trivia

I had the kind of question that could be easily answered by Wikipedia, so long as you don't need a scholastically verifiable citation. I was thinking about how 30 years ago I'd have had to pop into the library to research it, since I doubt anything I have at home would have answered it, and how I would neither have bothered to do so - it's not important - nor remembered it when I happened to be in the library anyway.

The question was, "When did the Barrymore acting family become prominent?" And the reason was, I was reading The Hound of the Baskervilles, which I hadn't re-read since childhood, and noticed that a character in it, the butler at Baskerville Hall, is named John Barrymore, which would have meant nothing to me on earlier readings. But now I wondered.

Turned out that Maurice Barrymore, the patriarch, became prominent in the 1870s or 80s, though in America so Doyle might not have known about him. But he took Barrymore as a stage name after a prominent earlier English actor, so the name did have theatrical connotations. But the elder John Barrymore, one of Maurice's sons, didn't begin his career until 1903 or become prominent until the next decade. And The Hound of the Baskervilles was published in 1901-2. So the name might have had connotations, but there'd be no direct connection.