors have been working out different ways of making the two work together. As an example of this cooperation, the paper examines Mark Billingham’s 2015 novel Time of Death.

The Melville Monument and the Shaping of the Scottish Metropolis

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 105-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarisse Godard Desmarest
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Grid Pattern ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Town ◽  
National Monument ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The City

AbstractThe Melville Monument, which stands at the centre of St Andrew's Square in Edinburgh, was erected between 1821 and 1823 in memory of the Tory statesman Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville (1742–1811). The design for the monument, more than 150 ft tall, was provided by William Burn (1789–1870). The 15 ft statue of Dundas that stands on top, added in 1827, was carved by Robert Forrest (1789–1852), a Scottish sculptor from Lanarkshire, from a design by Francis Chantrey (1781–1841). The Melville Monument, imperial in character and context, is part of a series of highly visible monuments built in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century to celebrate such figures as Horatio Nelson, Robert Burns, William Pitt, King George IV and the dead of the Napoleonic wars (National Monument). This article examines the commission and construction of the Melville Monument, and analyses the choice and significance of St Andrew's Square as a locus for commemoration. The monument is shown to be part of an emerging commitment to enhance the more picturesque qualities of the city, a reaction against the exaggerated formality of the first New Town and its grid pattern.

scholarly journals Metamorphoses of the Ukrainian Song “Їkhav Kozak beyond the Danube”:Was the German Translation by Wilhelm Kuchelbecker Familiar to the Hungarian Count Poet Ferenc Teleki?

2021 ◽  
pp. 327-349
Author(s):  
Zsófia Kalavszky ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Print Media ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
German Language ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
German Culture ◽  
German Translation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Language Area

In my essay I trace how – by which means and through what channels – the Ukrainian song «Ĭхав козак за Дунай» (Kozak was riding beyond the Danube) reached Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth-century and then by the means of German mediation, sprang out onto Hungarian territories. In the German language area, it spread essentially as a folk song. Translated (or rather transcribed) into German by Christopher Tidge, the Ukrainian song reached the Kingdom of Hungary most likely together with the troops that took part in the Napoleon wars. At the same time, another version of the song circulated among the Hungarian elite in German culture. The latter was known as Russisches Lied in the translation of Theodor Körner – it was also in vogue and was distributed mainly in print media. The history of this song that in the first decade of the nineteenth century, gained fame in Czech, Polish, and English, has another line that may be interesting from the point of view of Russian and Hungarian literary connections. In 1814, Russian poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker translated the song into German. His translation which remained in the form of the manuscript and was not known to the reading public reveals an amazing similarity and in some places direct coincidences with the poem by the Hungarian poet Count Ferenc Teleki written presumably before 1820.

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