Welcome to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes: Victorian America Meets Arthur Conan Doyle

Beverley B. Endersby was a Toronto-based editor and writer.

The author, who is director of the office of publications of the University of Waterloo, member of several Sherlockian societies, and has also written In Bed with Sherlock Holmes, has admirably reconstructed from diverse sources, including newspaper accounts, secondary reference books, and manuscript collections, Arthur Conan Doyle’s first lecture tour of 1894, which took him to Victorian America, from the Adirondacks to New York, Chicago, and Toronto. The sense of what is pertinent is impeccable in this lively text, the cumulative effect of seemingly minor but evocative details being that of an immediacy and freshness normally associated with fiction itself. The reader sees what Doyle called “the romance of America” and meets, with him, the prominent (and obscure) literary and historical figures of the period. Redmond’s documentation is thorough and unobtrusive; a map of Doyle’s itinerary is provided, as is a reconstruction of the lecture “Readings and Reminiscences,” which he delivered 34 times during the tour. Extensive notes on sources and an index of names and places are included.