Recently I wrote this post for the organisers of a wonderful conference on literary tourism in the long nineteenth century. Check out the rest of their fascinating blog posts by following the link.
Dave McLaughlin, an AHRC-funded PhD Candidate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, explores how fans can (dis)place an author.
Arguably the most hallowed of grounds for fans of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories is not in London, nor in any of the southern English towns in which the author lived. It is in the small, Swiss village of Meiringen. More accurately, it is a spot near the ledge of a viewing platform over the Reichenbach Falls. It was in this place, so we learn in The Final Problem, that the Great Detective Holmes apparently met his end at the hands of Professor Moriarty, the ‘Napoleon of Crime’, as both fell from the ledge into the watery abyss below.[1]
While reports of Holmes’s death were greatly exaggerated (he was, of course, resurrected almost a decade later in The Adventure of the Empty House[2]), the importance of Meiringen…
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travelling histories 