The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1892

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Background

Cultural Context: The Rise of Realist Literature

Arthur Conan Doyle began writing during a period when Realism was prominent in European literature; this literary approach sought to depict the daily lives of ordinary people. To achieve this goal, writers presented what they believed to be a detailed and unembellished version of reality. Reacting to the preceding Romantic period, which focused on unusual or idealized people and events with a special focus on emotions and the subconscious, Realism aimed for accuracy based on observation of ordinary social life.

Realism as a technique has existed in various cultures in different periods. Realism as an artistic ideology was consciously embraced in Europe and North America in the mid-19th century. It differed from preceding cultural trends in its focus on the middle and lower classes and the negative aspects of everyday existence: poverty, disease, and crime. Many of the leading writers of the age, such as Gustave Flaubert in France, Charles Dickens in England, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Russia, produced socially-engaged works critiquing contemporary society.

In the United Kingdom, the realist period coincided with the Victorian era, which is known for its rigid social and gender norms, suppression of sexuality and the body, and valorization of order and logic. Emotions were seen as fundamentally different from and incompatible with scientific reasoning, and were often associated with women. When women demonstrated strong emotions, they were often diagnosed with hysteria (a term derived from the Greek word for womb), based on the belief that the presence of a uterus predisposes them to mental and behavioral problems.

In this regard, Holmes is presented as an exaggerated Victorian male: a middle-class man who rarely displays emotions, uses his mind for rational deductions, and is polite and respectful, but ultimately dismissive, toward women. Yet, Conan Doyle complicates his portrait by making Holmes an accomplished violinist and music lover as well as a person who experiences addiction to cocaine.

Literary Context: Sherlock Holmes Through the Decades

Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories have never been out of print, and they began to be adapted for the stage as early as the 1890s. Adaptations for the radio and the screen soon followed. At present, there also exist comic book versions, board games, as well as pastiche texts and fan fiction based on Conan Doyle’s work. Several elements that have come to be associated with Holmes and Watson are derived from these adapted versions rather than from the original texts. For example, the deerstalker hat and Inverness cape are never mentioned by Conan Doyle. They became recognizable accessories because of actor William Gillette, who wrote and performed the extremely popular play Sherlock Holmes based on Conan Doyle’s work.

Interest in Sherlock Holmes has recently increased with several screen adaptations in the post-2000 period. Most notably, BBC’s Sherlock (2010-2017), CBS’s Elementary (2012-2019), and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films (2009, 2011) have kept the consulting detective at the forefront of popular culture. Sherlock cleverly works original case details into a modern setting. Elementary, in contrast, is set in NYC and casts Watson as a woman. Ritchie’s films seem to be the most faithful adaptations at first glance, as they are set in Victorian London, but Holmes is portrayed as a much more physical and active hero than the original character. These screen adaptations have generated fan fiction of their own.

Holmes’s impact extends beyond adaptations and imitations. The figure of the lone private citizen using clues and logic to solve crimes has fundamentally impacted the crime genre as a whole. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, while a very different type of man, can be linked through his methods to Holmes’s emphasis on observation and gathering information. Similarly, Sam Spade and Philip Marlow resemble Holmes in how they solve crime, focusing on talking to people and collecting clues, and especially in their exposure to the seedier aspects of society.

Genre Context: Detective Fiction

The 19th century was the period when literature became popular in the form of magazines and genre works written to attract a large audience of ordinary (as opposed to aristocratic or highly-educated) readers. Genre literature includes science fiction, gothic fiction, crime fiction, and romance fiction. At the same time, the detective profession emerged in the early 19th century, when the first detective bureau was founded in 1817 in Paris. The first examples of modern detective stories are considered to be E. T. A. Hoffmann’s "Das Fräulein von Scuderi" (1819), William Evans Burton’s “The Secret Cell” (1837), and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). Poe is first the writer who featured a professional detective in his work.

Typical elements of detective fiction include a crime, often murder; a wrongly-accused suspect; incompetent or disinterested police; an intelligent private citizen who is able to solve the crime with their observation and reasoning skills; and an often-unexpected ending, which walks the reader through the detective’s process of solving the crime. The goal of such stories is typically to arrive at the truth, rather than to apprehend or punish the criminal. The use of disguises is also a frequent element in detective fiction.

The stories in Conan Doyle’s collection range from more traditional detective stories, such as “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet,” to those that are more sensational without most elements of detective fiction, such as “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb.” The element that remains constant is a seemingly mysterious or bizarre crime or puzzle that Holmes solves through observation and deduction.