INTRODUCTION

The setting of late-Victorian London is central to Holmes’s world, and is often thought of as a labyrinth of foggy backstreets in the notorious East End. However, this popular image is an inaccurate one. Conan Doyle’s London had grand new buildings, fashionable shopping areas, broad gaslit thoroughfares, and affluent new suburbs. It was also at the heart of a communications revolution, with grand railroad termini, like Paddington and King’s Cross, a national telegraph system, and a thriving popular press.

Holmes’s London was one of contrasts. While steaming locomotives poured in and out of the great stations, and underground trains ferried commuters below the city’s streets, wealthier citizens still traveled around the center by horse-drawn hansom cabs. Despite the wealth of the empire, the city was a place of crushing poverty, although this was never made apparent in Conan Doyle’s canon.

London’s population had increased from one to six million over the course of the 19th century. This influx of people, ideas, wealth, and cultures created a melting pot of complexity and social change ( see Sherlock and Society). The sheer scale of the city, the largest in the world at that time, generated fears of a lawless underclass, mainly squashed into the overcrowded eastern districts. In spite of this, Holmes’s cases feature characters mainly from the mid- to upper echelons of society, mirroring Conan Doyle’s audience. Conan Doyle drew on social tensions and prevalent racial, gender, and class stereotypes in order to add fear, excitement, and zest to his tales. For all of Holmes’s “bohemian” sensibilities, Baker Street is painted as a white, male, middle-class world that would sometimes seem bigoted by today’s standards. Foreigners are criminals, and women are mainly victims or innocent pawns in the stories.

Holmes was, metaphorically, the progeny of two men, having been inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s character C. Auguste Dupin, and Conan Doyle’s former professor Joseph Bell. Both of these forebears excelled in the science of deductive reasoning, or ratiocination, which became the very heart of Holmes’s science of detection (see The Art of Deduction). The term’s history is explored, from its roots in Greek philosophy, through to the Enlightenment ideals of the 17th century, and on to the importance of Charles Darwin’s theories in his On the Origin of Species (1859).

Ratiocination was central to the burgeoning science of crime deduction, which Conan Doyle reflected in the canon, as the concepts of forensics and criminology became established terms. Holmes’s own contributions to the realm of forensic science, with his monographs on tobacco ash, typewriters, tattoos, and many other subjects, can be seen as part of a wider, pioneering spirit in the development of crime fighting.

The success of Holmes compared to Conan Doyle’s other characters can partly be attributed to the changing society. The growth of cities and increasing class divisions had led to a fear of crime and a hunger for justice, which the popular press, including the “penny dreadfuls,” was more than happy to encourage. Just as the science of crime solving was growing at this time, so too was crime fiction. The roots of the genre can be traced back to writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and even Charles Dickens, as well as to contemporaries of Conan Doyle, including G. K. Chesterton and E. W. Hornung. The 20th century saw the rise of hard-boiled detective fiction, and the dominance of female crime writers such as Agatha Christie, P. D. James, and Ruth Rendell. Today, crime fiction (notably Scandinavian) is as popular as ever, and many of today’s authors have taken inspiration from Holmes’s legacy.

An important aspect of Holmes is how popular the character and his adventures were, and how quickly they captured the public’s imagination. Conan Doyle’s first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887), may initially have gone unnoticed when first published, but his short stories, serialized by The Strand Magazine, created the phenomenon that endures to this day, with fan clubs and societies around the world.

Just as Holmes inspired many literary interpretations, he was also an early star of stage and screen. Many great actors have played the role of Sherlock Holmes, including Eille Norwood, Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, and Benedict Cumberbatch.

A selection of Holmes’s most important depictions is provided (see Many faces of Holmes)—from his early stage appearance in William Gillette’s 1899 play, Sherlock Holmes, to the latest movie release, Mr. Holmes (2015), starring Sir Ian McKellan.

There are also countless and varied literary appropriations of Holmes, from the early parodies, through to the sustained creation of the canon’s many “untold cases,” along with complete reimaginings and the current trend for “fan fiction.”

Conan Doyle also wrote many novels and stories beyond the Holmes canon . Here, his penchant for historical fiction, religious and political commentary, and spiritualist speculation—the “better things” that led him to temporarily kill off his most famous creation—is clearly demonstrated. Yet Holmes still remains his most enduring creation; a man who, in the words of writer Vincent Starrett, “Never lived and so can never die.”