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The Adventure of Sir Arthur's Home: Development, Preservation, Literary Snobbery, and the World's Most Famous Detective

2013; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 87; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2013.0138

1945-8134

J. Madison Davis,

Archaeological Research and Protection

July–August 2013 • 9 T he preservation of historical buildings is often said to have become an ongoing movement after the 1963 failure to save the historic Pennsylvania Station in New York. Yet questions always arise about what sort of buildings deserve the expense of preservation and what sort of preservation they deserve. Do we preserve only buildings generally agreed to be architectural works of art? Sites where great events unfolded, haunted by the ghosts of great men and women? Must such buildings be preserved as they originally were, undisturbed except by caretakers dusting them? Or is it sufficient to preserve the outer shell? In 2010 these issues arose in Surrey, England, as a developer announced plans to convert Undershaw , the former home of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, into several apartments . Undershaw was in bad shape, having been unoccupied and deteriorating since 2004. The reaction to these conversion plans was swift and angry. The developer offered to sell the home to anyone who might refurbish it as a private home, but the cost, equivalent to over $2 million (not including repairs) attracted no buyers. Preservationists pleaded with the local Waverly Borough Council to purchase the property, but the council decided that doing so would be “a substantial burden to the taxpayer.”1 Doyle lived in the house with his family from 1897 to 1907 after having it designed and built by architect Joseph Henry Ball for £10,000. It was some ten thousand square feet on four acres and up-to-date with its own electrical generator and a model railway in the backyard. Surrey air was thought to be very healthy, and Doyle had the house built there because his first wife, Louisa, suffered from tuberculosis. Doyle wrote in a letter, “If we could have ordered The Adventure of Sir Arthur’s Home Development, Preservation, Literary Snobbery, and the World’s Most Famous Detective Crime&Mystery international j. madison davis 10 worldliteraturetoday.org Nature to construct a spot for us, we could not have hit upon anything more perfect.”2 They moved in after returning from a trip to Egypt to help Louisa’s breathing. Although she had been given only months to live in the mid–1890s, Doyle’s treatment of her and the air at Undershaw seemed to help. She lingered for much longer than the doctors had predicted. The home also stimulated Doyle’s creativity. He wrote a number of his most famous works in the study there, including The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). After having killed off Sherlock Holmes in “The Final Problem” published in December 1893, Doyle had devoted himself to “serious” writing—an infamously serious mistake . He would never write anything finer than his Sherlock Holmes stories, and at Undershaw, he eventually yielded to public pressure and resuscitated his dead hero with “The Adventure of the Empty House” and the stories that would be published in the 1905 volume The Return of Sherlock Holmes. He also wrote The Great Boer War at Undershaw after volunteering as a doctor and serving several months in Africa in 1900. He was knighted in 1902 while living at Undershaw—according to contemporary rumor, because Edward VII wanted to encourage more Holmes stories. Eminent guests visited Doyle at Undershaw , like his friend Bram Stoker, who published Dracula in 1897. William Gillette, the American actor who co-authored with Doyle a hugely successful stage play featuring Holmes and became the first great interpreter of the detective, traveled to the home. Sidney Paget, whose illustrations of Holmes fixed his hawklike visage in the world’s imagination, came by. Authors J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan), the young Virginia Woolf, and E. W. Hornung, who created the gentleman thief Raffles, were guests, as were many eminent critics and journalists. Bertram Fletcher Robinson gave Doyle the idea for “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” and told Doyle the legend of a supernatural hound in Dartmoor. Later he helped Doyle work out the plot problems in the manuscript. Doyle ultimately saw that he could use the character he had wished to abandon, Sherlock Holmes, as the hero of the novel that became The Hound of the Baskervilles. Who wouldn’t have wanted to be...