Inaugurating a new department in pursuit of Old Irregular Robert G. Harris's description of the spirit of the early BSI annual dinners, we shall post occasional items to enliven the discussion. First on the docket is the recent debate about "Ronald Knox: Fact or Fiction?" conducted at the University of Minnesota Libraries' Sherlock Holmes Collections two weekends ago, between me and Dr. Richard Sveum of Minnetonka, Minn. The department can be accessed from the website's Welcome page, and new content will be announced both there and here. Comments on the debate posted here will be added to its text at the website as well. A direct link to this stirring debate is below.
http://www.bsiarchivalhistory.org/BSI_Archival_History/debate.html
The always learned and edudite Dr. Hill Barton does a fine job delineating the history of Ronald Knox and his essay. However, he faces one basic problem in trying to prove that the Knox essay was the basis for Sherlockian scholarship. The essay is simply not scholarly. It is funny, in a silly way, for a few pages, and then becomes tedious. Finally, one comes away from the Knox paper not really learning new or insightful about Holmes. The meticulous Rodger Prescott comes nearer the point, but does not deliver the knockout blow. While it is true that Sidgwick and others wrote important papers, papers with real content, before Knox, it was Morley who put it all together. Between his work in Saturday Review and his founding of the BSI, this truly was the basis of the long-term study of the Canon, both institutionally and in print. But then, Dr. Ainstree is also a son of Haverford College....
ReplyDeleteSome more food for thought. While working on my Holmes/Doyle bibliography I came across an article in the Sunday Telegraph from April 28, 2002. It opens thus:
ReplyDeleteAll the Knoxes loved jokes and spoofs, as Penelope Fitzgerald shows in her wonderful joint biography of them, The Knox Brothers, just republished. As boys, for example, they wrote a letter to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, denouncing inconsistencies in the Sherlock Holmes stories and including five dried orange pips, in allusion to the threatening letter in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Later, Ronald Knox expanded the joke into an essay called "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes", a parody of Biblical scholarship in which he pretended to detect, from careful study of the text, that some of the stories must be fictitious inventions by a drunken Watson. Conan Doyle was delighted by the spoof and wrote to Ronald Knox to thank him.
Nowadays we're rather more sensitive. Or so it would seem from the first programme, called Panic in the Streets, in a new series, The History of Fear (Radio 4, Monday), presented by the feminist historian, Joanna Bourke. On January 16, 1926, Father Ronald Knox (as he was by then) went into a studio in Edinburgh and delivered a talk over the air called 'Broadcasting from the Barricades'. An introductory statement explained that the talk was a work of humour and imagination and would be illustrated with 'sound effects', then a novelty.
Knox proceeded to describe a riot of the unemployed in central London as though it were happening in real time. Parliament and the Savoy Hotel were blown up and the Minister of Traffic was hanged from a lamp-post. Meanwhile, an assistant in the studio produced crashes and bangs and even the sound of breaking glass.
The broadcast took in many listeners, and Father Knox was much reprimanded in the press...."
My question: is the reprimand of Father Knox continuing?
Some more food for thought. While working on my Holmes/Doyle bibliography I came across an article from the Sunday Telegraph, April 28, 2002. The article opened thus:
ReplyDeleteAll the Knoxes loved jokes and spoofs, as Penelope Fitzgerald shows in her wonderful joint biography of them, The Knox Brothers, just republished. As boys, for example, they wrote a letter to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, denouncing inconsistencies in the Sherlock Holmes stories and including five dried orange pips, in allusion to the threatening letter in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Later, Ronald Knox expanded the joke into an essay called "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes", a parody of Biblical scholarship in which he pretended to detect, from careful study of the text, that some of the stories must be fictitious inventions by a drunken Watson. Conan Doyle was delighted by the spoof and wrote to Ronald Knox to thank him.
Nowadays we're rather more sensitive. Or so it would seem from the first programme, called Panic in the Streets, in a new series, The History of Fear (Radio 4, Monday), presented by the feminist historian, Joanna Bourke. On January 16, 1926, Father Ronald Knox (as he was by then) went into a studio in Edinburgh and delivered a talk over the air called 'Broadcasting from the Barricades'. An introductory statement explained that the talk was a work of humour and imagination and would be illustrated with 'sound effects', then a novelty.
Knox proceeded to describe a riot of the unemployed in central London as though it were happening in real time. Parliament and the Savoy Hotel were blown up and the Minister of Traffic was hanged from a lamp-post. Meanwhile, an assistant in the studio produced crashes and bangs and even the sound of breaking glass.
The broadcast took in many listeners, and Father Knox was much reprimanded in the press...."
My question: Is the reprimand of Father Knox continuing?