After-life/After-word: The Culture of Mourning and Mysticism

Abstract

“I was in a staid London hotel at eleven o’clock in the morning, most prim of all the hours of the day, when a lady, well-dressed and conventional, came through the turning doors, waltzed slowly round the hall with a flag in either hand, and departed without saying a word. It was the first sign that things were happening” (Memories 386). So wrote Arthur Conan Doyle about the cessation of war on 11 November 1918. He then rushed out to Buckingham Palace and witnessed singing, cheering, and a man downing a bottle of whisky raw, which angered him, when he felt “It was the moment for prayer” (Memories 386). Doyle’s eldest son Kingsley had died two weeks earlier, just shy of his twenty-sixth birthday.