ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

So Tessa Jowell has decided not to allocate any cash to the restoration of Undershaw, the home that Conan Doyle had built, and carefully adapted for the needs of his beloved Touie as she slowly died of cancer, on the grounds that he is not a Great Author 'like Jane Austen'. Well, no, he probably does not appear as required reading on the syllabus of any university Eng. Lit. course. (Not in Britain, anyway - I shouldn't like to take bets against his appearing somewhere in the American mid-west.)

But is that the only yardstick by which he is to be judged? As the creator of a fictional character as universally known as Hamlet (and perhaps more widely recognised); globally translated; appearing as play, film, and television in versions of wildly varying quality; and running through endless re-publications; Doyle is surely deserving of respect and memory. Not only do the Holmes stories represent the first real flowering of the detective novel; they present a detailed and endearing picture of Britain at the cusp of the Edwardian era. And not merely as a series of, to us, odd details which feeble minds may giggle at. He wears, according to the Paget illustration (though it's unmentioned in the text) a deerstalker hat, ankle-length coat, and spats, to approach Dartmoor. What a pantomime costume! But what could in fact be more fitting for an adventure which will see him lying out on the moor for nights - before the advent of Goretex and thermals?

Mostly, though, despite cartoon versions, he wears elegant morning dress with top-hat, except for short expeditions to the Home Counties, when he runs to a more doggish jacket and bowler. See the illustration above; where, incidentally, he is pointing out to Watson the tall blocks of the new Board Schools - 'lighthouses for the elimination of ignorance'. For all his bluff exterior Doyle was a man of wide sympathies: not his fault that the inner cities seem as insoluble a problem as ever.

As for his later pre-occupation with Spiritualism, it arose from personal grief, and if it were fantasy based on entire lack of real evidence it was not more so than the Catholicism in which he was brought up and so soon abandoned. And, of course, it brings us closer to what, for good or ill, was a preoccupation of the period.

If we live in a world in which it seems to be fantastic to analyse a man standing in the street as an ex-Marine sergeant by his appearance alone, that is only because our world is flattened and homogenised to a degree where real individuality (as distinct from the artificial twaddle devised by by the media) is so flattened by global (i.e. American) influences that it is more and more difficult to tell a Cornishman from a Cockney. And 'Passionate author remains celibate for years as his dear wife lies dying, though he is in love with another woman' would never make the headlines, would it?

And what does this Secretary for Culture offer as a sop to educated opinion? Why, to preserve 221B Baker Street - a fictitious address which, if it exists at all, does so as a tourist trap for the foolish, who may well be forgiven for being confused by the whole sorry business.

You're on about the Edwardians again, aren't you?

And what if I am?

It just makes you sound a bit of an old fuddyduddy.

I am an old fuddyduddy. Now get off my blog, whizz-kid.