Dear Sherlockians,
 
It is a great relief for me to be back with our international Sherlock Holmes
Society and it is always reassuring as ever. Regarding the proposed B.B.C.
programme, the details of which Sumal has so kindly posted, we are proud that
our Society has become truly international. 
 
Come 22 May 2009, and the literary world would be celebrating the one hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday. It is really
amazing how the ophthalmologist of Irish descent had created a detective who
would incorporate all the norms of Englishness within his demeanour and yet be
loved all over the world. Doyle’s creation of Sherlock Holmes – of Scottish
descent if William S. Baring-Gould and Leslie Klinger are to be believed –
actually served to shift the literary world’s attention from the American
identity of detective fiction to its popularity as a British ‘conception’.
We may recall that modern detective fiction began with the American novelist and
short-story-writer Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘tales of ratiocination’ in the
1840s. William (‘Wilkie’) Collins, an Englishman, was the only other
detective story writer of repute before Doyle began enthralling readers with his
Sherlock Holmes narratives, with the
first, “A Study in Scarlet”, being published in November 1886-edition of
“Beeton’s Christmas Annual”. 
 
General readers often tend to gloss over Doyle’s Irish ancestry, which might
account for the ancestral and national ambiguity of his world-famous sleuth.
Mary Foley Doyle, Arthur’s mother, hailed from the family of Percy-Louvain, in
turn related to the Plantagenets, who had once ruled Britain. The
litterateur’s father, Charles, had forefathers who came from Pont d’ Oilly
(in Normandy, France) and who settled in Ireland in the 1330s under the
patronage of King Edward III.  The Doyles were Roman Catholics and by the 18th
century they had been evicted from their lands. 
 
I would request the learned Sherlockians to shed some light on the ambiguity in
Holmes’s nationality. The first names ‘Sherlock’ and ‘Mycroft’, for
all things, do not  sound European.
 
Yours faithfully,
 
(Pinaki Roy)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
From:
 
Pinaki Roy, Ph.D.,
Lecturer in English,
Malda College,
Rabindra Avenue, Rathbari More,
Post Office + District: Malda - 732 101
 
 
 




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