The International Exhibition of Sherlock Holmes arrives in Columbia
The Post & Courier have published a great article announcing the next stop for The International Exhibition of Sherlock Holmes. It has just opened in Columbia at South Carolina's History Museum and will be there for the next three months.
The International Exhibition of Sherlock Holmes is a fully immersive experience. It allows you to experience Arthur Conan Doyle’s Victorian London and work side-by-side with his legendary detective.
The Exhibition is just one example of the global reach and world class expertise that The Conan Doyle Estate can provide. Our international network of specialists have been closely involved in consultancy and detailing for the making of the exhibition and it was with pride that it was opened in 2013 at the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry by Richard Doyle, senior director of The Conan Doyle Estate and Sir Arthur’s grandnephew.
The Post & Courier
Guests will be able to visit Holmes’ fictional sitting room and view items from Conan Doyle’s actual study. They’ll see various examples of the detective’s massive presence in pop culture, from card games, comics and magazines to radio scripts, movie and television show props and costumes. They’ll be able to learn about the scientific crime-solving methods used by Holmes and real-life investigators of his era. And perhaps most intriguingly, they’ll have the chance to be Sherlock Holmes, taking a book full of clues and trying to solve a murder mystery, written exclusively for the exhibit by Conan Doyle’s biographer, Daniel Stashower. Geoffrey Curley, whose consulting company spearheaded the development of the exhibit, says that Conan Doyle’s depth of knowledge and larger-than-life Sherlock Holmes character deserved a large-scale effort.
“The writings of Conan Doyle really have a wide breadth of content,” he offers. “So we’re looking at literature. We’re looking at technology. We’re looking at history, science and of course contemporary forensic science, and how they all blend together. The exhibit really has a lot of story-driven content to it, and a lot of theatricality to it.”
Curley says that the exhibit is meant to educate people not just about the size of Holmes’ influence on modern culture, but about the reasons behind it.
“The impact of Sherlock Holmes is hard to wrap your mind around,” he posits. “So we wanted to make sure that that we embraced the idea that Sherlock is everywhere, but also to get people to understand where this came from. And it didn’t come from nowhere. Conan Doyle was impacted by his experiences. He was a doctor studying medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland, at a time when Edinburgh was the center of medical innovation. So there were all these new innovations happening.”
“He was also impacted by what was happening in newspaper publications,” Curley continues, “and the way that you could have information at your fingertips. That was all part of Sherlock Holmes, this character that could evaluate this world and understand the difference between what’s fact and what’s fiction by using the scientific method, observation and logic to understand what is around us.”