Introduction to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes: Discovering The Victorian Man.

The Victorian Age produced many fine, innovative writers, all of whom have attempted to capture the essence of their age. The treatment of Victorian women in literature has been well documented already, yet the Victorian man has been pursued in literary criticism primarily as an aggressor in relation to his female counterpart. This is often a result of our contemporary, critical society, and our failure to place these texts accurately within their historical context. There is another way to view the Victorian man, and we must not ignore the troubles and anxieties he too was facing within the only age to actually call itself “Victorian” as an adjective.

We should examine this “Victorian” concept more clearly, and to begin with it would help to attempt a capsule definition of the adjective. In his book Victorian People and Ideas, Richard Altick tells us that the Victorian middle-class thought themselves:

…the moral heart of Victorian society…it took the understandable position that what was good for it was ipso facto good for the nation. This was dogma which, on the whole, was believed in as devoutly as even the existence of a Christian God or the sacredness of the British Constitution.

This gives us a generic idea of the overall pretentiousness of the Victorians and the demands they placed upon their middle classes. This ideology was also attributable to two dominant, nineteenth century philosophies: Utilitarianism, and Evangelicalism. They can be surmised as: Utilitarianism being the secular pursuit of happiness as opposed to pain, and Evangelicalism being the strict pursuit of salvation and the forgiveness of sin; both ideologies could allow no drifting from their strict tenets. Although Utilitarianism seemed more forgiving it was no more so than Evangelicalism. The basic tenets of Utilitarianism required man to question his plans and actions, asking himself whether the results would be good and pleasurable, or as described by the father of Utilitarian philosophy, Jeremy Bentham in his 1789 (later edition 1823) study An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, whether it will “add to the sum total of his pleasures: or, what comes to the same thing, to diminish the sum total of his pains.” Benthamites believed that if an individual sought his own pleasure and succeeded, then surely pleasure would arrive to the masses. Although, in actuality these philosophies softened their hardened dogma throughout the course of the nineteenth century, they are still often found to be represented in literature as possessing their full measure of rigidity; which is testament to how lasting an impression they made on society.

Thus armed with their self importance, and unforgiving philosophies and ideas, Victorian society defined the laws of good and bad for the middle classes through sheer supercilious disapproval of anything the collective didn't care for. And yet, in their defence, there is little wonder that the vast majority of the upper and middle classes felt so very superior. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's birth year (1859), fell 22 years into Victoria's 64-year reign, and this was a truly wondrous time of unparalleled growth and optimism for the British Empire. Resources and labour taken from colonies worldwide had made England prosper, and the time of serious independence struggles lay in the distant future. Businesses and technology flourished, and London grew at a rate of one to six million people in the space of a century. However, with all this growth there came a penalty and many perennial problems that urban overcrowding causes for us today: poverty, homelessness, drug abuse, and crime.

The conundrums of this contrasting and fascinating time provided Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with the raw materials and the backdrop to present his famous super sleuth Sherlock Holmes; a character that has become so far engrained into our popular culture that still some today believe him to have been a real person. Holmes was an undistracted man of science, who moved easily through the disquieting urban space of London, solving many of what we would consider to be more moral and practical dilemmas than actual crimes. In the Holmes stories Doyle concerns himself primarily with upper and middle class male characters, perhaps because he could relate to them more, but possibly more so because towards the end of the century male identity and conformity was beginning to blur in the wake of Victoria's reign. He uses Holmes as a shrewd literary device to identify forms of Victorian male eccentricity and transgression. In so doing he asserts that there is a certain dual nature in man that is forced to extremes in order to escape the oppressive societal dogmas we have thus far identified: one side of him upholds the ethos of the age, and the other longs for something more, or something very different. So despite their pretentious tendencies, inevitably many Victorians felt compelled to explore alternatives to what had become known as “normal Victorian” behaviour. This is why eccentric, wild and fantastic behaviour is not unusual in a substantial amount of Victorian novels: Bram Stoker's Dracula and Robert Louis Stephenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for example, show this to be true; it is clear that the repressions of these strict tenets had become too much for many. It has continually been proved that we should leave it to the writers to tell the world about its history, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of these individuals who felt compelled to investigate alternatives to “normal” behaviour.

With this subtle, literary rebellion in mind it is easy to see why Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887) became so popular among the reading public. This was Sherlock Holmes' debut appearance, and very soon after this story and The Sign of Four, he and his creator became popular household names. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) collected many more stories that had previously appeared in the Strand Magazine over the years. These stories accompanied the end of the nineteenth century, and they continued to intrigue and entertain the middle classes more so because of this; particularly those who looked for an escape from the strictures of middle class, mundane society. He offered them this escape by showing the reading public the type of characters that experienced adventure, and did things they would be too afraid or more so too repressed to do themselves; essentially fantasies. Towards the end of the century, past the end of the actual Victorian era, the general reading public were entering a period of transition that allowed them to begin questioning Victorian values and philosophy, and to look for alternatives to popular thought. They could do this with literature and they were fascinated with Doyle's characters because they were not cleverly drawn grotesques that represented good and bad, similar to those one might find in the work of Charles Dickens, and they were not bizarre events or unbelievable creations as they read in Stephenson's novella and Stoker's novel. Doyle's characters could not be classified as easily as that, they were mostly ordinary, middle-class Victorian men. This allowed a greater element of realism to exist for the reader and an almost tangible hope that eccentricity and independent thought could exist outside their own front door. In actual fact towards the end of the nineteenth century, Victorian London and its surroundings hosted a surprising amount of men and women of magnificently independent impulses, who continued to thrive independent of the dominant philosophies. This was witness to the fact that towards the end of the century, English toleration of eccentricity was in many cases stronger because of the Victorian, pervasive pressure towards conformity.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes helps to assert this growing toleration by using its protagonist Holmes to look beyond the facade and discover just who the real Victorian man actually is. The real man is not the one presented to the public, or indeed his family and friends. Doyle illuminates the male societal position in the late Victorian era as a false one, showing that the real Victorian man exists in a state of flux, and loss of identity somewhere in between conformity and eccentricity.

Here is an excellent opportunity to turn into the text to provide examples of Doyle's observations. In The Man with the Twisted Lip we find Neville St. Clair, an ordinarily normal, seemingly successful, middle-class man, posing as a beggar. This story is testament to the fact that the late Victorian middle-class male struggled with identity brought upon by dominant social requirements. Holmes tells Watson that Neville St. Clair is ‘A man of temperate habits, a good husband, a very affectionate father, and a man who is popular with all who know him.' The disappearance of St. Clair is initially baffling as he is socially and economically secure and seemingly happily married. Then it is revealed that St. Clair's financial success has come about because he realised that he could make a considerable amount of money by begging on the street, as he tells Holmes and Watson:

“Well, you can imagine how hard it was to settle down to arduous work at £2 a week when I knew that I could earn as much in a day by smearing my face with a little paint, laying my cap on the ground, and sitting still.'

St. Clair knew not on which side of the societal hierarchy he stood, nor even which one he preferred. In the madness of the world he inhabited it was easier for him to maintain the lifestyle his family, and indeed the upper and middle-classes of society had become accustomed to, by pretending to be someone else entirely. St. Clair's crime barely exists at all, yet when he is uncovered, the severity of the situation becomes clear by the way he makes the following vehement statement:

“I would have endured imprisonment, aye, even execution, rather than have left my miserable secret as a family blot to my children…

This case is a little similar to A Question of Identity, when Holmes is called upon to unmask the awful Mr. Windibank. Windibank plays with his stepdaughter's emotions by posing as her lover in order to secure her inheritance. He disguises himself so that she will not know who he is, and actually plans to marry her in order to prevent her bestowing any of her allowance or inheritance on another. These two cases can easily be aligned to the Victorian compulsion to acquire and maintain status and financial security, brought upon by many of the dominant social philosophies of the age.

Throughout his adventures we also see Sherlock Holmes in many different guises. These range from a common groom, to an elderly dope fiend, and even an ‘amiable and simple minded Non-conformist clergyman'. Holmes dons these disguises as easily and as readily as his suspects do, and he seems to fit a little too conveniently into the roles required. This fact leads us to the conclusion that Sherlock Holmes can detect these men, not only because he has a superior mind, but primarily because he too is one of them; after all he often refers to his problem solving as ‘elementary', which perhaps could lead us to believe that his ability to ‘observe' what others only see, is more to do with his eccentric similarities, and overall familiarity with the alleged perpetrators than his actual problem solving skills. He knows what to look for because he suffers much the same as they do at the mercy of ‘that great cesspool' London, as Doyle so eloquently describes it in A Study in Scarlett, and as a ‘dreary, dismal, unprofitable world' in The Sign of Four. Holmes' indulgence in Cocaine and his excessive, indeed obsessive experiments and overall level of thinking are as much escape mechanisms as they are addictions, just like some of the bizarre predicaments so many of his male clients and alleged criminals are found to be in. At the end of The Red-Headed League Holmes ties up the case and explains to his admiring companion Dr. Watson that ‘these little problems' help him to ‘escape from the commonplaces of existence.' Although seemingly quite languid, Holmes dislikes his bouts of depression and refuses to be brought down by the repressions of his age; he does his upmost to prevent them. His rebellion towards the ethos of the Victorian age manifests itself in the form of a self preserving refusal to acknowledge any information that is not relevant to him, as he explains in A Study in Scarlet:

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge that might become useful to him gets crowded out…

An Evangelical temper, or any other form of dominant philosophical influence for that matter is ineffective on Holmes, like some of the characters in his cases, he is a non-conformist. It was the Victorians who perfected the weapon of disapproval, but this would not be sufficient to affect a character like him, or indeed those eccentrics such as Dr. Roylott in The Speckled Band, who lives in a relative country house menagerie, or Elias Opensure, with ‘his known eccentricity' in The Five Orange Pips. Not unlike Robert Louis Stephenson's famous Dr. Jekyll's formula, that creates the free spirited (and wholly Utilitarian) Edward Hyde, the impervious Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the ideal tonic to transform the moral heart of Victorian society. We could imagine Holmes himself discovering the character of Henry Jekyll, as he exposes many other middle-class males experimenting with various forms of societal transgression. What is interesting here is that should Holmes have discovered the truth about Henry Jekyll, he would more than likely have helped him, in much the same way as he helps other Victorian men fight with their inner demons.

In defining what is right and wrong within Sherlock Holmes' superior mind, Doyle also enlightens the reader when Holmes' unorthodox methods illuminate the ambiguities surrounding good and evil; or at least how the dominant Victorian philosophies defined them. This is easy to see in The Boscombe Valley Mystery. Doyle's character John Turner is quite clearly a murderer. When he was in Australia, Turner was a member of a bandit gang that robbed and murdered people for money; this is how he came upon his huge fortune, and this is what has allowed him such a comfortable life in England. In any other circumstances, we as conventional readers of fiction would condemn him, and rightly so. However, Doyle plays with our allegiances here and places our sympathies with Turner by using Holmes' unorthodox reasoning. Turner is responsible for the murder of McCarthy at Boscombe pool, yet because of his ill treatment at the hands of his victim, and the fact that he himself is not long to the grave, Holmes tells him: “Well, it is not for me to judge you.” Holmes is quite prepared to cover up the scandal to spare Turner's daughter the humiliation and allow him to go to his grave without facing the consequences of his actions. He is quite prepared to withhold evidence in order to allow this, and tells Turner that he will only produce his ‘confession at the last extremity to save young McCarthy', the man accused of the murder. This is similar to A Case of Identity, when Miss Mary Sutherland falls in love with Mr. Hosmer Angel. Mr. Angel is of course Mary Sutherland's stepfather Mr. Windibank, yet Holmes neglects to inform her of this and only reprimands her scoundrel of a stepfather. Holmes tells her: “Let the whole incident be a sealed book, and do not allow it to affect your life” which of course she cannot, but Holmes would rather have that than tell her something she would not believe. His closing comments to Watson on the case are:

“...You may remember the old Persian saying, ‘There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.' There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.”

The men in both stories have wronged one or more people, yet Holmes remains capable of being the keeper of their secrets.

Finally, throughout these stories we cannot help but observe Doyle's narrator, and Holmes' loyal chronicler, Dr. Watson. He is that side of Victorian man, much like the reader, who has a fascination with the eccentric and the unusual but cannot attain it himself. Watson tells the reader that:

My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention…

But we know, as Holmes does, that this is not ‘sufficient' for Watson, and he is always keen to get away from his own mundane ordered lifestyle, like his practice that ‘is never very absorbing', to watch his friend at work. Watson is in denial, and perhaps arguably a little repressed himself. He would like to think that his life alone would be enough, but sadly for him it is not. We could conjecture that Holmes almost attempts to rescue his friend and confidant on occasions, and he is well aware of man's fascination with alternatives to modern life; he says:

“I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat embellish so many of my own little adventures.”

Just the fact that Holmes chooses to tell us that Watson has embellished some of his adventures is indicative of the fact that Watson is truly fascinated, and cannot keep away from the goings on of his friend. Watson represents the reader, as we too are ensnared by the strangely charismatic Holmes and the cast of eccentric characters that inhabit Conan Doyle's London and beyond.

In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and indeed in all the Holmes stories, the arch criminal is the middle-class male and Victorian society, and what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle implies is that, not only do the dominant philosophies of the Victorian age fail to work alone or even together, but profound effects can be experienced in man's adherence to ideals that are repressive, and essentially beyond his ken. The impervious Sherlock Holmes detects Victorian man's attempts to escape society imposed morals and behaviours, and once he discovers them, he then succeeds in blurring our distinction between the concepts of good and evil considerably by showing empathy for, and the ability to cover up, the crimes and transgressions of middle-class men. In doing this Conan Doyle detects and reveals the true, dual nature of man, and also achieves a daring, damning, and very telling critique on the judgemental ethos of the Victorian age.

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