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Sitting with 1910: Living in the Present, Writing in the Past

by Margie Deck & Nancy Holder

He was, seemingly, living the life expected of a well-to-do “civilized Englishman of the twentieth century” amid the chaos and wonder of the largest city in the world. London was shaking off the long nineteenth to become a modern metropolis, albeit with the undercurrent of tensions that would eventually lead to war in 1914 and the slow crumbling of its empire. Yet not one of the short stories published in 1910 reflect this time in his life. Not one is set in modern London and only “The Terror of Blue John Gap” is placed in the new century (1908).

The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia notes that Doyle published seven short stories in 1910: “The Terror of Blue John Gap” (August); “The Marriage of the Brigadier” (September); “The Last Galley” (November); “Through the Mists: I. The Coming of the Huns” (November); “The Last of the Legions” (December); “Through the Mists: II. The First Cargo” (December); and “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” (December). The Holmes adventure is the only work placed in the late 19th century—the other settings are earlier, some much earlier, even before the Common Era. Doyle’s imagination in 1910 appears to be comfortably lodged in a past when the Empire did not yet exist, or when there were no questions about its strength and stability.

In the Oxford University Press 1993 edition of the Doyle collection His Last Bow, which includes “The Devil’s Foot,” Owen Dudley Edwards, the general editor of the Oxford Sherlock Holmes series, notes a transformation in Holmes over the course of the stories (1908-1913). He states, “…Holmes is fallible, faulted, or marginalized….” He posits the stories are milestones for a world on its way to war, and that Holmes is “…called upon to reflect a wider and increasingly less contained and ordered world.” He continues, “Conan Doyle’s awareness of increasing loss of British national confidence may have been sporadic, and its artistic expression sometimes unconscious; but the result was to have a palpable effect on the Holmes prescription.”

This approach is echoed in “The Terror of Blue John Gap.” We can’t know Doyle’s reasoning behind his artistic expression for the year of 1910, or for “The Terror” specifically—perhaps this story of the lonely hero, diseased and weak, fighting the unknown monster represents Doyle’s subconscious concerns about the monsters England was soon to face and her ability to do so.

Or perhaps he was having fun writing good yarns. Either way, we are the beneficiaries.

WHO IS LISA?

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author, and editor whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels and over 200 short stories, and a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert who has appeared on CNN, NPR, The History Channel, Discovery +, and dozens of other sites and shows. Her books include Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances, Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween, and the Rondo Hatton Award-winning The Art of the Zombie Movie. She also hosts the popular weekly “Ghost Report” podcast and a newsletter about the paranormal (The Whole Haunted World). Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com.