It is misleading to classify Holmes and his creator as only “Victorians”: while many of the stories are set in the 1880s and 1890s—towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901)—over half were written in the early 20th century, and are imbued with a more modern perspective.

Conan Doyle was born in 1859 and died in 1930, so 42 years of his life were spent as one of Queen Victoria’s subjects, during a period of great innovation, expansion, and rapid change. He also lived through the Edwardian era, World War I, and much of the interwar period, and witnessed a number of seismic cultural, economic, political, and technological developments, many of which make an appearance in the stories. As a result, Holmes and Watson’s “Victorian” world is very different from the one portrayed in other novels of the era, such as Dickens’s classic tale A Christmas Carol, published almost 50 years earlier in 1843. Holmes’s own Christmas outing, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”, is set in a far more cosmopolitan London than that of Dickens’s day.

By the time Conan Doyle was born, many of the events and individuals that have come to characterize the Victorian age were already old news: the Great Exhibition of 1851 had come and gone, the Crimean War (1853–1856) was over, and the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859), who had revolutionized the way in which trade and travel were conducted, was nearing death.

From a literary perspective, Conan Doyle’s birth date was closer to that of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896) and Ernest Hemingway (1899), two of the most influential American novelists of the early 20th century, than it was to that of Alfred Tennyson (1809), Elizabeth Gaskell (1810), and Charles Dickens (1812), three giants of Victorian writing; and the last Holmes story was published in 1927—almost 90 years after Victoria came to the throne.

Conan Doyle’s life coincided with the zenith of the British Empire during the reign of Victoria (pictured), and Holmes represents, and offers an alternative to, Victorian and imperial values.

Despite his frequent forays into the leafy counties that surround London (and occasionally farther afield), Holmes is a creature of the great metropolis, one of millions drawn to what Watson famously describes in the first novel, A Study in Scarlet, as “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.” During the 1800s, the proportion of the British population living in cities rose from 20 percent to almost 80 percent, and by Holmes’s time, London was the most populous city on Earth.

The Industrial Revolution and the subsequent rise in urbanization brought prosperity to many, but also buried countless others in crushing poverty. The working poor rarely appear in the Holmes stories, but the striking effect that their living conditions have on the city’s character does not escape Watson’s notice: as he and Holmes travel across London in “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons”—from super-rich Kensington in the west to impoverished Stepney in the East End—he watches as the scenery turns from chic and sleek to wretchedly sordid and deprived.

In the late 1800s, those who could afford to began to migrate to the relative peace of London’s new suburbs—a trend that is noted in The Sign of Four as Holmes and Watson’s cab races away from Baker Street in the city’s center, past “interminable lines of new, staring brick buildings—the monster tentacles which the giant city was throwing out into the country.” This is also reflected in the appearance of suburbs as locations in the stories, including the South London areas of Norwood (site of Jonas Oldacre’s home in “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” and of Conan Doyle’s London home); Brixton (home to Scotland Yard inspector Stanley Hopkins, who appears in several cases); and Streatham (home of the banker Alexander Holder in “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet”).

Hansom cabs were famously safe, navigating street corners and traffic with ease. Holmes had other dangers in mind when he advised taking “neither the first nor the second which may present itself.”

The trend for suburban living gave rise to a modern phenomenon: the commuter. In “The Red-Headed League”, Holmes and Watson both observe “one of the main arteries which conveyed the traffic of the City to the north and west,” and the doctor remarks on the “immense stream of commerce flowing in a double tide inward and outward, while the footpaths were black with the hurrying swarm of pedestrians.”

The emergence of the daily commute from home to work was a direct result of the development of London’s transportation system in the Victorian era. In the early 1800s, people had to live close to their place of work, but by Holmes’s time the city was crisscrossed by an extensive transportation network of omnibuses, boats, and trains.

The Metropolitan Railway—the first of several subterranean train lines that would later become the London Underground—opened in 1863, although when Watson and Holmes took it from Baker Street to Aldersgate (modern-day Barbican) in “The Red-Headed League,” it would still have been hauled by steam engines. Above ground, too, the city’s inhabitants had seen an explosion in rail travel (almost all of London’s modern-day mainline rail stations opened during the 19th century). Holmes made excellent use of the network: various train companies ran different lines and stations, and the detective caught trains out of London Bridge, Euston, Paddington, Victoria, Waterloo, Charing Cross, and King’s Cross, traveling as far north as the Peak District in Derbyshire, as well as southwest to Devon and Cornwall.

Perhaps the most frequent Holmesian mode of transportation, though, was the iconic hansom cab. Pulled by a single horse, and with the driver sitting high up on a sprung seat behind his passengers, these two-seater carriages were ubiquitous, fast, and fairly cheap. They were first patented in the 1830s, and thousands of them plied the London streets until motorized taxis began to appear in the first decade of the 20th century. A more comfortable but slower alternative was the larger four-wheeler (or “growler”), which was more like a conventional enclosed carriage.

By the time of Queen Victoria’s death, the soldiers of the British Empire had fought alongside or against many foreign powers—invariably over colonial disputes. This imperial and international environment led Conan Doyle to populate Holmes’s world with exotic foreign caricatures, such as the lascar (sailor from the Indian subcontinent) in “The Man with the Twisted Lip” and the blowpipe-toting Andaman islander in The Sign of Four, and also with returning colonial adventurers, usually corrupted by their time overseas, such as Dr. Grimesby Roylott in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”.

Crimes and conflicts originating in other countries (particularly in North America) frequently found their way into Holmes’s Victorian England, and it seems only fair that Conan Doyle, in turn, allowed one of Holmes’s most famous episodes to take place abroad, when “The Final Problem” reaches its climax in alpine Switzerland. The Victorians’ innumerable wars also flooded London with a steady stream of former military men, who feature in various Holmes stories, such as A Study in Scarlet,“The Naval Treaty”, and “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier”. The most significant of these ex-soldiers, of course, is Holmes’s great friend and chronicler, Dr. John Watson, who fought in the Second Afghan War (1878–1880), one of three conflicts in which Britain, from a base in India, attempted to extend its control over Afghanistan, and to oppose Russia’s influence there.

Despite the Victorian setting of many of the stories, they often show 20th-century attitudes, and are sometimes used as a voice for their creator. For instance, when Holmes rails against the callous American millionaire Neil Gibson in “The Problem of Thor Bridge”, his sentiments reflect growing tension between Britain and America. He also often displays anti-German feeling, which was prevalent at the time. Nowhere is this more blatant than in the cartoonishly patriotic events of “His Last Bow”. Published in 1917, during World War I, the story features a German agent who chortles with his boss about the “docile, simple folk” of Britain, before being effortlessly outwitted by a sexagenarian Holmes. (This story also touches on Anglo-Irish relations, with Irish Home Rule a live issue throughout Holmes’s era.)

So while Holmes may be a Victorian by background, the stories have a palpable sense of progress and modernity. His is a sophisticated world that features many of the wonders of the age, including telegrams, gramophones, scientific detection methods, vastly improved national and international travel, and even that definitive emblem of the 20th century, the motor car. Conan Doyle himself was one of the first car owners, buying one before he knew how to drive and signing up to take part in an international car rally; like his fictional character, the author was in many ways an adventurer and a pioneer.