Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderLiterary fact

Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes in 1893, sending him over the Reichenbach Falls with his enemy Professor Moriarty. Readers were so upset that The Strand Magazine reportedly lost more than 20,000 subscribers, and ten years later Doyle brought the detective back.

The Strand Magazine, 1893

Literature

The story behind the card

Doyle had grown tired of Holmes and wanted time for the historical novels he considered his serious work. The story, “The Final Problem”, appeared in The Strand in December 1893. Angry letters followed; one woman reportedly began hers “You brute”. The famous tale of Londoners wearing black mourning bands is probably a legend: the earliest known mention of it dates from 1949. Doyle held out for eight years. The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialised in 1901 and 1902, was set before Holmes's death, and in 1903 “The Adventure of the Empty House” revealed that Holmes had faked his fall. Doyle went on writing Holmes stories until 1927.

Türkçe oku
Arthur Conan Doyle, 1893'te Sherlock Holmes'u baş düşmanı Profesör Moriarty ile birlikte Reichenbach Şelalesi'nden düşürerek öldürdü. Okurlar öylesine sarsıldı ki The Strand dergisinin 20.000'den fazla abone kaybettiği anlatılır. On yıl sonra Doyle dedektifi geri getirdi.
The Strand Magazine, 1893

Doyle, Holmes'tan bıkmıştı ve asıl işi saydığı tarihî romanlara zaman ayırmak istiyordu. “Son Problem” adlı öykü Aralık 1893'te The Strand'de yayımlandı. Ardından öfkeli mektuplar yağdı; anlatılana göre bir kadın mektubuna “Seni zalim!” diye başlamıştı. Londralıların yas tutmak için kollarına siyah bant taktığı meşhur hikâye ise büyük olasılıkla bir efsanedir: Bu konudaki bilinen en eski kayıt 1949 tarihlidir. Doyle sekiz yıl direndi. 1901-1902'de tefrika edilen Baskerville'lerin Köpeği, Holmes'un ölümünden önceki bir dönemde geçiyordu. 1903'te yayımlanan “Boş Ev” öyküsünde ise Holmes'un aslında ölmediği, yalnızca düşmüş gibi göründüğü ortaya çıktı. Doyle 1927'ye kadar Holmes öyküleri yazmayı sürdürdü.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Sherlock Holmes
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

Much of ancient Greek philosophy and science reached us through Byzantine scribes, who kept copying the old texts by hand in Constantinople for more than a thousand years. Before and after the city fell in 1453, Greek scholars carried many of these manuscripts to Italy.

Parchment and papyrus decay, so an ancient text survived only if someone kept making fresh copies. In the 9th and 10th centuries Byzantine scribes adopted a smaller, joined-up handwriting called minuscule and recopied the classics in it. Few of the older manuscripts were kept, so for many ancient authors the oldest surviving copy dates from this period. Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, summarised 279 books he had read; almost half are now lost, so for many of them his notes are our main record. His pupil Arethas, later archbishop of Caesarea, today's Kayseri, had manuscripts copied that preserve works by Plato and Marcus Aurelius; his Plato is now in Oxford's Bodleian Library. The 10th-century Suda, an encyclopaedia of some 30,000 entries, also quotes many lost sources. This revival of learning is known as the Macedonian Renaissance, after the ruling dynasty.

Ikigai DailyRead card
StillnessLiterature

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Einstein said this to the American journalist George Sylvester Viereck, whose interview 'What Life Means to Einstein' appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on 26 October 1929. By then he was world famous: measurements made during the 1919 solar eclipse had confirmed his general theory of relativity, and he had won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. The line follows his remark that he was 'enough of an artist' to draw freely on his imagination. A similar passage appeared in his book Cosmic Religion in 1931.

Albert Einstein, The Saturday Evening Post interview (1929)Read card
WonderLanguage

'Clue' comes from 'clew', an old word for a ball of thread. It took on the meaning of a hint because of the Greek myth in which Ariadne gives Theseus a ball of thread to find his way out of the Labyrinth.

In the myth, King Minos of Crete kept the Minotaur, a monster that was half man and half bull, in a maze built by the craftsman Daedalus. Theseus, a prince of Athens, came to kill it. Minos's daughter Ariadne gave him a ball of thread, which he tied at the entrance and unwound as he went in, so he could follow it back out. English writers came to speak of the 'clew' that guides a person through any maze or puzzle, and by the 1620s the word meant anything that points the way. The spelling 'clue' had appeared in the 1400s. Sailors still keep the old spelling: the clew is the lower corner of a sail. Turkish tells the same story in one word: ipucu literally means 'the end of the thread'.

Merriam-WebsterRead card
WonderHistory

The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree three times: in hieroglyphs, in Demotic, an everyday Egyptian script, and in ancient Greek. Scholars could still read Greek, so they could compare it with the Egyptian versions line by line. In 1822 the French scholar Jean-François Champollion used it to crack the hieroglyphic script.

Hieroglyphs had been unreadable for more than 1,400 years: the last known inscription was carved in AD 394, and later scholars wrongly assumed that every sign stood for an idea. The breakthrough came through names. Royal names are written inside oval frames called cartouches, and from 1814 the English scientist Thomas Young matched the cartouche on the stone with the Greek name Ptolemy and worked out some of its sounds. Champollion knew Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, still used in the Coptic Church. In September 1822, in a letter to the secretary of the French Academy of Inscriptions, he announced that many hieroglyphs stood for sounds, and by 1824 he had shown that the script combines signs for sounds with signs for meanings. Over the following decades, texts from more than 3,000 years of Egyptian history became readable again.

British MuseumRead card
WonderLiterature

Shakespeare's plays are the earliest known written source for many English words and phrases, from “star-crossed” to “green-eyed monster”. But being first found in Shakespeare is not the same as being invented by him, and many such words turn out to have been used by others first.

The popular figure of about 1,700 words invented by Shakespeare rests largely on the Oxford English Dictionary, whose first edition cited him as the earliest user of many words. The scholar Jonathan Hope has pointed out why: the Victorian readers who collected quotations for the dictionary read Shakespeare more thoroughly than any other writer, so he often got the credit for words that can also be found in others. Later research, helped by searchable collections of early printed books, has found older examples of many of them. What remains is still remarkable. He turned nouns into verbs, added prefixes and suffixes freely and joined words in new ways, and dozens of his phrases, such as “salad days” and “sea change”, are still in everyday use more than four hundred years later.

Literary historyRead card
Next card in the archiveJane Austen's name never appeared on her novels while she was alive. Sense and Sensibility (1811) was credited only to “A Lady”, and her later novels, such as Pride and Prejudice, to “the Author of” her earlier books.Read next →