“who seems to have the powers of magic” [SUSS]
We don't hear much of magic in the Sherlock Holmes stories, other than Holmes being called a wizard four times and a magician once (can you name the stories?). While he did have a "human love for admiration and applause," [SIXN] Holmes kept his agency flat-footed upon the ground.
His creator, of course, was another story. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, known worldwide for his perfect reasoning machine, was also fascinated by spiritualism and participated in many seances, including a rather famous one with his friend Harry Houdini that did not end well.
But it is another type of magic that Conan Doyle wrote about in 1907 in his book Through the Magic Door. In this memoir of sorts, the author takes us on a tour through his library through a series of personal essays that describe the transformational power of reading.
The first paragraph of Chapter I sets the tone:
“I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland. Surely there would be something eerie about a line of books were it not that familiarity has deadened our sense of it. Each is a mummified soul embalmed in cere-cloth and natron of leather and printer's ink. Each cover of a true book enfolds the concentrated essence of a man. The personalities of the writers have faded into the thinnest shadows, as their bodies into impalpable dust, yet here are their very spirits at your command.”
We know this effect from many books we've read, and certainly from Doyle's many works. In the words of T.S. Eliot, "Let us go then, you and I..."
Let's see what magic the boys at Baker Street Elementary are creating.
Baker Street Elementary follows the original adventures of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, as they and their friends work through the issues of elementary school in Victorian London. An archive of all previous episodes can be viewed at the Baker Street Elementary website.
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