Round the Red Lamp (1894), with Roger Luckhurst

Doings of Doyle - The Arthur Conan Doyle Podcast

This episode, we welcome to the podcast Professor Roger Luckhurst to talk about his new edition of Round the Red Lamp (1894) for the Edinburgh University Press, and plenty of Gothic too.

About Roger Luckhurst

Roger Luckhurst is the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of ten monographs and has edited many works of classic nineteenth century Gothic, including key works by Rider Haggard, Henry James, Stevenson, Stoker and Conan Doyle. Listeners to the Doings of Doyle podcast will have heard us make reference to his Science Fiction: A Literary History (2017) The Mummy’s Curse (2012) and his excellent book Gothic: An Illustrated History which came out in 2021.

He can be found on X as @TheProfRog. Visit Roger’s page at Birkbeck, University of London here.

Round the Red Lamp (Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle, 2024)

An often overlooked collection in Arthur Conan Doyle’s career, these tales actually track the vital moment in his life when he decided to shift careers from provincial medic to celebrated London author

• Detailed introduction, notes and scholarly apparatus
• Appendixes that collect extra medical tales, Conan Doyle’s early contributions to the medical press and the two one-act plays that he produced from two of the stories, including one of his greatest successes for the stage, Waterloo
• Introduction provides the medical context to help understand its place in Conan Doyle’s career

This is a scholarly edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s controversial collection of medical tales, first published in 1894 in the first flush of his fame. Conan Doyle had trained in medicine at Edinburgh University in the 1870s, and then spent eight years as a General Practitioner in Southsea, before deciding to become a professional author in 1890. The stories he collected in Round the Red Lamp are gathered from his medical training and incidents in his life as a provincial GP. Some of the stories are daring – dealing explicitly with child birth, sexually transmitted diseases and malpractice. Some are sentimental or comic vignettes. Some are Gothic horrors. On publication the shades of dark and light bewildered some of his readers and the medical realism outraged others. Round the Red Lamp is a vital collection in understanding Conan Doyle’s shift of profession from medic to author. (Source: Edinburgh university Press website)

Purchase from the publisher here.

Other works by Roger Luckhurst

Gothic: an illustrated history (London, Thames and Hudson, 2021).

‘Arthur Conan Doyle and medical London: reading the topography of Round the Red Lamp’, Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, Vol 11 (3), 2021.

The Ghost Stories of M. R. James (London, British Library Press, 2018).

The Cambridge Companion to Dracula (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Science Fiction: A Literary History (London, British Library Press, 2017)

The Mummy's Curse: the True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Late Victorian Gothic Tales (Oxford World's Classics, 2009)

Next time on Doings of Doyle

We take a look at ‘The Coming of the Huns’ (1910), one of Conan Doyle’s Tales of Long Ago. You can read the story here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com), and our supporters on Patreon and Paypal.

Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.

Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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