Worldwide Doyle 2024 and the Land of Mist

The Portsmouth History Center holds the Conan Doyle Collection. When the Sherlockian Richard Lancelyn Green died in 2004, he left his collection of 40,000 archives, 16,000 books and 3,000 objects to the City of Portsmouth after being helped by staff at the city’s Central Library when researching Conan Doyle. 

This year the Collection is hosting Worldwide Doyle 2024, a series of virtual webinars that have been conducted in various forms since 2021. You can access all the information about this year's series here.

There are four lectures this year on the schedule, each invited partly because they had visited the Richard Lancelyn Green Bequests' vast Conan Doyle Collection as part of conducting their research:

• Professor Christine Ferguson - Towards the Centenary of The Land of Mist: Arthur Conan Doyle, Spiritualism, and Scandal in 1920s Britain.
• Paul Chapman, Ross Davies and Mark Jones - The Adventure of the Imaginary Pedlar: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Army on Manoeuvres.
• Mattias Bostrom - "Was Killing Sherlock Holmes a Stroke of Genius?": A Contemporary Perspective on Conan Doyle and His Creation in the Mid 1890s.
• Douglas Kerr - 1909: Arthur Conan Doyle goes to the theatre.

The first lecture was held this week, presented by Professor Christine Ferguson from the University of Stirling in Scotland. Prof. Fergusion's research "focuses on the entwined histories of the literary gothic and the British occult revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century." When Christine's recording is made available on Youtube I'll post it here:

 

Christine spoke about ACD's book 'The Land of Mist'. Here is a description of the talk from the website:

First serialized in the Strand between 1925-26, Arthur Conan Doyle described The Land of Mist as his “big psychic novel” which would, he hoped, prompt wide-spread conversion to the modern spiritualist cause he had been publicly championing since 1916. My talk examines how the novel developed from and responded to various controversies in the early nineteenth-twenties British occult scene, including the Cottingley Fairy fiasco, the tabloid crusade against Thelemic sex magician Aleister Crowley, and Harry Houdini’s public attack on the authenticity of Jean Doyle’s mediumship. We will see how Doyle enlisted the capable male adventurer characters from Doyle’s popular Professor Challenger series to promote a sane, seemingly scientific, and scandal-free brand of Christian spiritualism in line with his increasingly conservative and enduringly nationalistic outlook, one often at odds with the cosmopolitan modernity that The Land of Mist depicts.

One interesting aspect of the talk was a mention of GK Chesterton's review of 'The Land of Mist' in the Illustrated London News, raised by the ACD Encyclopedia. Ed Petit from the The Rosenbach Museum & Library tracked down the review and shared it on the Sherlockian Facebook site 'The Stranger's Room'. The article was published in the Illustrated London News on 10 April 1926. An image of the article (thanks to Ed) is below, and I've placed a transcription of this most interesting article underneath. It's a delightful article with some Sherlockian pastiche opportunities discussed. Chesterton is also brutally treats ACD's Challenger character, but is highly complimentary of ACD himself.

Illustrated London News

10 April 1926

By G.K. Chesterton

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE has just published a novel about Spiritualism ; it is called "The Land of Mist," and I for one find it intensely interesting. I do not agree with the mere disparagement of it that has been prevalent in the Press. It is not so neat and telling as one of the short stories about Sherlock Holmes ; nobody but a fool would expect it to be. Even Watson would not be such a fool as that. I have often wondered why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle does not now write up a story about Sherlock Holmes as a Spirtualist. It would be better till still we had a new and psychical repe­tition of "The Return of Sherlock Holmes" with the detective making his positively last bow as a gaunt and grisly spectre. It would be glorious to have Watson as a worried medium and Holmes as a rather irritable control. Perhaps Sherlock Holmes really did die when he fell over the precipice in the Alpine pass and all his after adven­tures were the actions of a revenant. 

Perhaps we might go over all the admirable tales, one by one, and tell them the other way round from "the other side." Perhaps the Hound of the Baskervilles really was a demon hound, and the character of a blameless naturalist, collecting butterflies, was blackened merely in order to find a fictitious natural explanation. Perhaps the treasure in "The Sign of Four" really was weighted with some cult curse of the 

Orient, and Mr. Sholto died by more than mortal agency. It would be great fun to go through the whole series and find out how the fairies stole the racehorse, or how the Musgrave family ghost killed the Musgrave family butler. But nobody could expect an exposition of psychical theory, whether in fiction or not, to have the curt and compact interest of a criminal mystery. Nobody can expect it to have the snap with which the handcuffs are locked on the struggling pur­loiner of the Romanoff Ruby or the Moon of Bengal. That sort of finality cannot be asked of stories about the infinite. And if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has found it difficult to tum his moral philosophy into a really good novel, he is not the first to fail in doing that. 

Instead of reviving Sherlock Holmes he has revived Dr. Challenger, as the distin­guished convert to Spiritualism. Dr. Chal­lenger was the hero of at least two other romances ; one about the discovery of a world still full of prehistoric monsters, and the other, I think, about some astronomical danger threatening the earth from a poison­ous atmosphere in space. Both these Chal­lenger stories would have been quite good stories if it had not been for Challenger. Challenger himself was a product of that unlucky and undignified tendency in the Teutonic and Imperialistic epoch; the blunder of supposing that really big men are bullies. It came from Prussia ; or rather, it came from hell via Prussia. But Sir Arthur was quite innocent in being in­fluenced by it; he was only one of many millions who were so influenced. In this story the bully begins by being a material­ist, and eventually becomes a Spiritualist ; but even before he becomes a Spiritualist he is a good deal less of a bully. He has been softened because his author has been softened; and his author has been softened because he has really got a religion. And that, at any rate, is a real argument for spiritualism. But when we come to the more formal arguments for Spiritualism, as operating in the case of Challenger, we find the whole question raised in a way that is certainly itself open to question. 

Challenger, who has come to scoff, remains to pray, or at any rate to praise, at the Spiritualistic seance; because, after a doubtful exhibition by the professional medium, his own daughter goes into a trance and tells her father something reassuring about two dead men to whom he once secretly ad­ministered a drug, of which he has always feared that they died. Up to this moment Dr. Challenger has appeared to be as hard as a rock in his denial and as headlong as a cataract in his disdain ; be will not hear a word, or the whisper of a word, of there being the remotest suggestion of anything to be said for Spiritualism. He is a fierce as a mad dog and as deaf as a post. He bites anybody's head off who mentions the possibility ; he sweeps it away unexamined with nothing but roaring, rending, deafen­ing contradiction. For Dr. Challenger is a Ration­alist, and one of those lucid scientific enquirers who have adopted an attitude of Agnosticism.

This does not seem an attitude quite worthy of a professional man. But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has never been particularly flattering to his own pro­fession. There may be doctors as simple and silly as Dr. Watson. There may also be doctors as stupid and rabid as Dr. Challenger. But at least Dr. Chal­lenger's stubborn dogmas and strong unnatural antipathies ought to be a protection to him against a too ready acceptance of psychic marvels. A man of that extreme materialism has at least a long way to travel before he comes even within sight of the Land of Mist, let alone of the ultimate Land of Light. We should expect that he would have to be dragged every step of the way, that he would examine every step of the argument. And yet, when Dr. Challenger does receive his private revelation, he seems to me to take one wild and flying leap over half-a-dozen logical steps and land beyond the border-line to which he was being brought. He accepts more than the revelation reveals ; he is the fool who rushes in where the angels of the astral plane fear to tread.

If he is really certain that he inocu­lated his late patients secretly, so that nobody knew; if he is quite certain that they died before anybody knew; and if he is quite certain that he has heard certain words unmistakably referring to a cer­tain incident that nobody knew - why, then he may be justified in saying that there must be some channels of com­munication other than the senses - something capable of receiving and repeating truths other than the limited human mind, or (if you will) some power that can com­municate with the spirit by purely spiritual means. That he knows ; and that is all he knows; that he must admit, and that is all he need admit. Whether the new abnormal power is good or bad, whether the strange unexpected message is true or false, even whether the additional and unexplored faculty is inside him or out­side him, he need not in the least con­fess to knowing. All he need admit (who had a moment before recoiled in disgust from admitting anything) is that a know­ledge of his hidden thoughts exists some­where in something that can act outside him and without his consent. But when Dr. Challenger suddenly leaves off denying everything, he instantly begins accepting everything, and that beyond anything he is required to accept. These are his words : "Others may try to explain what has oc­curred by telepathy, by sub-conscious mind action, by what they will, but I cannot doubt - it is impossible to doubt - that a message has come to me from the dead."

Now, I should not have thought it was impossible to doubt it. I should not cer­tainly have thought it was impossible for so stubborn a doubter to doubt it, for so reckless a denier to doubt it. A mes­sage touching a secret need not come from the dead because it is about the dead. All we can say for certain about the secret message is that it came from somebody who knew the secret. All we know about the knowledge is that somewhere or other it is known. It need not necessarily be a dead man ; it might be a devil ; it might be a fairy ; it might be a dual personality or mysterious separ­ate mind of some other sort ; it might be all sorts of things. I do not blame a man for having a mystical and intuitional faith and saying so. But I do blame a man of science for first of all furiously deny­ing that any evidence can possibly exist ; and then, when he finds it does exist, blindly accepting it as proof of something that it does not prove. And I do not blame it the less because it does not only occur in the case of fictitious characters, but also in the case of real characters ; because it is not only found in an imaginary monster of a mad materialist, but in many a genuine and admirable Victorian agnostic ; because it is exemplified not only in an impossible person whom I dislike, but in a real person whom I respect and to whom I am grate­ful; because it is not only the story of Professor Challenger, but of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.