The new Star Trek movie is playing and I’ve been reading about fans arguing over canon violations etc. It got me wondering: How recent is this phenomenon of fan communities? I mean the hard-core kind, where fans of some fictional character or world get together to draw out timelines, argue over canon, write essays, dress up, etc. I know that Sherlock Holms did/do this, but are there earlier examples? Did Last of the Mohicans fans, maybe, go to those lengths? (Were there Hawkeye/Uncas shippers?)
The Matter of Britain bears a strong resemblance to modern fan culture. You have a number of authors building and extending a central canon. They do seem to have been concerned about maintaining continuity, although their interest in cosplay is debatable … .
Doyle did run into flack from fans of his serialized stories. If I recall correctly Watson was injured in India by a jazail bullet in different limbs in different stories. And villain Col. Moran was named James but so was his brother. Or some such. He was so sick of his fans he killed Sherlock and abandoned him for a couple of years before relenting and adding more stories.
Sherlockiana as we know it today began with a humorous lecture by Ronald A. Knox in 1911 called “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes” to the Gryphon Club at Trinity. It was published in the college magazine The Blue Book in 1912. He made it a set piece and gave the lecture all over the place in England. It was finally printed in an easily-available source in his Essays in Satire in 1928. (Still available relatively cheaply used, and later reprinted.)
Studies contains many of the issues that have been discussed ten million times since.
Essays in Satire contains a bunch of other essays that were along the same lines (one “proving” that Queen Victoria wrote Tennyson). This kind of academic humor wasn’t unusual. Canon is a term borrowed from academic literature (and also exists in music) and spoofing it was a mark of erudition to mock the more heavy-handed.
It didn’t really become a large-scale fad until the 1920s when Knox and others began publishing their Sherlockiana. You may find other individual examples, but I’m pretty sure that nothing like the Holmes fans existed earlier. Doyle killed off Holmes much earlier just because he wanted to write other stuff, not because people were parsing his dates.
Relevant Straight Dope Staff Report: Did Sherlock Holmes really exist?
And also check What kind of ape was Tarzan raised by?, since I took part of my reply from it and which started with another canon and responses to it.
I’ve always said that Sherlock Homes fans were the original Trekkies. I thank Exapno for that thumbnail history, which I wasn’t aware of. I’[m sure he’s right about it being the beginning of that sort of obsessive fandom.
But rabid fandom had existed earlier, in the form of a public obsessed by stories and details. The offices of the Strand were reportedly mobbed when new issues with Holmes stories came out. Verne’s and Dickens’. stories were serialized in magazines and newspapers, and rabidly followed.
If you’re looking for someone obsessed with making al versions of the story consistent, then long before the stories of King Arthur (which i can’t recall anyone trying to reconcile with other versions – the Arthurian stories from different authors contradict each other constantly) there was Apollodorus, the circa 1st century AD compiler of the Library, a compendium of Greek mythology. Apollodorus did seek out the earliest and most reliable sources, and frequently quotes them. And he tried to shoehorn it all together consistently. For instance, he knew that Hercules encountered a Gorgon in Hades when he went to free Theseus(it was in his source). But Stheno and Euryale were immortal. no problem – this was obviously Medusa, after she had been slain by Perseus! see – it all fits! Apollodorus was as obsessive as any comic book geek over this sort of thing. (He was also ignorant of, or deliberately ignoring, traditions of gorgons besides the “canonical” three)
Ah, but did Tennyson write back?
My favorite Trekkies from the past are the fans of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
I do remember documentaries on how famous Cervantes’ characters got to be in Spain specially. There were examples of what we could call nowadays fan fiction, plays and short histories that Spaniards created (with no permission) based on the character of El Quixote back in the late sixteenth century.
It got so bad that even someone called Avellaneda published a successful fake sequel to the original novel; but Cervantes used the obsession some of the fans had to prove that the novel of Avellaneda had continuity mistakes and showed that it was a fake.
The curious thing was that Cervantes then made the fans and the continuity errors from the book of Avellaneda to play a part in the real second book of El Quijote!
I can imagine: When Homer was scheduled to recite at a polis’s amphitheater all the local Mythies would camp out days ahead of time dressed as Amazons and Cyclopes with their babies in little Eros costumes, brushing up on their spoken Centaurian.
Right. The fanatic following is what disturbed Doyle. And it came about incredibly quickly. “A Study in Scarlet” was printed in the rather obscure Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. The first short story didn’t appear in The Strand until 1891. Yet “The Final Problem” dates only from December 1893. Holmes became an institution in only two years. Doyle was writing about a story a month, plus two or three other novels each year. The Holmes stories overshadowed the novels, which were his real love.
But these fans were readers. (And parodists. The first parodies had already appeared before “The Final Problem.”) The gamesters came later. The staff report puts the first in 1902, a time when no more Holmes stories were expected, except for the oddity of The Hound of the Baskervilles, set before the “death.” They didn’t start taking the stories apart until the canon was thought complete.
Knox probably knew this. Knowledge of classical literature was a must for serious scholars of the day. And biblical reconciliation was a big topic in European scholarship at the time, with German scholars trying to understand all the sources and history of the various versions. I’m told that much of the parody in Knox’s book is of the biblical scholars, who were as humorless as only German scholars can be.
The last Holmes story appeared in 1927. Knox’s book appears in 1928. There’s a book on Holmes in about 1929 (I’m not home or I’d look up the author and date). The complete works and Christopher Morley’s introduction to the U.S. edition is in 1930, when Morley starts writing about Holmes in his weekly magazine column. The timing isn’t surprising. Although you could talk about individual works earlier, it helped to have all the stories to comb through before the deep digging starts and true fanaticism descends.