Dear Sherlockians,

Religion in the Sherlock Holmes canon has always interested me.
It is right that Christmas is explicitly mentioned in "The Adventure of the Blue
Carbuncle", and that the story, which was published in "The Strand Magazine",
January 1892-edition, is centred on post-Christmas celebrations and the
Chrsitmas fowl. It may also be mentioned that in his annotation to the story in
the first volume of "The Annotated Sherlock Holmes" (New York: Clarkson and
Potter, 1967), William S. Baring-Gould places the happenings "after 7 January
1887." (pp. 451).

The interesting question is that: is Holmes a Catholic, or a
Protestant or an Anglican? I would like to point out, in context of Leslie S.
Klinger's explicitly identifiying him as a Scot, and Duncan Mac-Dougald, Jr., as
an Irishman, that Holmes is Catholic by faith, Scotland and Ireland being
predominantly Catholic countries, and Conan Doyle himself was a Catholic - from
an Irish Catholic family settled in Scotland.
Catherine Wynne's "The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish
Nationalism and the Gothic" also identifies Holmes as a Catholic. I would like
to hear our esteemed Society members' comments on this observation.


Tim, the title of my seminar paper is "Coming Home: Passage
from Anglophilia to Indophilia in Amitav Ghosh's 'The Shadow Lines'", and the
seminar is on 19 and 20 of this month. I shall mail you the paper once I return
from the programme.






Pinaki Roy,
Department of English,
Faculty of Post-graduate Studies,
Malda College


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