Representative of several musical references in Conan Doyle's adventures of the great detective, Sherlock Holmes' explanation of his reasons for attending Sarasate's London concert is striking. In his comparison of national musical repertoire, significant by its absence is British music, which, frustratingly, seems to play little meaningful part in the musical references of Victorian and Edwardian literature. Apart from the range of traditional songs and ballads incorporated into the novels of Dickens and Thackeray, the British music scholar has to be content with a handful of examples; these include the brief mention of the Scottish composer Alexander Campbell Mackenzie in Bram Stoker's Dracula, some scathing remarks made by Little Billee in George du Maurier's Trilby concerning ‘British provincial home-made music’, or G. H. Lewes' references to prominent figures in Victorian musical life in his 1848 novel Rose, Blanche, and Violet. More significant is the character of Owen Jack in George Bernard Shaw's 1881 novel Love Among the Artists, who, as Phyllis Weliver has suggested, is modelled variously upon Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and Hubert Parry. Jack, like Parry, composes a cantata titled Prometheus Unbound, a Fantasia for piano and orchestra (a probable reference to Parry's Piano Concerto, performed in 1879), and lives in Kensington; representative of ‘progressiveness, individuality and genius’, Weliver argues, Jack and his music reflect the direction in which Shaw hoped that the English Musical Renaissance might develop.