INTRODUCTION

This edition of Conan Doyle's 1894 collection of short stories, Round the Red Lamp, Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life, follows the policy of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle in using the first London book edition (in this case published by Methuen) as the base text (E1). Variants from the journal versions of some of the stories ( JV) and the Author's Edition of 1903 (AE), the John Murray collections of short stories from 1922 (JM), and the manuscript (MS) where available have been collated with E1. Any significant decisions about excisions or changes of emphasis between these versions are noted in the Apparatus. There survives a fair copy handwritten manuscript of one story, ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ (MS), although this is unenlightening other than on Conan Doyle's attitude towards punctuation (see below).

Appendix 1 includes two stories later added to the 1930 Crowborough edition of RTRL, which represents the most expanded version of the collection. ‘My Friend the Murderer’ was one of Conan Doyle's earliest publications in London Society magazine in 1882. ‘Crabbe's Practice’ has a more complicated history. This story was first published in the Boy's Own Paper in 1884. Conan Doyle did not often choose to reprint early stories, but for the Tales of Adventure and Medical Life, published in the 1922 JM volumes that disassembled and reframed his short stories into new thematic collections, he did return to and revise ‘Crabbe's Practice’. Perhaps signalling his dissatisfaction with his early attempts at fiction, Conan Doyle virtually rewrote the tale line by line, a relatively unusual occurrence in his career. These emendations were considered far too extensive to track in detail. It was this 1922 version of the story from JM that was added to the 1930 Crowborough edition of Round the Red Lamp. Since it did not appear in the first edition of RTRL in 1894, but did so in the expanded 1930 edition, this volume has chosen to reprint this JM version, as reflecting the author's latest intention for the work in the context of his medical fiction.