four signed holograph letters

William Gillette

four signed holograph letters

dated from 1899 to 1918

To Arthur Conan Doyle

Gillette and Conan Doyle exchanged many notes and letters before and during the play’s eight-month run at the Lyceum, and their correspondence continued until Conan Doyle’s death in 1930. These four exemplars reveal Gillette as a chatty, personal letter-writer, sometimes playful (“What singular tastes you have! First it is cricket —and now politics! My dear friend, what will you go to next!”), sometimes touching on business (“Do you notice how well the old ‘Sherlock’ still does on this side?”), sometimes on world affairs, including this reference to the last months of the Great War (“I hope with all my heart that you are standing the strain well . . . ”).