139 years ago today, on November 20, 1886 (for God’s sake check the math: it’s never my strong point), British publisher Ward and Lock accepted a manuscript, for the princely sum of £25, and for which the 27-year-old author gave up any subsequent rights to the narrative, from the newly qualified Scottish Doctor of Medicine, Arthur Conan Doyle. The story told by this already-prolific, but so-far unsuccessful, writer was A Study in Scarlet.
It was another year before the story appeared before the public, in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. (Yeah. The husband of that Mrs Beeton.)
Although the Beeton’s tradition ended in 1898, the “Christmas Annual” was a staple of my childhood, a hard-back book published for the season, with the intention of gift-giving, and which focused on the stories of the then-popular youth magazines, comics, and television shows. The Z-Cars Annual. The Rupert the Bear Annual. The June Annual. The Look and Learn Annual. And so on. I really loved them. And I still have a few treasured copies of a few of them.
But I think such things are largely no more, when it comes to matters of popular culture. After all, reading takes a bit of effort. Especially when it’s not being thrust into either your line of sight or into your realm of hearing, via Kindle, or Audible, or some other immediately gratifying “push” schema.
Still, I remember my childhood.
It was early 1964, and only a couple of months after my family and I had moved from Nigeria and the UK to Boston, Massachusetts. I was in the fourth grade. I developed a bad case of whooping cough (as many did, who’d not been vaccinated against such a thing, owing to their being in the wrong place at the wrong time over the years when such measures were introduced and then mandated). Whooping cough was (rightly) viewed at the time as a very serious illness, and I was quarantined and removed from school for several weeks.
I couldn’t do much else to amuse myself in our tiny third-floor apartment, but read. Dad introduced me to C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series. I avidly read all those published to that date. I read (at the age of almost ten) Gone With The Wind. And Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. (Lord preserve us, at least from the last.)
And then (thanks to Dad again), I encountered Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. Beginning with A Study in Scarlet.
By the time I went back to school I’d read all the Holmes adventures, short stories, novels, and all. And I’d found faithful and loyal friends that have lasted me a lifetime.
Looking back on it, and when I remember the dark and the cold, it wasn’t such a “bleak winter” after all.
Do young folks still read like this, and find comfort for the ages by doing so?
I hope that’s the case.
