Holiday reading

[Brightonian]

I inherited a bound set of the Strand magazine from the 1890s, which I guess were originally purchased by my great-grandparents. So my plan for the festive season is to re-read the first batch of Holmes stories from A Scandal in Bohemia to The Final Problem, in the exact setting in which they first appeared - complete with full page illustrations by Sidney Paget.

Sadly, I don't own Beaton's Christmas annual for 1887, or Lippincott's Monthly Magazine for February 1890.

[admin]

Sounds like fun! Do you plan to read some of the other stories in those issues, to see how they hold up?

[Brightonian]

Absolutely. Other treats include interviews with celebrities of the day such as Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and ACD himself.

[admin]

I have a book called Short Stories From the Strand. I've read the first few, by writers such as Max Pemberton, H. G. Wells, Jerome K. Jerome, and Arthur Conan Doyle, and was not that taken by them. Maybe the editor wanted to avoid the most famous stories (the Conan Doyle is not a Sherlock Holmes for example) and in doing so avoided the best stories. Let me know how readable an actual issue of the magazine is today. You may find great stories by forgotten writers, and minor stories by famous writers.

On the subject of forgotten writers, does anyone remember Robert Abernathy? He wrote some wonderful stories, especially "Junior".

[Brightonian]

Don't know Abernathy, but one writer I'd like to know more about is Hubert Crackanthorpe: I found a story of his in an anthology of writings from the 1890s, a tale of marital breakdown which struck me as surprisingly modern in tone.

[now I say this, I checked on Amazon and it seems quite a few of his stories have come back in print in recent years. Must investigate, as Rorschach would say.]