第 52 页

Arthur Conan Doyle

The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes

Urbanization and suburbia

Despite his frequent forays into the leafy counties that surround London (and occasionally farther afield), Holmes is a creature of the great metropolis, one of millions drawn to what Watson famously describes in the first novel, A Study in Scarlet (pp.36–45), as “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.” During the 1800s, the proportion of the British population living in cities rose from 20 percent to almost 80 percent, and by Holmes’s time, London was the most populous city on Earth.

The Industrial Revolution and the subsequent rise in urbanization brought prosperity to many, but also buried countless others in crushing poverty. The working poor rarely appear in the Holmes stories, but the striking effect that their living conditions have on the city’s character does not escape Watson’s notice: as he and Holmes travel across London in “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons” (pp.188–89)— from super-rich Kensington in the west to impoverished Stepney in the East End—he watches as the scenery turns from chic and sleek to wretchedly sordid and deprived.

In the late 1800s, those who could afford to began to migrate to the relative peace of London’s new suburbs—a trend that is noted in The Sign of Four (pp.46–55) as Holmes and Watson’s cab races away from Baker Street in the city’s center, past “interminable lines of new, staring brick buildings—the monster tentacles which the giant city was throwing out into the country.” This is also reflected in the appearance of suburbs as locations in the stories, including the South London areas of Norwood (site of Jonas Oldacre’s home in “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” (pp.168–69) and of Conan ❯❯

298 THE WORLD OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

Hansom cabs were famously safe, navigating street corners and traffic with ease. Holmes had other dangers in mind when he advised taking “neither the first nor the second which may present itself.”

Doyle’s London home); Brixton (home to Scotland Yard inspector Stanley Hopkins, who appears in several cases); and Streatham (home of the banker Alexander Holder in “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet,” pp.96–7).

Mass transit

The trend for suburban living gave rise to a modern phenomenon: the commuter. In “The Red-Headed League” (pp.62–7) Holmes and Watson both observe “one of the main arteries which conveyed the traffic of the City to the north and west,” and the doctor remarks on the “immense stream of commerce flowing in a double tide inward and outward, while the footpaths were black with the hurrying swarm of pedestrians.”

The emergence of the daily commute from home to work was a direct result of the development of London’s transportation system in the Victorian era. In the early 1800s, people had to live close to their place of work, but by Holmes’s time the city was crisscrossed by an extensive transportation network of omnibuses, boats, and trains.

The Metropolitan Railway—the first of several subterranean train lines that would later become the London Underground—opened in 1863, although when Watson and Holmes took it from Baker Street to Aldersgate (modern-day Barbican) in “The Red-Headed League,” it would still have been hauled by steam engines. Above ground, too, the city’s inhabitants had seen an explosion in rail travel (almost all of London’s modern-day mainline rail stations opened during the 19th century). Holmes made excellent use of the network: various train companies ran different lines and stations, and the detective caught trains out of London Bridge, Euston, Paddington, Victoria, Waterloo, Charing Cross, and King’s Cross, traveling as far north as the Peak District in Derbyshire, as well as southwest to Devon and Cornwall.

Perhaps the most frequent Holmesian mode of transportation, though, was the iconic hansom cab. Pulled by a single horse, and with the driver sitting high up on a sprung seat behind his passengers, these two-seater carriages were ubiquitous, fast, and fairly cheap. They were first patented in the 1830s, and thousands of them plied the London streets until motorized taxis began to appear in the first

Numerous events, technological milestones, and inventions of historic significance took place in Britain within Holmes’s presumed lifetime.

1854

Possible birth date of Holmes.

1855

First daily newspaper,

The Daily Telegraph, is published.

1860

1876 Invention Horse-drawn of the telephone.

trams appear on London’s streets.

1863 World’s first underground 1880 The first

train line opens British homes are

in London. lit by electricity.

THE VICTORIAN WORLD 299

decade of the 20th century. A more comfortable but slower alternative was the larger four-wheeler (or “growler”), which was more like a conventional enclosed carriage.

Age of Empire

By the time of Queen Victoria’s death, the soldiers of the British Empire had fought alongside or against many foreign powers— invariably over colonial disputes. This imperial and international environment led Conan Doyle to populate Holmes’s world with exotic foreign caricatures, such as the lascar (sailor from the Indian subcontinent) in “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (pp.80–1) and the blowpipe-toting Andaman islander in The Sign of Four, and also with returning colonial adventurers, usually corrupted by their time overseas, such as Dr. Grimesby Roylott in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (pp.84–9).

Crimes and conflicts originating in other countries (particularly in North America) frequently found their way into Holmes’s Victorian England, and it seems only fair that Conan Doyle, in turn, allowed one of Holmes’s most famous episodes to take place abroad, when “The Final Problem” (pp.142–47) reaches its climax in alpine Switzerland. The Victorians’ innumerable wars also flooded London with a steady stream of former military men, who feature in various Holmes stories, such as A Study in Scarlet, “The Naval Treaty” (pp.138–41), and “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier” (pp.274–77). The most significant of these ex-soldiers, of course, is Holmes’s great friend and chronicler, Dr. John Watson, who fought in the Second Afghan War (1878–1880), one of three conflicts in which Britain, from a base in India, attempted to extend its control over Afghanistan, and to oppose Russia’s influence there.

A multi-era hero

Despite the Victorian setting of many of the stories, they often show 20th-century attitudes, and are sometimes used as a voice for their creator. For instance, when Holmes rails against the callous American millionaire Neil Gibson in “The Problem of Thor Bridge” (pp.254– 57), his sentiments reflect growing tension between Britain and America. He also often displays anti-German feeling, which was prevalent at the time. Nowhere is this more blatant than in the cartoonishly patriotic events of “His Last Bow” (pp.246–47). Published in 1917, during World War I, the story features a German agent who chortles with his boss about the “docile, simple folk” of Britain, before being effortlessly outwitted by a sexagenarian Holmes. (This story also touches on Anglo-Irish relations, with Irish Home Rule a live issue throughout Holmes’s era.)

So while Holmes may be a Victorian by background, the stories have a palpable sense of progress and modernity. His is a sophisticated world that features many of the wonders of the age, including telegrams, gramophones, scientific detection methods, vastly improved national and international travel, and even that definitive emblem of the 20th century, the motor car. Conan Doyle himself was one of the first car owners, buying one before he knew how to drive and signing up to take part in an international car rally; like his fictional character, the author was in many ways an adventurer and a pioneer. ■

I have every hope that the light of truth is breaking through.

Sherlock Holmes

“The Problem of Thor Bridge”

1880 Jack the Ripper strikes. 1887 Invention of the gramophone. 1901 Queen Victoria dies. 1914 World War I begins.

August 1914

1885 Last mention

Invention of Holmes in

of the first 1894 1902 the canon—

gasoline- Tower Edward around age 60

powered Bridge VII is and retired

vehicle. opens. crowned. in Sussex.

THERE IS NOTHING

SO UNNATURAL AS

THE COMMONPLACE

SHERLOCK AND SOCIETY

G

iven the popularity of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle’s readers may be forgiven for treating the canon as a legitimate document of Victorian life. However, society in Holmes’s fictional world did not always correspond to reality.

At first glance, it may seem that the stories simply reflect typical late-Victorian attitudes. Dig a little deeper, however, and the depiction of society is more complex—one that was informed by Conan Doyle’s own views and values and is, by turns, both conventional and radical.

Social explorers

In Charles Dickens’s novels, crime is shown as the inevitable result of injustice—poverty and squalor rubbing up against luxury and excess. Crime in the Holmes stories, by contrast, is often the work of “professional” criminals, usually upper-class dilettantes or opportunists. This difference may derive from the two writers’ wildly divergent familiarity with London.

Dickens’s journeys through the city’s poorest districts provided him with firsthand

The social spectrum

Considering that they deal with crime and criminals, it seems likely that the Holmes stories would shed light on the social and economic disparities that existed in Britain at the turn of the 19th century. However, social status is treated ambiguously throughout the canon.

In 1889 (two years after Holmes first appeared in A Study in Scarlet, pp.36–45), social researcher Charles Booth published the first volume of his so-called “poverty maps” of London to illustrate the deplorable living conditions in much of the city.

source material for depicting the slums and their inhabitants. These trips laid the groundwork for social explorers such as the American writer Jack London and, later, George Orwell.

Conan Doyle, however, rarely went out of his way to visit the places he described, and often worked from out-of-date maps. The London of his tales has a genteel sheen, its wealthy districts counterbalanced by the far-flung reaches of the British Empire, rather than the squalid working-class quarter a few miles east of Baker Street.

In these plans, each of the capital’s streets was color-coded according to eight categories of social class, based on income. Yellow streets denoted “Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy,” while black streets demarcated the cramped dwellings of the “Lowest Class. Vicious, semi-criminal.” The map showed that more than a third of Londoners were living in poverty. Booth’s classification of London’s poor as “vicious, semi-criminal” might seem shocking today, but in Holmes’s day, poverty and crime were often spoken of in the same breath—an association reinforced by the English word “villain,” which originally referred to a low-born, rustic person, or a serf, but has since evolved to signify someone who is involved in illegal activities.

In “The Red-Headed League” (pp.62–7), Holmes makes a declaration that appears to reflect the exploratory spirit of social reformers such as Booth—“it is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London.” Yet, as the literary critic Franco Moretti has pointed out, there is almost no overlap between the poor districts on Booth’s map and where crimes occur in the Holmes stories.

SHERLOCK AND SOCIETY 301

The contrast between leisured high society and bustling metropolis in Holmes’s world is clearly seen in James Tissot’s 1876 painting of upper-class passengers cruising on the Thames.

This was a conscious choice by Conan Doyle, as he was writing his stories for a bourgeois audience (even if they did attract readers from across society). After A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four (pp.46–55), in which the bulk of the action takes place in the “unfashionable” suburbs of South London, Holmes’s exploits are set mostly in the capital’s wealthier districts or in “the smiling and beautiful countryside” of southeast of England. It makes perfect sense, too, that on Booth’s map, Baker Street is marked red for “Middle Class. Well-To-Do.”

A class act

The shift in the setting of the Holmes stories after The Sign of Four resulted in a surge in their popularity. Correspondingly, the characters (both victims and villains) tended to be well-off. Grand personae—such as Lord Bellinger in “The Adventure of the Second Stain” (pp.202–07)—added a dose of glamour. Similarly, Holmes’s great rival, Moriarty, is described as “an aristocrat of crime,” a designation intended to add to his esteem.

It seems neither Holmes nor his audience had much interest in the lower classes. Although he takes on a few working class clients, such as the governess Violet Smith in “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist” (pp.176–77), he most relishes the intellectual puzzles brought to him by the middle and upper classes.

Nevertheless, Holmes succeeds in moving effortlessly through all levels of society, employing local street urchins as the “Baker Street Irregulars” and donning disguises with the skill of a stage actor. He also has an uncanny ability to determine the class of anyone he encounters, based solely on outward

Section 41 of Charles Booth’s map of London poverty covers Fulham and Chelsea. The different colors denote levels of wealth. Many of Holmes’s cases are set in affluent red or yellow areas.

appearance. In spite of his class awareness, however, Holmes’s own background—as an educated descendant of country squires— is barely mentioned in the stories; within the context of the tales, it is only his intellect and skill that matter. In this, Holmes embodies the entrepreneurial spirit of 19thcentury modernity, revealed in his declaration that “I have taken to living by my wits” in “The Musgrave Ritual” (pp.120–25). As the critic Iain Pears has claimed, this might make Holmes the archetypal “Victorian New Man… a meritocrat, living solely off his brains.” ❯❯

I found that [Holmes] had many acquaintances, and those in the most different classes of society.

Dr. Watson

A Study in Scarlet

302 THE WORLD OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

Indeed, Holmes seems to care little about the hierarchical strictures of the society in which he lives. He is no slavish adherent to class deference, concerning himself with the details of a problem, not the individuals involved, explicitly stating in “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor” (pp.94–5) that “the status of my client is a matter of less moment to me than the interest of his case.” This attitude even sees him making jokes at the expense of the upper classes. For example, in “A Scandal in Bohemia” (pp.56–61), he repeatedly undermines the status of his royal client.