Imagine yourself in a world lit only by gas street lamps, a world buried in smog and patrolled by pickpockets and violent criminals. In this world, it can seem like justice and fairness are imaginary concepts; the police force is still a relatively new (and untrusted) concept, forensic science is in its infancy — almost all convictions rely on circumstantial evidence, luck and the class of the people involved.
Welcome to Victorian London, circa 1891.
By the late 19th century, the Industrial Revolution had brought sweeping, radical changes across every aspect of English society, but nowhere were the shockwaves as visible as in the city of London. By 1891, the slums that had exploded all over the city were at their miserable, unhappy peak — overcrowded, unsanitary and squalid.
And for those unlucky enough to be born poor or working class, there was little to no hope of improvement. Class structure was strict and well-enforced. There was no safety net. If you were born poor, you were almost certainly going to die poor — before your 25th birthday, on average. If the children of the slums didn’t join a gang of pickpockets, they became walking fatalities: chimney sweeps or coal miners, helping to support their families, often from the age of four or five.
Naturally, in a world where people suffered and slaved in equal measure — with no hope of improvement — crime was rampant.
To Victorian Londoners, crime was terrifying and out of control. Penny Dreadfuls, cheap pamphlets blending the lurid and the sensationalist, contributed to the feeling that violent crime was lurking behind every street corner, waiting to spring out of every shadow with a knife drawn and ready to kill.
Jack the Ripper, with the entire city at his heels, murdered and mutilated his way through the streets of London — preying on the same underworld he seemed to spring out of. And then, suddenly and without resolution, he disappeared, and slipped back into the shadows. Ready to spring out again, at any moment. A knife held against the entire city.
And then, out of these same shadows, stepped a hero. A man of science, who brought order to a dangerous world in the throes of calamitous change. A man who obeyed only a strict moral code, rather than the letter of an unjust law. A man who not only did not obey the class structure, but openly flaunted it — in his very first adventure, he reproached a King for saying a lower-class woman was not on his level. This was a man who would help anyone in need — as long as the case was interesting enough. He had no interest in money or class; he was as happy with a king’s simple portrait as he was with the proverbial king’s ransom. He was a man who didn’t just protect the city, but even adapted some of its worst bits, such as the young and ruthless pickpockets, to help him in his quest.
That man was, of course, Sherlock Holmes. And it’s no wonder he became a sensation when he first appeared in the Strand Magazine in 1891 — emerging into the city and wider society that he did.
(Author’s note: I’m setting aside the first novels for a few reasons. But in any case, it was the Adventures that exploded in popularity, and would’ve been most readers’ first introduction to Sherlock.)
You can argue that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, not based on Dr Joseph Bell, but in direct response to the confused and terrified society he saw all around him — Sherlock is focused, scientific rigor made human and given a pipe. He is untouched by ordinary distractions like sex or money. Even his occasional drift into addiction is easily thrown off the instant a case becomes interesting. He goes undercover in an opium den, for goodness sake, and is amused that anyone would even worry — he was on a case, after all.
It is exactly this quality that has — I believe — made Sherlock Holmes immortal. For nearly a century and a half, Sherlock Holmes has been reawoken and reinterpreted over and over again, far more than any other fictional detective — far more, most likely, than any other character in fiction (outside of Shakespeare). And it is not because of the mysteries themselves.
In my novel, No Comfort for the Dead, Emma Daly — a librarian in a small Irish village — attempts to solve the murder of the rich man in the Big House. As an amateur sleuth, and a lover of books, I knew she would be inspired by some of her fictional heroes. Enter Sherlock Holmes.
However, as I pored through my well-thumbed anthology (third copy) for various stratagems and deductive reasoning for Emma to emulate, one thing became clear. Sherlock was impossible to emulate — he is a superhero, who has stepped out of the comic books and into ordinary literature.
Sherlock in the Adventures is primarily a stand-in for the burgeoning field of forensic science — nobody in the real world could actually identify 140 different types of tobacco ash at a glance, or determine what part of London a man had travelled through by studying the splashes of mud on their pants.
And that’s the point. A man, no matter how brilliant, could not actually perform that magic. The police force, as 1891 found them, certainly could not. Lestrade is a tenacious bulldog, but dumb as bricks. He can wrestle a suspect to the ground, but he can never wrestle an answer from a crime scene.
Sherlock, in the Adventures, laments more than once the contemporary justice system and its reliance on circumstantial evidence. In one, when Watson points out that the weight of circumstantial evidence clearly points towards the guilt of a man, and that many men have been hanged on far less, Sherlock replies: ‘So they have. And many men have been wrongfully hanged.’ And of course, that man is eventually revealed to be innocent.
But a better police force was possible. Forensic science grew more and more accepted going into the 20th century — due to progress, Jack the Ripper, or Sherlock Holmes himself, it has sometimes been suggested.
And that’s where the enduring magic of Sherlock becomes clear. Sherlock Holmes, the embodiment of progress itself, will always be a magnifying glass to our times — whatever issue he is set loose on, that is the terrible game afoot in society.
These days, we may not have the same issues as London in 1891 — street urchins, chimney sweeps and workhouses have thankfully become mostly antiquated terms, along with many problems of the Victorian age.
But every society has its problems. No society has ever been sure of itself; no culture is free from upheaval. War, crime, pollution, economic recession, disease, political violence — the list could go on and on. Sherlock died once, and was mourned. But he never really lived. He could never really save us. And yet, we bring him back over and over again.
Why?
Because what humans need — and have always needed — is hope, and comfort in uncomfortable times.
We could always create a new and modern Sherlock Holmes, of course. But it wouldn’t be the same. Because the fact that Sherlock has been with us for nearly a century and a half — that’s the point. We know that he has been called on in response to terrible uncertainty for nearly a century and a half; it is comforting that human beings, no matter when they’ve lived, have always craved the same thing — not a mystery, but an answer.
And from the state of the world these days, I think we will need him more than ever.
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