Worldwide Doyle 2025 in honour of Professor Neil McCaw

As Conan Doyle’s health began to fail, he looked back upon a life rich with accomplishment. In 1930 he drew a cartoon depicting himself as “The Old Horse,” pulling a wagon loaded with memories. This talk explores his life’s work, underscoring the characteristic decisions which made it uniquely memorable. Three lessons are suggested that could be applied to enhance our own experiences. 

 
Burt Wolder, BSI (“Third Pillar from the Left”) is an editor and co-host of I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, the first podcast for Sherlock Holmes devotees, and Trifles, a weekly podcast about Holmes’s cases. He also serves on the board of Frederic Dorr Steele Memorial, Inc., a non-profit organization publicizing the life and work of the illustrator F. D. Steele (1873-1944). 

This talk is about Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens and the possibility of their actual meeting, as well as a general discussion of Conan Doyle's view of Dickens and a bit of comparison. 

Clifford Goldfarb is the author of The Great Shadow: Arthur Conan Doyle, Brigadier Gerard, and Napoleon; and the introduction to the Barnes & Noble edition of The Complete Brigadier Gerard. Also Investigating Sherlock Holmes (with Hartley R. Nathan). He is currently editing Rodney Stone for the Edinburgh New Critical Editions Arthur Conan Doyle Project. His Doylean writing has been published in such places as Journal of Olympic History, Finest Hour (magazine of the International Churchill Society), Journal of the Oscar Wilde Society and Green Bag Almanac and Reader. He is Chairman of the Friends of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at the Toronto Reference Library and the Advisory Board of the ACD Society. He is a frequent speaker on topics related to Conan Doyle. He practices charity and non-profit law. 

This talk will examine Arthur Conan Doyle’s role in the movement for divorce reform in the early twentieth century. Doyle was perhaps an unlikely champion for divorce reform which had historically been the preserve of radical thinkers from the feminist and atheist margins. Yet the unpopular divorce reforms of the 1890s helped to assemble a diverse coalition to argue for a complete reformulation and destigmatization of marriage dissolution. Debates on this topic in Britain help to reveal Conan Doyle’s key role in the fraught transition away from deep-seated Victorian attitudes on the subject. The issue formed a crucial part of his developing views on a number of issues including home rule for Ireland, free trade and female suffrage. 

Dr Jonathan Cranfield is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University. He is the author of Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891-1930 (2016) and the editor of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (2023) 

Did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle get things wrong?  There is a whole Sherlockian industry devoted to errors in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but what about when he was writing non-fiction, as in his collection of essays called Through the Magic Door, a collection of charming observations about literature, boxing, and Napoleon, in which Conan Doyle recounts a series of anecdotes about Thomas Carlyle, Walter Scott, Oliver Cromwell, and himself.  Often the anecdotes are wrong.  And then there are his quotations: often they are wrong too. 

Does it matter?  Should we not worry unnecessarily about precision when listening to a good story?  What did Doyle himself think?  In my talk I will explore the errors and the rationale for them, and see if we should care about whether Thomas Carlyle bought a whole set of Gibbon to start his private library. 

Sheldon Goldfarb is editing Through the Magic Door for the new Edinburgh University Press edition of the works of Conan Doyle.  He is the president of the Sherlock Holmes society in Vancouver, Canada (aka the Stormy Petrels of British Columbia) and is the author of Sherlockian Musings: Thoughts on the Sherlock Holmes Stories.