When Literary Snobs Strike

Disheartening news coming out of Britain, courtesy of The Guardian:

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has just rejected pleas from the Victorian Society and Holmes aficionados to safeguard the future of Undershaw, the house that [Arthur] Conan Doyle built near Hindhead in Surrey, by giving it Grade I status. Here he wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles and a patriot defence of Britain’s Boer war; resurrected Sherlock Holmes, having previously thrown him off the Reichenbach Falls; campaigned for justice for the falsely accused solicitor George Edalji, and attempted to learn the banjo.

Few would rate the house as an architectural triumph, and today it is a poignant, boarded-up sight. Empty for several years, its owners have been thwarted in plans to divide it into separate apartments.

But the DCMS is unwilling to help. Doyle, it asserts, does not occupy a high enough status in the nation’s consciousness, saying he is not another Dickens or Austen. Which is true--but few writers are. And few have established a character so firmly embedded in the national consciousness as Doyle did in Holmes, a figure still discussed, revered and cherished across the world.

Ian Rankin couldn’t agree more with that last point, it seems. As The Scotsman explains:

… Rankin has accused government minister Tessa Jowell of “literary snobbery” over her refusal to recognise the Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle as one of Britain’s literary giants. …

Yesterday Rankin, the Scots author behind the [Inspector John] Rebus novels, said: “Conan Doyle may not have a great standing in the universities, but around the world, more people know about and read Sherlock Holmes than read Jane Austen. He created one of the most recognisable and archetypal figures in literature, and if his house is not worth saving, then I would say that no house is worth saving.

“It would appear that there’s an element of literary snobbery in this.”

This is unfortunate, especially given Conan Doyle’s stature among generations of the reading public, and the way his stories have brought Britain good will from all over the globe. If his own homeland can’t understand his significance, who can?

READ MORE: “The Homes of Holmes and Papa,” by Stephen Miller (The Rap Sheet); “Sir Arthur’s Curse,” by Linda L. Richards
(The Rap Sheet).