The Society Of Sherlock Holmes In London

Review:Faysal

London , 1950. St Marylebone Borough Council was hard at work trying to decide how to celebrate the Festival of Britain the following year. The Public Libraries Committee suggested an exhibition about Sherlock Holmes. Others on the council were not impressed - 'is this character, associated with murky crime, the best we have to offer' someone demanded. Why not do something on slum clearance? Letters began appearing in The Times - from Dr Watson, Mycroft Holmes, Inspector Lestrade - seventeen of them in all. Some even said that they had some mementoes of Sherlock Holmes, and offered to lend them for exhibition. Bowed down by public opinion, the Council relented. A small group of enthusiasts got together to plan the exhibition. Eagerly they designed and collected - a Persian slipper for Holmes’s tobacco, a gasogene for Watson's soda, a jack-knife for Holmes to skewer his unanswered correspondence to the mantelpiece. On an upper floor of Abbey House, the Baker Street headquarters of Abbey National, a meticulously detailed recreation of the famous sitting room at 221B took shape. Fresh crumpets - bitten into by two different sets of teeth - were supplied every day by a local bakery. Over 54,000 people came to see it. It was a triumph.
For its creators, though, the job was over. Then they thought - why don't we resurrect the Sherlock Holmes Society? There had been a small Society in the 1930s, whose members had included such distinguished scholars as the leading cleric Mgr Ronald Knox and the crime writer Dorothy L Sayers. The war had brought an untimely end to its activities. On Tuesday 20 January 1951, the new society was formed - called the Sherlock Holmes Society of London to distinguish it from the pre-war ancestor from which it can nevertheless claim direct descent. The first Sherlock Holmes Journal appeared in May. It included articles on Holmes's personality and Watson's gambling habits, and a review of the films of The Hound of the Baskervilles . Its membership list included just over 130 names. There are more than 1,000 today.

The Society quickly established a pattern of activities which it continues to this day - a twice-yearly journal, regular meetings, an annual dinner in January. Its tone was witty, erudite, but always with a light touch. The writer Mollie Hardwick once described the Sherlockian game as a huge family joke, and a sort of family the Society indeed is, whose skills and responsibilities are passed down the generations.
One of the Society's greatest early triumphs was the celebrated pilgrimage to Switzerland in 1968 - forty members and least twice as many Press, all in full Victorian costume. High above the Reichenbach Falls, the Society's President Lord Gore-Booth shed his mantle as head of the Diplomatic Service to become Sherlock Holmes himself, locked in the death struggle with the evil Professor Moriarty, played by leading barrister Charles Scholefield. And when the BBC made the fight at the Falls the first item in its evening news bulletin, the Society knew that it had reached a new pinnacle of success.
Since then, there have been no fewer than five further pilgrimages to Switzerland. In 1993, the Society made its first visit to France. Full costume was again de rigeur as members visited Bordeaux and Cognac, concluding in Montpellier, where Holmes had spent part of his exile while all the world believed him to be dead, exactly one hundred years earlier. And in 2001, to celebrate its fiftieth birthday, the Society took a cruise in the Baltic, with visits to Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Tallinn, St Petersburg and Helsinki.
The Society Of Sherlock Holmes In London Originally published in Shvoong: http://www.shvoong.com/f/internet-and-technologies/181812-society-sherlock-holmes-london/

The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

Summary:writerros
This book tells the story of the English language from the post-Roman Germanic invaders who imposed their language on the resident Celts, right up to the present day. What makes this book such a fascinating read is the way that Bragg personifies the English language, treating its journey as a kind of adventure story, without losing any of his academic authority over the subject. The book begins with the introduction of a germanic language which became the common tongue as the Celts withdrew to the outer regions of the British Isles. Much of our language is still founded in this Old Norse language, and although the language has changed almost out of recognition since this time, our hundred most common words came from this original language. The invasion of the Normans is described by Bragg as the potential destruction of the English language. For many years the people of the court spoke French, and English was in danger of disappearing. But it survived through the common people, and by taking on many Norman words and integrating them into itself. Bragg tells how, when the King wanted to speak to his people, he spoke in English, and eventually English replaced French in schools until English had once again become the dominant language. Chaucer and Shakespeare, of course, have chapters to themselves. In Chaucer we see how French language and ideas had penetrated into the English psyche and how he himself influenced our language while giving us a superb picture of English characters in his Canterbury Tales. Between Chaucer and Shakespeare, we see the beginnings of the fight to bring religious texts from Latin into English. A fight that resulted in loss of life and a stubborn resistance from the Church that seems startling to our 20th century attitudes. Shakespeare expanded the language, and many of the words and phrases we use without thinking today were invented by him. Phrases such as, playing ‘fast and loose’, ‘budge an inch’, ‘vanish into thin air’ and many, many more all began with Shakespeare. He expressed different levels of society in language and, as Bragg describes: ‘gave us a new world in words and insights which would colour, help, deepen, lighten and depict our lives in thought and feeling.’ From there we travel to America and see how English travelled with the early settlers to the New World and how it developed there into its various Amercian characteristics through the experiences of the pioneers who travelled into and settled in the Wild West, the influence of the Native Americans, and of the American South where words and phrases from slaves integrated themselves into the language.

From America, they came back to us and are now part of our every-day speech. As the enlightenment in England progressed, attempts to control the language, including correct spelling and grammar, were begun, as well as the idea of a ‘proper’ way to speak in terms of accent. However, as we moved into the industrial revolution, more words came into being, and the greater awareness of the classes and differences in pronunciation and accent. Dickens used language to describe these differences to great effect, including cockney rhyming slang and the language of the streets. Again, we leave the British Isles to journey to India, and see how the British Empire took on words such as ‘bungalow’, ‘bandanna’, ‘bangle’, ‘jungle’, ‘lilac’ and ‘yoga’. From there we travel to the West Indies and then to Australia where the language developed its own Australian characteristics and, again, came back to us with words that we now take for granted. There is a wonderful interpretation of the song Waltzing Matilda which is mainly made up of Australian out-back slang. With a quick look at the not-so-pretty aspects of the English language (racial insults, swear words etc), Bragg brings us up to the present day, and how our language is now being influenced by the modern-day computer age and the recent development of mobile phone texting language. English is now spoken as a second language in many countries of the world and influences other languages, as it was once infuenced itself. The book is a fascinating read, and if you ever thought that there was a ‘correct’ way to speak the English language, this book will challenge that belief as Bragg explains how a living language can only survive through change and influence from other languages. English continues to develop and change, and will do so as long as it survives.
The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language Originally published in Shvoong: http://www.shvoong.com/humanities/history/72396-adventure-english-biography-language/

What Is the Victorian Novel ?

Review:rizwantata

Victorian novel or Victorian literature is the literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) (the Victorian era). It forms a link and transition between the writers of the romantic period and the very different literature of the 20th century.
The 19th century saw the novel become the leading form of literature in English. The works by pre-Victorian writers such as Jane Austen and Walter Scott had perfected both closely-observed social satire and adventure stories. Popular works opened a market for the novel amongst a reading public. The 19th century is often regarded as a high point in British literature as well as in other countries such as France, the United States and Russia. Books, and novels in particular, became ubiquitous, and the "Victorian novelist" created legacy works with continuing appeal.
Significant Victorian novelists and poets include: Matthew Arnold, the Brontë sisters (Emily, Anne and Charlotte Brontë), Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Joseph Conrad, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, George Meredith, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Richard Jefferies, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Philip Meadows Taylor, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, George MacDonald, G.M. Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and H. G. Wells (although many people consider his writing to be more of the Edwardian age).

The style of the Victorian novel

Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrongdoers are suitably punished. They tended to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart. While this formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction, the situation became more complex as the century progressed.

The influence of Victorian literature.

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Victorian fiction outside of Victoria's domains.
Writers from the United States and the British colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada were influenced by the literature of Britain and are often classed as a part of Victorian literature, although they were gradually developing their own distinctive voices.Victorian writers of Canadian literature include Grant Allen, Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill. Australian literature has the poets Adam Lindsay Gordon and Banjo Paterson, who wrote Waltzing Matilda and New Zealand literature includes Thomas Bracken and Frederick Edward Maning. From the sphere of literature of the United States during this time are some of the country's greats including: Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry James, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman.

The problem with the classification of Victorian literature is great difference between the early works of the period and the later works which had more in common with the writers of the Edwardian period and many writers straddle this divide. People such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, Jerome K. Jerome and Joseph Conrad all wrote some of their important works during Victoria's reign but the sensibility of their writing is frequently regarded as Edwardian.

The persistent popular embrace of Victorian literature has had a profound influence on modern literature and media. Writers such as Dickens and the Brontë sisters still sell robustly on most book resellers' lists and are frequently adapted into films and television productions, both directly and in modernized retellings. In addition, many modern novels such as A Great and Terrible Beauty demonstrate that the intricate cultural mores of the Victorian era finds a home in the modern cultural psyche.
What Is the Victorian Novel ? Originally published in Shvoong: http://www.shvoong.com/books/novel-novella/2067158-victorian-novel/