Fun with Conan Doyle

[kahvi]

I've been re-reading the Sherlock Holmes novels on gutenberg.org at work. I do adore them; I'm only sorry I started reading them so late in life. I was always worried that the language would be inaccessible. Obviously pretty much anything is accessible to me at my current fluency level, but Sherlock Holmes I could have read in my late teens, quite

Comments

[qzee]

yes, times have changed. The sentence you quoted demonstrating this vividly when you think of how Doyle lived in the days they sent young children (mostly boys) up chimneys to clean them and sometimes the boys got stuck in them and were unable to get out. Occasionally dying right there, in the chimney. http://www.executivechimney.com/pages/hist.html

Knowing this makes the quote more poignant and makes my heart ache. (I first learned of this on the History Channel, a program called Worst Jobs in History hosted by Tony Robinson. Makes me glad to be born in modern days.

[kahvi]

Yes, I know. That was what I meant. The horriffic WTFery adds to the absurdity, which turns to dark humor. Nearly made me spray my lunch out over the keyboard.