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Worldwide Doyle Talks

Following on from 2021's Professor Neil McCaw Lecture Series, we are delighted to present the following talks from researchers who have recently used the Richard Lancelyn Green Bequests' vast Conan Doyle Collection.

Thanks to funding from Arts Council England, a further project will be running alongside 2022's and 2023's lectures. The Detectives will take themes from the talks and give to local community groups to interpret into original pieces of work.

Neil McCaw, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at Winchester University, died in 2020. He became involved in the Conan Doyle Collection in 2005 and advised on the first initial cataloguing and identifying the Collection as a unique and diverse collection. Neil went on to give wider academic talks globally about the Collection, which broadened our audiences, produced texts for exhibitions that have toured around the world to diverse audiences, wrote and produced a facsimile for The Adventure of the Creeping Man and then later curated the You Don't Know Sherlock Holmes, Yet exhibition.

Professor Neil McCaw was a true advocate for the Collection and his expert knowledge and advice has given a fantastic legacy to this world class Collection, maintaining the collections original bequest to be made accessible to the public.

Programme of events

2023

The following talks took place in June/July 2023 via Zoom. You may watch the presentations on our partner, the Doings of Doyle's youtube playlist.

Ross Davies and Mark Jones - Arthur Conan Doyle and the Adventure of the Gaiola Malediction

26^th June 2023 - 7pm

In April or May Sir Arthur Conan Doyle vacations on his relatives' tiny paradise of an island estate (Gaiola) off the port of Naples, Italy, where he meets an Italian inventor, who claims to have automated the process of duplicating of sculptures. Arthur Conan Doyle buys the English rights to the patented machinery, partners with a colourful sculptor-contractor named W.G. Jones who turns out to be both dishonest and difficult to deal with (not quite a grifter, but pretty close!). The whole thing turns into a business nightmare, but not before the plan and ACD's business (both ultimately unsuccessful) get widespread attention in the news media on both sides of the Atlantic. By June 1905, the madcap adventure is over. There are many nifty visuals, and many interesting words in both the news coverage and the private correspondence (including some pretty clearly direct connections to a couple of the Sherlock Holmes stories). And nowadays, there is a legend that the beautiful little island is cursed (though for reasons other than Arthur Conan Doyle's failed sculpture company) -- if only Arthur Conan Doyle had known about the curse!

villa on a little island surrounded by water

Michael Gunton - Portsmouth's Conan Doyle Collection

28^th June 2023 - 7pm

Portsmouth's Conan Doyle Collection is perhaps the most wide-ranging of its type in the world - including everything from letters written by Conan Doyle to Snoopy outfits and board games. Michael Gunton gave an overview of the contents of the collection, and talked about some of the ways it is being used and enjoyed by users around the world.

Photograph of Conan Doyle

Bryan Woods - Arthur Conan Doyle Supernatural Stories

3^rd July 2023 - 7pm

Bryan Woods has been a Detective with the Conan Doyle Collection Lancelyn Green Bequest since February, 2022. Since then he has carried out research into the life and career of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He writes regular online blogs for the Collection. This was his first talk for them.

Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was also a prolific writer in other genres - including the supernatural. Bryan Woods’ talk featured ghosts, Egyptian mummies, and other creatures of the night, as imagined by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Poster of the poison belt made by one of our detectives showing the earth getting assaulted by belts of poison gas

Christopher Pittard - Sidney Paget's Visions of Sherlock Holmes

4^th July 2023 - 7pm

This talk focused on the illustrator Sidney Paget's role in creating Sherlock Holmes when Doyle moved to the Strand Magazine in 1891, meaning that from the start of his popularity Holmes has always been a multimedia figure. The talk considers Paget's influences, some of the origins of his Holmes illustrations (drawing on material from the Lancelyn Green Bequest), and the way in which his visual style interacts with Doyle's writing to shape the stories.

A black and white illustration with Sherlock Holmes walking into his house with someone and someone walking away down the street with the caption "Good-night, mr Sherlock Holmes."

2022

The following talks took place in May 2022 via Zoom

Michael Comben - Conan Doyle as A.C.Smith - Football and Portsmouth

23^rd May 2022 - 7pm to 8pm

This talk covered:

What and where is Portsmouth and its history in the Victorian period
Conan Doyle arrives in Portsmouth and the sport that a junior doctor played in Victorian England
Founding and playing for the Portsmouth Association Football Club in the 1880s under the pseudonym of A.C.Smith
The founding of Portsmouth Football Club in 1898
Conan Doyle’s links to the founders of the club.

Antonija Primorac - In Search of Sherlock Holmes' Doubles: Translation and Early Pastiches of A C Doyle's World Famous Detective

24^th May 2022 - 7pm to 8pm

This talk presented the findings of long-term archival research carried out in the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection Lancelyn Green Bequest and the national libraries of Croatia and Slovenia. This talk informed the virtual exhibition “Sherlockovi dvojnici/ Sherlock’s Doppelgängers” at the National and University Library of Croatia in Zagreb which is currently in preparation.

The talk focussed on Sherlock Holmes’ action-loving double that appeared across Europe in penny dreadful editions which were advertised as Conan Doyle's own work and often published alongside the translations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s own stories about Holmes. This immensely popular series, originally titled Detective Sherlock Holmes and His World-famous Adventures, first appeared in 1907 in Germany and quickly spread across Europe and beyond. By examining the surviving copies and mapping the outreach of this always already translated series, the talk challenged the assumptions of recent world literature theories that place London and Paris as the centres for literary dissemination and examine the figure of Holmes’s doppelgänger as a prototype for subsequent neo-Victorian re-visionings of Sherlock Holmes on screen.

David Gigauri - Conan-Doyle and the ‘Magnificent Mdivani’

25^th May 2022 - 7pm to 8pm

What do Sherlock Holmes, Coco Chanel, Rudolph Valentino, and the world’s richest girl have in common? – The Mdivanis.

In August 1936, the son of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, Denis married Nina Mdivani. Although unknown now, Nina was one of the five Mdivani siblings who were a global household name at the time. Having fled the communist invasion of Georgia penniless, the family became the epicentre of the international ‘café society’ in the interbellum of the 20^th century.

Spanning continents, 11 weddings, seven divorces and five spectacular deaths, the Mdivani story became a glamorous, yet tragic saga. The individual story of Denis and Nina became the longest running Mdivani chronicle which developed beyond the earthly realm and continued long past Denis’s death in 1955.

This is illustrated talk on Conan-Doyle and his ‘Magnificent Mdivani’, is taken from the forthcoming book The Mdivani Saga.

Dr Anne Chapman - Arthur Conan Doyle in The Idler Magazine

26^th May 2022 - 7pm to 8pm

In this talk Anne Chapman discussed the ways in which Arthur Conan Doyle presented himself in the popular illustrated monthly magazine The Idler. Alongside short stories, his contributions to the periodical included the 1892 article, ‘The Glamour of the Arctic’, drawing on his experience as a ship’s surgeon aboard the Arctic whaling ship Hope; and, in 1893, a reflective piece in the series, ‘My First Book’, which describes his literary development from an early age. These pieces suggest how he wished the public to see him as he positions himself amongst the crew of the whaling ship and as he confers authority upon himself as a writer. In both cases this talk considered the ways in which The Idler’s illustrations also contribute to Conan Doyle's autobiographical sketches.