Past event!
This event has already taken place. Find all current events for this promoter here.

Worldwide Doyle 2025 - Sheldon Goldfarb

Conan Doyle, Misquoter

Presented by: Portsmouth BookFest
0ONLINE: Zoom - online event
PThursday 3rd July, 2025
N7:00pm

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.