Anthropology by gaslight: Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle and the anthropology of detection at the Victorian fin de siècle

ABSTRACT

The last decade of the Victorian era, the fin de siècle, was a time of deep social anxiety as the power structures and social institutions of the Victorian era came under great critical scrutiny from the arts and the sciences alike. Central concerns about human nature and just how civilized Victorians really were, were allied to concerns about the future of the ‘white race’ and its continued social and political hegemony. Much of the literature of this time focuses on the erosion of the boundaries between things that had seemed self-evident to earlier generations (racial distinctiveness, class superiority, imperialism and so on). Through anthropological themes, the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle reinforced all that was seen as good in the imperial project and in the hereditary superiority of those who delivered it. Yet after 1901 and The Hound of the Baskervilles these anthropological tropes all but vanished from Doyle’s work.

KEYWORDS:

• Sherlock Holmes
• Conan Doyle
• Victorian
• anthropology
• science fiction
• scientific romance
• evolution

Acknowledgements

This paper derives from an invitation to present the Richard Lancelyn Green Memorial Lecture (2015) to the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. I am grateful to Elaine McCafferty (President) for the invitation. I also express considerable thanks to Andrew Lycett for sharing his research notes with me. A later version was presented at the CAHO Christmas Lecture in Southampton in 2015. I am grateful to the two anonymous referees whose comments and suggestions have made this a far better paper. I am also deeply grateful to Sarah Semple and Paul Pettitt for the invitation to contribute to their volume.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Unfunded [no grant];

Notes on contributors

John McNabb

John McNabb gained his PhD from the Institute of Archaeology in London in 1992. He has worked extensively on British and African Lower Palaeolithic/Earlier Stone Age, concentrating on how technology and assemblage character reveals insights into cognitive and social development amongst handaxe making hominins. He joined the department in Southampton in March 2000. He has broader research interests in the archaeology of the Acheulean and in the history and wider social context of human origins research. He is a Welshman, and very proud of it.