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Holmes also occasionally shows a tendency toward the progressive. His celebration of the new state-run schools as “Beacons of the future!” reveals his support for a measured and planned type of social reform. This perspective mirrors Conan Doyle’s own liberal outlook. The author included a veiled criticism of the Conservative government led by the Marquess of Salisbury in “The Naval Treaty” (pp.138–41). Yet to characterize Holmes as a model of the burgeoning British middle class would be excessive. He also has a string of louche, patrician attitudes, including an haughty disdain for the “imbecile” policemen he works alongside. His cocaine use and violin playing all fit the mold of dandyish bohemianism, while his famed satisfaction with finding solutions for the pleasure of it (rather than for any attached fee), reflects the contemporary cult of “art for art’s sake.” It is hardly surprising to learn that The Sign of Four was commissioned around the same dinner table as Oscar Wilde’s classic novel of fin de siècle aestheticism and decadence, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).

Colonial souvenirs

At the turn of the 19th century, London’s riverside East End dockyards were a major point of entry and exit for ships and people from all over the world. Integral to Britain’s trade with its overseas empire, the area was also a hotbed of crime and vice of every kind,

In the time of the Holmes stories, the London docklands were thriving. A link between the capital and the far-flung colonies, all kinds of foreign influences entered England through the docks.

so it is perhaps surprising that it is referred to in only a few cases (for example The Sign of Four and “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” pp.188–89). However, Britain’s status as the preeminent colonial superpower is the hinge on which many stories turn. Many Britons felt that the Empire had a duty to spread “enlightened values” around the world, just as in the stories Holmes is tasked with defending Britain from insidious foreign influences. Throughout the canon, it is often the “otherness” of strangers from distant territories or curious foreign objects that injects an element of the sinisterly exotic into the orderly imperial metropolis.

For example, characters who originate from, or have lived at some point in, the British colonies frequently have a criminal history, which, when dredged up, shatters all perceived respectability. Convict transportation to Australia figures prominently in “The Gloria Scott” (pp.116–19), while the wealthy landowner John Turner’s previous

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

Dr. Watson

A Study in Scarlet

SHERLOCK AND SOCIETY 303

involvement with an Australian criminal gang forms the basis of “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (pp.70–3). These hidden histories can provide the key to unlocking the secret power plays that bind former colonials: just as John Turner is blackmailed by a tenant who once witnessed his past wrongdoing, in “The Gloria Scott”, the haggard Hudson has a morbid authority over Victor Trevor due to his role in a mutiny many years before.

Some objects and creatures also symbolize the corruption that lies beyond England’s shores. For instance, the swamp adder that is retrieved from Calcutta by Dr. Grimesby Roylott in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (pp.84–9) is employed as a murder weapon. Roylott himself also embodies a set of malevolent qualities—principally a proclivity to violence—apparently intensified during his time in India (a stark contrast with Holmes’s cool, “English” rationality).

The role of race

On one of the few occasions he does visit London’s docklands, Holmes exploits a subtler foreign danger by pretending to contract

Heroism and masculinity

Violence of temper approaching to mania... had, I believe, been intensified by his long residence in the tropics.

Helen Stoner

“The Adventure of the Speckled Band”

“a coolie disease from Sumatra” in “The Adventure of the Dying Detective” (pp.234–35). An island in the Indonesian archipelago, Sumatra had been part of the Dutch empire. “Coolie” originally meant a locally-hired, unskilled Asian labourer, but by the 19th century it had, like villian, become a derogatory term; unlike villain it has almost completely vanished from use in the west today.

More pointed racial language and stereotypes appear elsewhere in the canon. The black boxer Steve Dixie in “The Adventure

Britain’s overseas colonies and territories were once so numerous, and scattered so widely around the globe, that the empire was said to be one “on which the sun never sets.” But by the late 19th century, the sun was setting on the very concept of imperialism. It is no wonder that, as a whole world of political and financial power was perched on one small island’s precarious authority, anxieties about decline were rife among the British people.

Feminist critics have argued that, against this backdrop, stories such as Conan Doyle’s actively

of the Three Gables” (pp.272–73) is cruelly derided by Holmes, and specifically for his appearance. The Andaman Islander Tonga in The Sign of Four, a “pygmy,” is consistently called “little Tonga”. Much of the sinister atmosphere in “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge” (pp.222–25), meanwhile, is derived from the voodoo practices of Aloysius Garcia’s Haitian cook. In addition to this broadbrush caricature, the chef is described as “a huge and hideous mulatto, with yellowish features of a pronounced negroid type.”

In other stories, black people are often called “devils” or “fiends,” language that was not uncommon at the time. The profound but invalid belief in the supremacy of white British culture at that time had even taught people to associate dark skin with inferiority and repellent cultural practices.

However, while Conan Doyle was not particularly concerned with subverting the era’s prevailing prejudices, his depiction of race is nuanced. His sympathetic portrait of a mixed-race relationship in “The Yellow Face” (pp.112–13) is a definite rejection of contemporary attitudes. ❯❯

promoted an ideal of heroic, masculine culture to provide a sense of stability in turbulent times. In The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar pointedly included the “detective story” and the Boys’ Own genre in a tradition “from which women have almost always been excluded.”

According to this view, Holmes, with his simple virtues of clinical reason and heroic bravery, represents a willful nostalgia for the patriarchal, imperial order, governed by white male rationality.

304 THE WORLD OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

The male bond

Conan Doyle’s use of a detective and a separate narrator (a technique lifted straight from the stories of Edgar Allan Poe) meant that a crime’s solution could be slowly unraveled and turned into a story.

It also means that the friendship between detective and narrator had to be sustained at all costs, which explains the convenient death of Watson’s wife, Mary Morstan, and the doctor’s return to 221B Baker Street, for example. Likewise, any marriage or romantic relationship for Holmes himself would have spelled disaster for the stories.

The fraternal bond between Holmes and Watson has a strong literary heritage, stretching from Robinson Crusoe and Friday, to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. This kind of male relationship is often seen in “boys’ fiction.” Indeed, one of Conan Doyle’s literary role models, the British novelist H. Rider Haggard, had Allan Quatermain, the narrator of the high adventure story King Solomon’s Mines (1885), dedicate the book “To all the big and little boys who read it.”

As some critics have pointed out, Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys, published in 1908, set out an imprint of English “manliness” for the 20th century. In his section on “tracking,” the British war hero and founder of the Boy Scouts specifically referenced both “The Greek Interpreter” (pp.136–37) and

Holmes is often called to defend his homeland against foreign influences that take the form of violent criminals, strange objects, and deadly organizations.

In “The Five Orange Pips”,

the Ku Klux Klan secret society reaches across the Atlantic to murder those who stand in its way.

When burned, the rare devil’s-foot root can be used as a poison, as it is by the West African Ubangi people, and the killers in “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot.”

Jack Ferguson uses one of his father’s South American blowpipes to shoot poisoned darts at his baby brother in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.”

The use of an experimental youth serum from Prague explains Professor Presbury’s strange behavior in “The Adventure of the Creeping Man.”

A swamp adder

is brought back from India by Dr. Roylott and used to murder Julia Stoner in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.”

“The Resident Patient” (pp.134–35), and recommended that scout leaders read the tales to their troops.

A man’s world

Unlike his brother Mycroft, Sherlock is not a member of one of London’s private gentleman’s clubs, yet 221B Baker Street often seems to be an equally male-dominated arena— a haven from which troublesome questions about gender roles have been conveniently excised. Yet, for all that, Holmes is, at times, required to think about women.

The attitude of the detective (and his creator) toward females is shifting and contradictory, but largely a product of typical male Victorian thought. Although Holmes does not seem to rate female mental faculties, he often goes out of his way to help women and release them from suspicion. Female characters also tend to occupy a peripheral position in the stories, and are rarely granted much to say, even when a plot turns on their involvement. They most often appear as clients in need of male aid, or as helpless victims of crime.

Holmes is often described by Watson as a pure, emotionless “reasoning machine”: in “A Scandal in Bohemia”, he remarks that “as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer.” Therefore, Irene Adler, the “adventuress” who outsmarts Holmes in that story, had to be a truly exceptional female. Always described by Holmes as “the woman,” she is bold, quick-witted, and American—free from the “old world” of European social conventions and able to set her own standards.

Apart from Adler, there are a few exceptions to the sidelined female: the proactive Isadora Klein

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Conan Doyle was writing at a time when suffragettes were protesting for equal voting rights for women, but the movement was never mentioned in the Holmes stories.

in “The Three Gables” is one; Miss Burnet in “Wisteria Lodge” is another. However, neither of these women are heroic. Klein is a classic femme fatale, while Burnet’s dogged pursuit of retribution fulfills the stereotype of the embittered woman.

When women are more active in the Holmes stories, their decisions can be disastrous. Lady Trelawney Hope in “The Second Stain” is both beautiful and reasonable, but it is her interference in matters of state that constitute the story’s central crime, and Holmes’s intervention is essential in order to bring about a return to peaceful, patriarchal order. Similarly, if Sophy Kratides had not succumbed to the charms of the villainous Harold Latimer in “The Greek Interpreter,” her brother might not have been killed.

There are plenty of these less-than-flattering examples of late-Victorian womanhood. Female characters can be hysterical and vindictive, like Sarah Cushing in “The Cardboard Box” (pp.110–11); simple and meek, like Sarah’s sister

Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.

Sherlock Holmes

“A Scandal in Bohemia”

Susan; vengeful and scheming, like Mrs. Gibson in “The Problem of Thor Bridge” (pp.254–57); or icy and aloof, like Violet de Merville in “The Illustrious Client” (pp.266–71).

Given how peripheral female characters are in the canon, it can be easy to forget that the stories were published at a time when women were challenging their lower status. But although there was increasing female education and social mobility, most women remained subordinate. In his way, Conan Doyle helped to highlight this injustice by writing stories such as “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” (pp.198–201) – which depicts an abusive marriage – in order to illustrate the situations in which women could be trapped.

However, the author’s motto, “Steel true, blade straight,” was redolent of the “manliness” and “unaffectedness” that he most admired in his fellow men. In his memoir, Memories and Adventures (1923), he casually mentions that “it is notorious that though ladies greatly improve the appearance of a feast they usually detract from the quality of the talk.” However, he ascribed this to men changing their conversation in order to suit the situation, rather than any specific foolishness on the part of women— if anything, he meant it as a slight on contemporary social strictures.

A rounded portrait?

In all, it is clear that Conan Doyle’s treatment of contemporary class, race, and gender issues is far from straightforward. The social scene he depicts drew on the shifting sands of an increasingly fragmented society. Britain was facing huge upheaval as a result of rapid industrialization, population growth, and urbanization. Conan Doyle’s depiction of society reflects this changing world, and suggests a conflict between his own liberal views and the prevailing conservative values of the time.

Although Holmes is white, male, middle-class, and resolutely Victorian, his complexity and contradictions still resonate with a modern audience. The stories remain captivating today, even in a society that would be unrecognizable to their creator. ■

I HAVE A TURN BOTH

FOR OBSERVATION

AND FOR DEDUCTION

THE ART OF DEDUCTION

T

he term “ratiocination” is often used to describe the methodology employed by Sherlock Holmes in his work as a consulting detective. Derived from the Latin ratiocinari—“to calculate or deliberate”—it follows a process of step-by-step reasoning that begins with observation and the collection of evidence available, leading to an informed deduction and, therefore, a logical conclusion.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “ratiocination” was first used in Western Europe, which saw the birth of rationalism, a philosophy, which holds that reason is the main source and test of knowledge, rather than experience or divine revelation. Holmes is a direct descendant of this tradition, using his powers of rational, reasoned observation and deduction to help his clients and solve the many crimes that the police—who are hampered by the constraints of standard “procedures”—often find baffling.

The influence of Aristotle

However, the roots of ratiocination lie much farther back in history, originating in the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher and natural scientist Aristotle (384–322 BCE). A pupil of Plato, Aristotle soon rejected the central tenets of Platonic thought (which held that the observed or natural world was a mere approximation of an ideal, ethereal world), and promoted the science of reaching