![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
Before the establishment in the early 1800s of France's Sûreté Nationale and England's Scotland Yard, the detection of crimes was generally regarded as supernatural work, but the rise of modern science allowed mere mortals to systematize and categorize events—and thus to solve crimes. Reducing the amount of crime, however, did not reduce the fear of crime, which actually grew in the late-nineteenth century as the result of globalization and media sensationalism. Literary detectives offered an imaginary cure for an imaginary disease. Sherlock Holmes, the most famous literary detective, retained many of the characteristics that earlier ages had attributed to superhuman “detectives”; a wondrous and a social being, he nonetheless was able to reassure an anxious public that even the most heinous crimes could be solved. His ability to calm the fears of the globalizing Victorian era was an early version of what later became a proliferation of imaginary characters serving similar public functions.
Notes
1. The desire to believe is reflected in a century-old game in which many Holmes fans pretend he did, in fact, exist. See, e.g., Baring-Gould 1962 and Tracy Citation1977, among many others.
2. The Sherlock Holmes stories have enjoyed lasting popularity throughout much of the world, and not just in Victorian England, for a variety of reasons, including the ripple effect of their initial success, the intrinsic excitement of the stories themselves, and the profound similarities between the anxieties of Victorian England and those of other countries that have struggled with the unforeseen consequences of globalization.
3. Well into the eighteenth century, criminal enforcement was local and collective, with constables and sheriffs deputizing local citizens to help capture criminals. See Knight Citation1980, 11.
4. See Vidocq Citation1935 and Stead Citation1954. Vidocq and his memoirs inspired almost all detective fiction of the nineteenth century, from Balzac's Jacques Collin (a.k.a. Vautrin) in The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans (1847), and Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean and police inspector Javert in Les Misérables (1862), to Émile Gaboriau's Tabaret and Monsieur Lecoq in, among others, L'affaire Lerouge (1866) and Monsieur Lecoq (1869).
5. On the beginnings of the police and detective forces in England, see Kayman Citation1992.
6. On this point, see Gatrell Citation1980 and Emsley Citation2010. Both note the methodological difficulties in using crime statistics as a measure of the actual level of crime. But both accept the increasingly sophisticated crime statistics kept in Victorian England as at least a rough indication of actual crime. Across a range of measures, those statistics indicate a significant decline in crime, especially violence and theft, in the second half of the nineteenth century.
7. On this point, see Gillespie Citation1995, 101–34. Detective heroes, as we will see, occupy the borderline between the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the demonic figures of Romanticism.
8. E.T.A. Hoffmann's Madame de Scudéri: A Tale of the Times of Louis XIV (1819) contains some rudimentary elements of the detective story, but it is better described as a murder mystery.
9. Later literary detectives, especially in American fiction, are often small, marginally successful businessmen, living in the rundown heart of the city, semi-bohemians socializing with the riff-raff of society, morally suspect but never morally fallen. They use violence when necessary, and solve most cases by hard work rather than mere logic. Holmes resembles the more aristocratic Dupin, but has many elements in common with his latter-day American cousins.
10. Holmes does explain in “The ‘Gloria Scott’” how he decided to become a detective, but not how he became interested in detection itself. Of his origins, we know only that his “ancestors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class” and that his grandmother was the sister of “Vernet, the French artist” (Doyle Citation1960, 435).
11. Since the stories were written serially, it is not surprising that details of Holmes's life are not made clear in the initial stories—Conan Doyle almost certainly had no idea that Holmes would be so long lasting. What is surprising is that these details are never fleshed out in any of the stories that followed.
12. On Holmes's “scientific” method, see Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok Citation1983 and Truzzi Citation1983. These two articles identify the essence of the method as a logic of what Charles Peirce called “abduction,” which uses raw empirical facts to suggest a theory that explains but is not necessitated by them. This theory is then tested against the real world by a hypothetical-deductive method of confirmation. Holmes's formation of theories is aided, moreover, by his encyclopedic knowledge of human nature and the history of crime, which allows him to adduce general principles of knowledge in the construction of theories. While this overall approach is extremely similar to Baconian induction, Sebeok and Truzzi insist it differs because it does not begin to theorize before the full observation of facts, and because it theorizes back from effect to cause rather than forward from cause to effect.
13. Laurence Frank (Citation2003) also makes a strong case for Darwin lurking behind Holmes.
14. Anna Neill (Citation2009) points in this direction in “The Savage Genius of Sherlock Holmes.” In her view, Homes is best understood as combining the brilliance of modern science with the intuitive powers of the subliminal mind that characterized primitive man. While there is no denying that there is, at times, something deeply savage about Holmes, Holmes himself never claims to make intuitive leaps, but simply to process more information more rapidly than anyone else.
15. On his similarity to the criminals he tracks down, see Harpham Citationforthcoming.
16. Holmes admits that he might commit a crime if he had had the motive to do so. See, e.g., Doyle Citation1960, 970.
17. The two instances of criminals in the Holmes stories who are not motivated by money, power, or sex are Professor Moriarty and Colonel Sebastian Moran (who appears in “The Adventure of the Empty House”). Holmes suggests that both men commit crimes because it is somehow natural to them. As he says of Moriarty: “The man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers” (Doyle Citation1960, 470–71).
18. From 1815 to 1870, Britain was the world's undisputed industrial power, supplying more than 50 percent of the manufactured goods consumed in Germany, France, and the United States.
19. On public concern with the imperial project, see Harlow Citation1998.
20. “Probably there is no spectacle in the whole world as that of this immense, neglected, forgotten great city of East London. It is even neglected by its own citizens, who have never yet perceived their abandoned condition” (Besant Citation1882, 48).
21. See, e.g., John Hollingshead, Ragged London in 1861 (1861); Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883); Margaret Harkness, In Darkest London (1889); and Walter Besant, East London (1899). Only a little later, Jack London penetrated its depths, recording the experience in The People of the Abyss (1903).
22. See, e.g., Finlay and Shearer Citation1986, Landers Citation1993, Wrigley Citation1967, and Schwarz Citation1992.
23. The literature in this field, although relatively recent, is extensive and growing. For the best surveys, see Holmes Citation1978, Holmes Citation1988, Panayi Citation1994, and Panayi Citation2010.
24. See Jones Citation1982, 117–143.
25. The Gladstone Committee Report on Prisons in 1895 was only one of the many measures the state took in response to the outcry about crime: see Harding Citation1988. On the British government's shifting attempts to confront what it thought to be the serious threat of crime, see Wiener Citation1990.
26. See MacIntyre Citation1997. Worth was the model for Moriarty.
27. It is, of course, impossible to determine the precise causal relationship between public opinion and media attention, especially in a period in which there were no public opinion polls. For the purposes of this essay, we assume that while media coverage may have an important effect on public opinion about crime, it must have some referent in the real social and political world. That is, the effect of the media is made possible by underlying conditions. On the relation between media coverage and the public perception during this time that crime was a serious threat, see Altick Citation1986, Gray Citation2010, and Sindall Citation1990.
28. We do not mean to assert that globalization was the only source of social anxiety. Class conflict was also important at the time. What is surprising, however, is how little this shows up in the Holmes canon. To what extent social anxiety was the result of class conflict rather than globalization, however, is difficult to determine. It is also certainly the case that emphasizing the foreignness of crime can distract from its class character, but what remains decisive for us is the fact that Holmes's criminals are mainly members of the middle and upper classes whose crimes are committed against other members of these classes.
29. On this point, see Siddiqi Citation2006.
30. On this subject, see Jann Citation1990 and Thomas Citation1994.
31. See Moretti Citation1998, 134–140.
32. See also Clausen Citation1986, 51–85.
33. The impact of globalization, or what has been more typically called reverse colonization in the case of Britain at the time of the Holmes stories, has been explored by a number of authors. See in particular Siddiqi Citation2006, Reitz Citation2004, and Harris Citation2003.