The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (2 page)

The significance of this is that Conan Doyle moved into the popular realm a method of thought which was of incalculable importance in several areas of intellectual life. The Holmesian method, after all, had already been put into practice in real criminal work by criminal anthropologists who began by measuring heads, ears and so on, initially with the aim of identifying criminal types for preventive incarceration, and then more modestly merely to identify individuals after crimes had been committed. The practice was later refined by Sir Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon, who developed fingerprinting and handwriting analysis respectively – classic cases of insignificant details being made to yield significance – for the same purpose. Fingerprinting, which received little publicity until Galton's book on the subject in 1892, is never referred to in these stories, but Holmes is an early analyst of the particularities of the typewriter, which, he says
in ‘A Case of Identity', ‘really has quite as much individuality as a man's handwriting'.

On the other hand, hereditarian arguments – suggesting that criminals are born and not made and can be identified by the study of physical characteristics and family trees – are of scant importance and, in the stories presented here, are referred to only in the case of Moriarty. This is perhaps a surprising omission, as eugenics, the science of race and its application, was then at the very cutting edge of research – Galton, for example, spent much of his career writing on methods of defending and preserving the race, and scientists throughout Europe confidently asserted the need for radical measures to prevent racial degeneration. Had Holmes identified criminals by using his powers of observation to spot degenerative tendencies to crime he would have been acting fully in accordance with the advanced scientific reasoning which he employs in other areas.

Yet Conan Doyle refrains from any such device; even in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, where atavism and degeneration are important motifs, they play no significant part in solving the mystery – identifying the villain through his resemblance to an old family portrait is quite an old trick of plotting which owes little to
fin-de-siècle
scientific thought. Equally importantly, Conan Doyle declines the frequent opportunities to make orthodox remarks about the characteristics and inferiority of other races – indeed, the implications in a story such as ‘The Yellow Face' are quite the opposite of orthodoxy. It is a quiet expression of a natural humanity which stands very much in his favour.

Instead of such notions, it is hard external evidence of a particular kind which is of importance: ‘Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details,' he tells Watson in ‘A Case of Identity', an aphorism which sums up not only the whole of the Holmes stories but also much of late nineteenth-century intellectual life, from forensic science through German philological studies of the Bible and on to the dating of ancient history through potsherds or the uncovering of the fossil record through bone fragments. Holmes himself draws the parallel in ‘The Five Orange Pips' when he remarks that ‘As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood
one link in a series of incidents, should be able accurately to state all the other ones, both before and after.'

As the Italian scholar Carlo Ginzburg has noted, perhaps the most precise parallel with the Holmesian method comes with Sigmund Freud and the development of psychoanalysis. The parallel even extends to the literary form, for while Holmes is at his best in the short story, so Freud reaches his height through lectures and above all the celebrated case studies which, in narrative drive and economy of expression (and perhaps, in imaginative invention), rank as literary masterpieces in their own right. The similarities are indeed extraordinary: detective and analyst are required to set aside their own characters and become almost disembodied intellects to pursue the truth, preserving a distance from their clients; they both maintain consulting-rooms to which clients with troubles come in search of relief; while Freud insists on medical confidentiality, Holmes maintains that ‘I extend to the affairs of my other clients the same secrecy which I promise to you in yours' (‘The Noble Bachelor'). Moreover, both all but break that assurance in order to publicize their method, Freud by writing up his cases, Holmes by allowing Watson to do so.

Above all, both see the significance of the insignificant, and use it to pioneer a new method of investigation which has since had many imitators but few superiors. For while Holmes pursues ‘the little things' in pursuit of the truth, so Freud considers previously overlooked trifles – such as facial tics, jokes and dreams – to delve into the unconscious and reconstruct a past which is otherwise completely obscured. The classic Freudian case study begins with a neurosis and works back through details to its point of origin; the best Holmes stories begin with a crime (‘Silver Blaze', ‘The Naval Treaty'), or a piece of inexplicable behaviour (‘The Red-Headed League'), or a disappearing fiancé or wife (‘A Case of Identity', ‘The Noble Bachelor'), or a mysterious death (‘The Five Orange Pips', ‘The Speckled Band'), and again works back to the source of the disturbance. In both cases, the truth lies underneath the surface; the narrative of the client hides the deeper narrative which detective and analyst alone can perceive.

The faith in reason which Sherlock Holmes embodies was, perhaps, appealing because it was already waning as the stories first appeared
and had all but vanished under the impact of war when the last adventures appeared in the 1920s. The fierce secularism of the earliest stories is self-evident throughout. It is notable, for example, that while the occasional member of the nobility is grudgingly allowed an appearance – if at the cost of being generally presented in a bad light – that other staple of nineteenth-century fiction, the clergyman, is notable by his absence. There are scarcely any references to religion in any of the stories presented here, almost no vicars, priests, curates, bishops, of any sort. Even the account of the wedding in ‘The Noble Bachelor' mentions almost the entire congregation except for the officiating priest. Holmes's excursions to the country, such as in ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery', take him to a society quite unlike that visited by his fellows, for he goes to no villages with churches in them, and when he makes inquiries the last place he ever thinks of going is the vicarage, which so many other detectives have regarded as their first port of call. Almost the only mention of anything ecclesiastical is a far-off glimpse of the steeples of Tavistock in ‘Silver Blaze' – distant, decorative and irrelevant. This absence of any reference to orthodox religion is matched by the equal absence of any spiritual references or overtones at all. The world of Holmes is a purely material one, unconcerned with anything beyond.

However, the stories had something of a nostalgic tinge to them even when new; they appeared just as a wholesale turning-away from the positivistic ideal and a revolt against rationality were getting under way. Holmes was setting out his creed about the ideal reasoner at the moment that the realism of Émile Zola was being challenged by the mysticism of Joris-Karl Huysmans, that William James was lecturing on the varieties of religious experience, that physicians such as Jean-Martin Charcot, who had spent their life attacking religion, were beginning to send patients on pilgrimage to Lourdes and write on the power of faith. Conan Doyle himself abandoned the rationalism of Holmes to turn to spiritualism and a willingness to believe in fairies. The logicality of the stories became little more than an ideal, a reassurance that reality could be subjected to reason even when all the evidence suggested otherwise. This insistence on the explainability of life, the belief that it can be controlled and ordered through logic,
is one of the relatively few points of contact between the stories and their twentieth-century successors in England. The difference, however, is stark once more. For all their great value as entertainment, which has ensured Holmes and Watson a vast audience ever since, underlying the stories there was if not exactly a serious purpose then at least a serious intellectual framework: the cases embody a fascinating moment in the evolution of ideas and convey something of that excitement. By the time of the ‘golden age' after the First World War all this subterranean content had been stripped out, and as a result the detective story – including the last appearance of Holmes himself – had become little more than a clever game.

The Annotated Sherlock Holmes
, ed. William S. Baring-Gould, 2 vols. (1968) is indispensable.

Booth, Martin,
The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle
(1997)

Coren, Michael,
Conan Doyle
(1995)

Dudley Edwards, Owen,
The Quest for Sherlock Holmes
(1983)

Higham, Charles,
The Adventures of Conan Doyle
(1976)

Lellenberg, Jon L.,
The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(1987)

Stashower, Daniel,
The Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle
(2000)

Symons, Julian,
Portrait of an Artist: Conan Doyle
(1979)

Weller, Philip, and Roden, Christopher,
The Life and Times of Sherlock Holmes
(1992)

Symons, Julian,
Bloody Murder
(1992)

Watson, Colin,
Snobbery With Violence
(1971)

A chronology of Arthur Conan Doyle's life and work is likely to be skeletal. As a highly professional writer, a medical specialist, a public campaigner against injustice, a would-be politician, as well as a sportsman, spiritualist, and well-meaning amateur in fields ranging from skiing to weaponry, he threw himself with generous energy into a variety of lives, any one of which would have satisfied most people. A brief account of his activities can, at best, only suggest the range of an extraordinary life.