Worldwide Doyle 2025 - Sheldon Goldfarb
Conan Doyle, Misquoter
Presented by: Portsmouth BookFest| 0 | ONLINE: Zoom - online event (info) |
|---|---|
| P | Thursday 3rd July, 2025 |
| N | Door time: 7:00pm Start time: 7:00pm |
| . | All ages |
| C | Literature |
| ` | Before the event you will be emailed a link, providing access to your online event. In order to ensure you receive this please add tickets@wegottickets.com to your Contact List or mark us as a Safe Sender. Please see here for more info on how to do this. |
Event information
Did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle get things wrong? There is a whole Sherlockian industry devoted to errors in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but what about when he was writing non-fiction, as in his collection of essays called Through the Magic Door, a collection of charming observations about literature, boxing, and Napoleon, in which Conan Doyle recounts a series of anecdotes about Thomas Carlyle, Walter Scott, Oliver Cromwell, and himself. Often the anecdotes are wrong. And then there are his quotations: often they are wrong too.
Does it matter? Should we not worry unnecessarily about precision when listening to a good story? What did Doyle himself think? In my talk I will explore the errors and the rationale for them, and see if we should care about whether Thomas Carlyle bought a whole set of Gibbon to start his private library.
