Читать книгу Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters - Daniel Stashower, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 76

I have been so much taken up by amusements that I have but little time for writing. I have been to the Theatre twice with Uncle James, being presented with private boxes by Mr Tom Taylor a play-writer and friend of Uncle Dick. The first time was to the Lyceum where we saw Hamlet. Hamlet was acted by Henry Irving who is supposed to be the best tragic actor in England. The play has continued three months, yet every night the house is crammed to suffocation by people wishing to see Irving act. I enjoyed it very much indeed. Irving is very young and slim, with black piercing eyes, and acted magnificently. The rest of the Lyceum company seemed to me very poor.

Last Thursday we went to Haymarket and saw Sothern again. Though I had seen him before I enjoyed it just as much. Buckstone acted as Ana Trenchard but I do not think him half as good an actor as our Edinborough Pillars [sic].

I have been visiting a Stonyhurst boy, and great friend of mine. We went to the zoo together yesterday, which I enjoyed very much. We saw the animals being fed and the seals kissing their keeper. We was [sic] at Luncheon also at Clifton Gardens on Saturday, and next Thursday we are going to the theatre together.

I have been living just as much at Clifton Gardens as at Finborough Road lately. I spent nearly all last week there. I like Aunt Jane very much indeed. She has had a very bad cold but is recovering.

I have been also to Madam Tussaud’s, and was delighted with the room of Horrors, and the images of the murderers.

Uncle Henry is coming over to see me ere I depart, and we are going to the Crystal palace together. Uncle Dick has just returned from the country and tomorrow he goes off again. Today he is going to take me to Henglers circus.

Henry Irving, in 1894 the first actor to be knighted, was still rising as the first man of the British theatre—and the one for whom, in the early 1890s, Conan Doyle would write his first theatrical hit, a one-act play about an aged Guards veteran who had fought for the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. Conan Doyle, as he watched Our American Cousin from the box of its author, Tom Taylor, was presumably aware that Abraham Lincoln had been watching the same play the night of his assassination.

In the 1920s, hearing an American physician, Gray Chandler Briggs of St Louis, explain how he had succeeded in identifying Sherlock Holmes’s 221B address in Baker Street from clues in the story The Empty House, Conan Doyle stopped the conversation cold by remarking that he didn’t think he had ever been in Baker Street in his life. But Madame Tussaud’s wax museum was in Baker Street when he visited it in 1874; and it is no surprise that the Chamber of Horrors made the greatest impression upon him. Back at school in January, he was still bubbling over with enthusiasm for his trip to London.