The Six Napoleons: Popular Vs. Literary Art

 

Literary Art in an Age of Formula Fiction and Mass Consumption:

Double Coding in “The Six Napoleons”

 

Nils Clausson

 

There must be something wrong in me or I would not be so popular.

—R. L. Stevenson to Edmund to Gosse (1886)

Holmes had the impersonal joy of the true artist in his better work, even as he

mourned darkly when it fell below the high level to which he aspired.

                                                —Watson, in The Valley of Fear

 

The distinction between “high” and “low” (or “mass” and “popular”) culture is

based partly on an evaluation of the difference between unique and mass-produced

objects.  —Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility”

 

To the man who loves art for its own sake . . . it is frequently in the least important

and lowest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to is to be derived.

—Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”

 

… working as he did for the love of his art rather than for the acquirement of wealth . . .

—Dr. Watson on Holmes in “The Speckled Band”

 

 

Clearly one of the great—perhaps tragic— characteristics of the modern age has been

The progressive alienation of high art from popular art.

                —Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, ‘Popular Art and Mass Culture” (1964)

 

I

Criticism of the Holmes stories over the last few decades has been dominated by historical approaches, which have tended to read them either in the context of the rise of criminology and forensic science at the end of the nineteenth century,¹ or from the perspective of late nineteenth-century British imperialism.² These approaches have unquestionably contributed to our historical understanding of the stories. My concern with them is not that they are historical and hence ignore the aesthetic (their aim has not been to re-evaluate the stories artistically), but that reading the Holmes stories only in these historical contexts has militated against our recognition of their aesthetic and literary value; indeed, it has made it almost impossible to imagine that they could have literary value, or even that establishing such a value would be a desirable critical goal. The dominant historical reading sees the stories as reflecting the changes taking place in society’s response to crime, such as rationalizing the study of crime as a science, or even as contributing to that rationalizing process by providing fictional examples that might then influence criminological practice, as Catherine Belsey suggests when she says that the Holmes stories “have been deservedly influential on forensic practice” (112). But reading the Holmes stories in the historical context of the rise of forensic science and modern criminology, or the new science of criminal anthropology, has not raised their literary value; they are still seen as belonging to a sub-literary genre. The solution to this problem, however, is not to abandon an historical reading of the stories in favour of a purely formalist or aesthetic approach. We cannot simply ignore history.

The solution, in my view, is to adopt an historical approach that will necessarily foreground the aesthetic properties of the Holmes stories. Such an approach will result not only in a fresh historical reading of the stories, but even more importantly, in a higher valuation of them as literature. So as well as reading them in the (illuminating) criminological context of Sir Francis Galton’s Finger Prints (1892), Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometry, and Alexandre Lacassagne’s pioneering work on ballistics, I am proposing that we also read them in the cultural context of the widening gap that developed between literary and popular fiction in the late nineteenth century. To illustrate this approach, I propose of offer a re-reading, which will also be a revaluation, of two stories, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” the seventh Holmes story to appear in the Strand Magazine, and “The Sixth Napoleons,” from The Return of Sherlock Holmes. These readings will reveal these two stories to be cunningly crafted, double-coded narratives—at once popular and literary—about the fate of art and the artist in a society of mass-marketed popular fiction. But such a reading will require us to abandon our presuppositions about what we “already know” we are supposed to find in a Sherlock Holmes story. We must set aside all presuppositions we have about them.

 The historical context in which I propose to read these two stories is that provided by three related developments in the 1880s and the 1890s: the dilemma that the rise of popular periodical fiction during this period presented to the literary artist; the emergence, at the same time, of the writer as a professional for whom writing was a career rather than a calling; and, finally, coinciding with Conan Doyle’s early career, the rise of the Aesthetic Movement. The publication of the Holmes stories in July 1891 in the newly founded Strand Magazine coincided with a huge increase in the number of similar mass-market periodicals which provided aspiring writers with a ready-made mass market for their work, provided they could meet the editorial requirements of these magazines to satisfy the tastes and expectations of their readers. This situation inevitably raised questions about literary standards (would the bad drive out the good?), as well as the possible deleterious effect of popular fiction on the readers who consumed it. “The eighties and nineties,” Frank Kermode trenchantly observes, “saw a huge expansion in the reading public, or, if you like, an enlarged market for trash” (11). This situation is nicely encapsulated by the reply Conan Doyle got from the publishers Ward, Lock and Company when he sent them the MS of A Study in Scarlet in the fall of 1886: “We could not publish it this year, as the market is flooded at present with cheap fiction” (Stashower 81). The detective story in particular was perceived as the very type of popular ‘literature’ written for a mass audience. Despite its invention by Edgar Allan Poe, the form lacked a respectable literary pedigree. It was too close to Gothic, sensation fiction and journalism to be taken seriously as literature. An author who wrote detective stories, or any type of formula fiction, was likely to be perceived as pandering to the masses and hence as having abandoned any claim to literary merit.  “Throughout his career,” says Diana Barsham, “Doyle had insisted that the popularity of Holmes had been damaging to his reputation as a serious writer, bifurcating and weakening his literary identity” (99). Peter Ackroyd has made a similar point: “Their very popularity,” he says of the Holmes stories “may have predisposed [Conan Doyle] against them; the fact that he could compose them easily may have led him to consider them somehow flawed or worthless” (Ackroyd xiii).

As a suddenly successful writer—the phenomenal popularity of the Holmes stories could not have been anticipated—Conan Doyle was becoming aware of the conflict between writing for art and writing for money and the masses. During the early years of his success as a writer, says one of his biographers,

Conan Doyle liked to imagine himself at the center of a community of writers. “At that time I was practicing in a small way as a doctor,” he was to say of his Southsea and London years, “and in a draper’s shop close by H. G. Wells was an assistant. There was also a raw-boned Irishman rolling about London. His name was Bernard Shaw. There was another named Thomas Hardy, and there was a young journalist struggling for a living in Nottingham, whose name was [J. M.] Barrie.” (Stashower 134)

Conan Doyle claimed to have killed off Holmes at the end of 1893 so that he could devote his time to writing more historical novels, which he considered a literary rather than a popular form and which he hoped would win him the esteem of the writers he admired.   This conflict between the literary and the popular in Conan Doyle’s fiction is usually seen as a conflict between his (literary) historical fiction and the (popular) Holmes stories. (Ironically, Scott’s historical romances inspired a spate of imitators and made the historical novel one of the most popular genres of the nineteenth-century.) “Doyle’s many accounts of Sherlock Holmes,” says Barsham, “all emphasize a polarity between the popularity of Holmes and Doyle’s wish to be taken seriously as a historian” (99). But, as I hope to show, that polarity is inscribed within two of the Holmes stories themselves. Although “The Blue Carbuncle” (1892) and “The Six Napoleons” (1904) may have appeared to most readers of the Strand as nothing more than popular detective stories made from an increasingly familiar mold, they also address serious issues about the status of literary art in a culture increasingly coming to treat fiction as a commodity to be marketed to consumers like any other product.

The emergence of a mass market of consumers coincided with the professionalization of the writer, signalled by the establishment of The Society of Authors in 1884, and by Walter Besant’s lecture “The Art of Fiction” to the Royal Institution the same year, a lecture that prompted Henry James’s famous reply with an identical title. As Stephen Arata has pointed out, “The Society of Authors […] was explicitly interested in redefining fiction as a profession analogous to the law, medicine, certain sciences, and other of the arts. “If the ‘fine arts’ like painting or sculpture enjoy a   status denied to writers, [Besant] contends in the lecture, that is because they are organized into culturally-sanctioned professional institutions” (246). In “The Art of Fiction” Besant, who was instrumental in organizing The Society of Authors, urged novelists to look after their financial interests by considering their products first as marketable commodities and only secondarily as art. But in the view of his detractors, most notably Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, Besant “had succeeded primarily in degrading fiction-writing from a sacrament into a trade. […] For many writers Besant’s position was scandalous, akin to the mercenary views confessed by Anthony Trollope in his recently published autobiography (1882)” (Arata 246). The publication of the Holmes stories beginning in the summer of 1891 marked the emergence of Conan Doyle as a thoroughly professional writer in the sense that, for the first time, he was able to support himself solely by means of his writing. This success created a tension between the artist and the professional in him, a tension that surfaces in Holmes in the form of a conflict between detection as a science and detection as an art pursued as an end in itself. “Holmes,” says Watson in “The Black Peter,” “like all great artists, lived for his art’s sake, and, save in the case of the Duke of Holdernessse [in “The Priory School,” published the previous month], I have seldom known him claim any large reward for his inestimable services” (“Black Peter” 134). As a matter of fact, Holmes receives £1000 from the King of Bohemia in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” The dilemma faced by Holmes—money versus art—is, I shall argue, the same dilemma that Conan Doyle faced as a writer and one that he obliquely inscribed in “The Blue Carbuncle” and “The Six Napoleons.”

The first twenty-four Holmes short stories coincided not only with the expansion of periodical fiction and the professionalization of writing but also, paradoxically, with the art for art’s sake movement. The robust cricket player and author of The White Company appears, at first sight, to have nothing in common with The Yellow Book, Oscar Wilde, and the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley.  Nevertheless, Conan Doyle admired Dorian Gray and, as several critics have pointed out, the early Sherlock Holmes would have been at home with the aesthetes of the Fin de Siècle. Holmes’s love of music (he both plays the violin and composes music), his descent on his mother’s side from a French artist, his skill as an actor, and (in The Hound of the Baskervilles) his interest in modern Belgian painters and knowledge of English painters all testify to his “artistic temperament.” As Daniel Stashower perceptively remarks, “With Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle intended to elevate the science of criminal investigation to an art form. To do so, he needed to cast his detective as an artist rather than a simple policeman” (103). Peter Ackroyd makes a similar point: “We may even see [Holmes] as an artist, then, concerned with the plangent and lachrymose poetry of crime and detection” (Ackroyd viii). But Conan Doyle did not only intend to raise criminal investigation to an art form, he also aspired to elevate the lowly detective story to an art form. Contrasting the novel to the short story, he said, “It takes more skill to carve the cameo than the statue” (Stashower 120).

The Aesthetic Movement responded to the question of the place of art in a utilitarian and commercial culture by drawing a clear distinction, one that Modernism inherited and reinforced,³ between the popular and the literary, a distinction that was often expressed as an opposition between the unique and the mass-produced: the genuine work of art is one of a kind, unique; a work of popular fiction is virtually indistinguishable from others of its kind because it has been mass-produced according to a formula (hence the pejorative term ‘formula fiction’). Viewed in terms of this binary opposition, popular writers like Conan Doyle wrote to entertain the masses and to make money for themselves, whereas aesthetes like Wilde wrote for the sake of Art. In his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1890), Wilde wrote:

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to the popular novelist. (260; Wilde’s italics)

As well as separating the artistic from the popular, the art for art’s sake movement also separated art from morality. “No artist has ethical sympathies,” said Wilde in the Preface to Dorian Gray. “An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.” A parallel separation appears in the Holmes stories, most noticeably “The Blue Carbuncle”: Holmes solves the mystery for detection’s sake and not for such utilitarian motives as making money, lowering the crime rate, or even securing justice. Solving a crime is an end in itself: “Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem,” says Holmes at the end of the story, “and its solution is its own reward” (170). Oscar Wilde would have agreed.

In “The Six Napoleons” Holmes uses his skills as a detective to solve a crime not only as an end in itself but also to enrich himself by deviously acquiring “the most famous pearl now existing in the world” (196), the black pearl of the Borgias, a gem with a criminal history. This contradiction reflects the central conflict shared by Holmes and his creator: art versus money.  Although “The Blue Carbuncle” and “The Six Napoleons” appear to be popular detective stories, the serious issues that they raise—the role and status of the writer in society and the relation of art to morality—are ones that they share with such contemporary literary fiction as Henry James’s “The Real Thing,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” and “The Private Life.” Both of these Holmes stories are thus double-coded.  On one level they can be read as trivial pieces of entertainment: “The matter is a perfectly trivial one,” Holmes tells Watson in “The Blue Carbuncle.” But on another level they are works of literary fiction that affirm their status as unique works of art in a society that mass-produces cheap fiction for mass consumption by a mass readership.

 

II  “The Blue Carbuncle”

             As a double-coded story, “The Blue Carbuncle” explores the conflict between the literary and the popular, the unique and the mass-produced, the true artist and the commercial writer. This conflict is prefigured by the contrast, in the opening sentences of the story, between the obviously aesthetic Holmes, smoking and lounging like an aesthete in his “purple dressing gown,” and the “crumpled morning papers” that he has been reading: “He was lounging upon the sofa,” says Watson,

in a purple dressing gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand. Beside the couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back hung a very seedy and disreputable hard felt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracked in several places. (149)

Holmes is most Holmes-like when he is portrayed in deepest thought, as he is here, lounging on the sofa while he detachedly examines the hat. Yet the “crumpled morning papers”—through which the known facts about the theft of the gem are later mediated to Holmes and to the reader—appear as the first obvious sign of the mass culture that literary fiction, in contrast to the sub-literary detective story, was coming to define itself against. In contrast to the aesthetic Holmes, the newspapers “near at hand” are part of the “seedy and disreputable” material out of which the unique work of art, “The Six Napoleons,” will be fashioned. “The Press,” Holmes tells Watson, “is a most valuable institution, if you only know how to use it” (SN 188).

In addition to the newspapers, which are as ephemeral as much genre fiction, there are two other examples of the mass-produced in this story. One is the “battered billycock” (150), a felt hat similar to a bowler, which Holmes is carefully examining as the story opens. Doyle’s choice of a drab, utilitarian billycock is not fortuitous, for it reiterates the contrast between the mass-produced and the “absolutely unique” (155). According to the derivation of the word given in Richard Lancelyn Green’s Oxford edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which is supported by the etymology given in The American Heritage Dictionary (1^st ed.), the first billycock was in fact unique, for it was designed and custom-made in 1850 for William (“Billy’) Coke, nephew of Thomas William Coke, Earl of Leicester. The new style caught on and soon “billycocks,” so named after Billy Coke, were being cheaply mass-produced.  Anyone with a few shillings could buy one. Even if this etymology is historically inaccurate (it is not given in the OED), the fact still remains that this etymology was widely believed, and Henry Baker’s “very ordinary” billycock was almost certainly mass-produced rather than custom-made for him by an expensive hatter catering to the upper classes for it bears “no maker’s name” (BC 151).

The most obvious and the most important examples of mass production in the story, however, are those delectable geese produced for the Christmas market (the story takes place during the Christmas season) by Mrs. Oakshott, egg and poultry supplier, of 117 Brixton Road.  Her geese are raised and fattened for the sole purpose of being consumed by Londoners at their Christmas dinners. They are not country-bred, but urban geese, raised right in London. And they are indistinguishable. So alike are two of them that Mrs. Oakshott’s brother, the inept jewel thief James Ryder, mistakes a virtually identical one for the one in which he hid the blue carbuncle by forcing it into the bird’s gullet. Indeed, the geese are so alike that even Mrs Oakshott can’t tell them apart! In the story, then, the unique, priceless jewel, the blue carbuncle, is concealed in a common Christmas goose that is indistinguishable from all those other Christmas geese that contain nothing unique or priceless in them and will be consumed by Londoners  who, from the poultry seller’s point of view, are indistinguishable from one another. Read as a popular, mass-market detective story, “The Blue Carbuncle” is aesthetically valueless, indistinguishable artistically from the countless other mysteries commercially marketed in the Strand Magazine and similar periodicals. As Suzanne Ferguson points in her illuminating essay “The Rise of the Short Story in the Hierarchy of Genres,” “works of popular art”—like Christmas geese—“are regarded by both their creators and their audience as consumable. Designed for immediate gratification, they are not expected to give pleasure and edification over a long period of time” (177; italics added).⁴ But if “The Blue Carbuncle” is read as a literary story, it will be seen to be not only about such a “seedy and disreputable” subject as crime, but also about the struggle of the artist to be true to his calling in a society that insists on treating art as just another consumable.

The connection between Mrs. Oakshott’s geese raised for the Christmas dinner tables of Londoners and the formula stories written for consumption by readers of mass-market periodicals like the Strand Magazine finds support in a famous comment Conan Doyle made about being sated with the Holmes stories. “Poor Holmes is dead and damned,” he wrote in a letter to David Christie Murray; “I couldn’t revive him if I would (at least not for years), for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day” (qtd. in Green, “Introduction” xii). Strictly speaking, of course, Conan Doyle is saying that he has had too much of Holmes, just as earlier he ate too much pâté. But the production of pâté is impossible without the mass forced feeding of geese. This association may have been an unconscious one in the story, but the later comment certainly suggests that geese, at least indirectly, had unpleasant associations for Holmes.⁵

            In contrast to the mass-produced newspapers, billycocks and Christmas geese stands the “absolutely unique” blue carbuncle. But why a carbuncle, and why a blue one? The detective plot of the story does not require a particular kind of gemstone, and certainly nothing as improbable or unnatural as a blue carbuncle. All that is required is that it be valuable enough to be a target for thieves. A rare, valuable diamond, or even a violet amethyst, would do just as well. But in this double-coded story, the priceless gem has to be double-coded too. It has to serve the needs of both the manifest detective story and the latent literary story that together form “The Blue Carbuncle.” Whereas the detective story requires only that the stone be valuable, the literary story requires it to be not just valuable but rare, unique: the (unique) stone is a metaphor for the (unique) literary story that bears its name.

An ordinary carbuncle is a semi-precious stone, not at all rare, and therefore not valuable, like most mass-produced detective stories. What makes this carbuncle so valuable is that it is unique. Carbuncles are most commonly red but can be any colour—except blue. Thus the blue carbuncle is not just any valuable stone that a jewel thief might be interested in. “It’s more than a precious stone,” says Holmes. “It is the precious stone.” He adds, “It is absolutely unique, and its value can only be conjectured, but the reward offered of a thousand pounds is certainly not within a twentieth part of the market price” (155). The stone is “absolutely unique,” which is precisely what one would say of a genuine literary work of art, as opposed to works of formula fiction mass-produced and sold to middle-brow periodicals like the Strand Magazine for consumption by a mass audience, like so many fatted geese. A central binary opposition in the story, then, is the one between the “absolutely unique” and the mass-produced, between the unique work of art and the mass-produced piece of formula fiction.  A blue carbuncle is thus a contradiction, like a literary detective story. It also appears to violate the laws of nature, and is therefore aesthetically connected to that most notorious unnatural rarity, and symbol of the Fin de Siècle—the green carnation associated with Oscar Wilde. The similarity between Holmes and Wilde has been noticed by John MicBratney: “Doyle may have modeled Holmes  . . . on Wilde, a writer and man he admired. Holmes is, like Wilde, a witty aesthete, a lover of the outré, and a seeker after fresh sensations that sometimes shock the bourgeoisie” (161).

 

As a double-coded story, then, “The Blue Carbuncle” can be read either as a popular, mass-market detective story, or as literary short story. When it is read as a literary story, Holmes the detective becomes a surrogate for the artist Conan Doyle. The challenge facing Holmes the detective—how to find in a seedy and disreputable common robbery an “intellectual problem” (150) that is “striking and bizarre” (149) and thus worthy of his talent—is analogous to the challenge facing Conan Doyle the artist: how to transform a “disreputable” sub-genre of mass-produced fiction, the lowly detective story, into an original work of art. He does this by making this challenge the latent subject of his double-coded story. The manifest content of “The Blue Carbuncle” is the story of a valuable gem criminally concealed in a commercially produced and marketed goose. But if it is read for its latent literary content, it becomes the story of a unique work of art artfully concealed within a commercially produced piece of consumable formula fiction. Something rare and beautiful has come out of something common and ordinary, which is exactly what Holmes says of the blue stone that emerges from the goose’s gullet: “[A] most remarkable bird it proved. I don’t wonder that you [Ryder] should take an interest in it. It laid an egg after it was dead—the bonniest, brightest little blue egg that was ever seen” (166).⁶   If laying an egg is a metaphor for creating art—think of a beautiful Fabergé egg—then Conan Doyle has created the artistic counterpart of the blue carbuncle. By double-coding his work so that it will satisfy the claims of both Art and the marketplace, Conan Doyle has it both ways: he satisfies his mass audience with yet another seemingly formulaic Holmes story (the sixth to appear in the Strand and superficially just like all the others) and he satisfies himself and his like-minded readers by creating a kind of allegory of the fate of art in mass society. In this witty, clever and comic story, Conan Doyle appears to be a Grub Street Mrs. Oakshott, turning out yet another consumable story, identical in form to the previous ones, for the popular fiction market—but this one turns out to be an “absolutely unique” one, like a blue carbuncle “whose value can only be conjectured” (155).

Notes

¹ See, for example, Ronald R. Thomas’s Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), especially chapters 5, 10 and 13; and Marie-Christine Lep’s Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1992), especially chapters 7, 8 and 9.

² See Jon Thompson, Fiction, Crime and Empire (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993), which contains a perceptive reading of The Sign of the Four. See also Catherine Wynne, The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and the Gothic (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002; and Susan Cannon Harris, “Pathological Possibilities: Contagion and Empire in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes Stories, Victorian Literature and Culture, (2003): 447-466.

³ The standard analysis remains Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986).

⁴ William J. Scheick makes a similar point in The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century (Austin: U of Texas P, 1994) about what he calls “eventuary romances” (popular narratives that focus on plot and action): “Eventuary romances use the conventional matter of the genre chiefly to emphasize plot and action. These works are designed to entertain, to sell. The reader of eventuary romance is supposed to buy and consume the story as a treat of transient and renewable pleasure. Ideally, the reader’s addictive appetite for such trifles should demand more of the same kind—sequels, in fact” (42; Scheick’s italics). Scheick uses H. Rider Haggard’s romances as his primary example, but he could just as easily have chosen the Holmes adventures.

⁵ Even Conan Doyle’s seemingly innocent use of the word “overdose” is (again perhaps unconsciously) suggestive: reading mass-market fiction has often been compared, by Q. D. Leavis for example, to an addiction. Reading popular fiction is often figured as a form of bodily consumption—ingestion or injection—whereas reading elite fiction is figured as a form of disengaged mental contemplation, figured by a seated figure reading a book or in a rapt posture viewing a painting or sculpture.

⁶ There is probably a reference here to the “The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg.” The Holmes stories were truly a golden goose for Conan Doyle, creating more wealth for him than he ever dreamed of and enabling him to buy a sixteen-room house in the middle-class suburb of South Norwood.

 

 

The Myth of the ‘Scientific’ Detective: A Dissenting View of the Role of Science in the Holmes Stories

                                                     Nils Clausson

Few works of popular fiction have been more misread, misinterpreted and misunderstood by more readers than Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.  The reason for this is that the myth of Sherlock Holmes—the iconic image of him as the quintessential detective—has so completely seeped into the minds of both Holmes fans and of critics and scholars that this myth has shaped the way in which the stories are read and interpreted. Before any reader picks up a Holmes story for the first time, that iconic image will already have predetermined how the story is going to be read. Thus a reading unencumbered by presuppositions has become virtually impossible. We find in the stories what the prior Myth of Holmes instructs us to find. That myth is some variant on the image of Holmes as a scientific detective, an investigator who uses logic, reason, observation, and above all the methods of science to solve mysteries that baffle everyone else, especially the police.

 

            This myth has evolved and solidified since the first Holmes story was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1886, but its origins can be traced to the advertising campaign that was used to boost sales of the annual. The publisher placed an ad in the major magazine of the publishing industry, the Bookseller, to puff the novel:

 

This story will be found remarkable for the skillful presentation of a supremely ingenious detective, whose performances, while based on the most rational principles, outshine any hitherto depicted. In fact, every detective ought to read “A Study in Scarlet,” as most helpful means to his own advancement.

 

At first glance, A Study in Scarlet seems to confirm the advertising copy. Early in the story, an admiring Watson, just a few hours after observing his new friend and roommate examine a crime scene, exclaims, “You have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world.” Sanctioned by Watson’s hyperbolical praise and supported by Holmes’s astonishing deductions, this early image of Holmes as the personification of the scientific consulting detective who applies irrefutable logic and the methods of science to solving crimes has endured virtually uncontested as one of the most familiar myths of popular culture. In his Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Adventures and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Ian Pears encapsulates the orthodox view: “What Conan Doyle created,’ says Pears, “was the perfect positivist, the embodiment of the Victorian faith in rationality and science, convinced that the right combination of reason and method could overcome all obstacles.” Pierre Nordon, in his 1964 biography of Conan Doyle, claimed that Holmes’s power is the power of science: “As the creation of a doctor who had been soaked in the rationalist thought of the period,” says Nordon, “the Holmesian cycle offers us for the first time the spectacle of a hero triumphing again and again by means of logic and scientific method. And the hero’s prowess is as marvelous as the power of science, which many people hoped would lead to a material and spiritual improvement of the human condition, and Conan Doyle first among them.” Nordon’s identification of Holmes’s methods with the methods of science is as strong as it was in 1964.  “A character like Holmes,” says Christopher Clausen, “could grow to full stature only in a time when . . . science was viewed by its enthusiasts as a new force in the public mind . .  . The overt techniques of science, the careful collection and rational analysis of information, were realised in Sherlock Holmes.” Jon Thompson proclaims Holmes “the quintessential empiricist.” J. K Van Dover agrees, asserting that Conan Doyle “embodied in Sherlock Holmes the argument that the detection of crime is the scientific method.”

 

Two recent books, both favourably reviewed, are devoted to the science in the Holmes stories: James O’Brien’s The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics, and E. J. Wagner’s The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective’s Great Cases. O’Brien argues that a strong component of Sherlock Holmes’s “appeal and success is his knowledge of science and frequent use of the scientific method,” adding that Holmes’s “knowledge of science . . . lends credibility to his impressive powers of reasoning. Indeed, among the best-loved stories . . . those that rely not just on deductive reasoning but also employ elements of science are regarded most highly.” For Wagner, “the Holmes stories record a series of adventures in a Victorian world that becomes a laboratory for applying science to criminal investigation.” On the website Forensicoutreach.com you will find an article on “5 Ways Sherlock Holmes Inspired Forensic Investigation.” Nonsense. Forensic science would have taken exactly the same course if Sherlock Holmes had never been created. Perhaps the most famous, and likely the most influential, expression of this orthodoxy comes from Catherine Belsey in her book Critical Practice:

 

The project of the Sherlock Holmes stories is to dispel magic and mystery, to make everything explicit, accountable, subject to scientific analysis. . . . Holmes and Watson are both men of science. Holmes . . . is a scientific conjuror who insists on disclosing how the trick is done. The stories begin in enigma, mystery, the impossible, and conclude with an explanation which makes it clear that logical deduction and scientific method render all mysteries accountable to reason. . . . The stories are a plea for science not only conventionally associated with detection (footprints, trace of hair or cloth, cigarette ends), where they have been deservedly influential on forensic practice, but in all areas. They reflect the widespread optimism characteristic of their period concerning the comprehensive power of positivist science. (Italics added)

 

 

Contrary to this orthodoxy, the actual role of science in the stories is as thin as the Great Detective. All the real science actually used by Holmes could be recorded on one of the index cards in Holmes’ criminal archives. While I can’t in a short article survey the entire canon to controvert this orthodoxy, I will attempt to do is persuade you to return to the stories themselves and ask just how much science Holmes actually uses. If you do, I am confident that you will be inclined to question whether the widely accepted view of Holmes as the avatar of science, logic, and reason can stand up to a careful reading of the stories themselves.

 

            It is not just literary scholars, Sherlockians, and the legions of Holmes fans around the world who have perpetuated the myth of Holmes the scientific detective. Scientists, or those who claim to be scientists, such as criminologists, have also been eager to elevate a fictional character to the status of an avatar of the scientist and indeed of Science itself as the highest form of knowledge human beings have achieved.  As an example I would point to the article entitled “Sherlock Holmes: Father of Scientific Crime Detection,” published in The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science and written by Stanton Berg, a criminologist who is a fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Science and a member of the International Association of Identification, originally the International Association for Criminal Identification, which is the largest forensic organization in the world. ‘I feel,” says the author, “that a strong case can be made that the famous sleuth had a decided stimulating influence on the development of modern scientific crime detection.” In a section of the article entitled “Evidence in the Stories,” Berg cites the scene in the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, in which Holmes is introduced to Watson—and to the reader. At this meeting, Holmes enthusiastically announces that he has, in his words, “found a re-agent which is precipitated by haemoglobin, and by nothing else. . . . Why, man, it is the most practical medico-legal discovery for years. Don’t you see that it gives us an infallible test for blood stains. . . . Had this test been invented, there are hundreds of men now walking the earth who would long ago have paid the penalty of their crimes.” Although at the time considerable research was being done in the field of blood serology, Conan Doyle as a doctor would certainly have been aware that a reliable test for blood was not available when he wrote the story.  Thus Holmes’s discovery was, in 1887, science fiction. It was not until the end of the century that a 100%-reliable test for bloodstains was discovered, spectroscopic analysis, and eventually became available to crime-scene investigators.  It was only in 1901, that a German researcher developed a reliable method of distinguishing between animal and human blood.

 

What I want to draw your attention to is that identifying human blood stains plays no role in Holmes’s investigation of the crimes in the story, nor does it in any of the subsequent 59 Holmes stories published over the next four decades. Of course, I acknowledge that Holmes, as a result of examining the crime scene, constructs a portrait of the murderer, Jefferson Hope, that turns out to be accurate. After his examination of the room in which the murder took place, he announces to the Scotland Yard detectives and to Watson: “. . . the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse, square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar. In all probability the murderer had a florid face, and the fingernails of his right hand were remarkably long.” Holmes’s investigation of this crime scene and others in later stories is regularly cited by those who believe that the stories offer abundant evidence of Holmes’s reliance on the methods of science to solve otherwise mystifying crimes. However, none of these details, including the blood stains, plays a role in the identification of the murderer, Jefferson Hope. Their function is not scientific but rhetorical: to astonish the police, Watson, and the reader. These details construct an image of Holmes as someone who appears to use scientific methods to solve crimes. That image is reinforced later when Holmes tells Watson that he has written a monograph on tobacco ash, “I flatter myself that I can distinguish at a glance the ash of any known brand either of cigar or of tobacco,” adding “it is just in such details that the skilled detective differs from Gregson and Lestrade” (the two Scotland Yard detectives on the case). No doubt Holmes can identify dozens, maybe scores, of tobacco ash. But this specialized knowledge plays no role whatsoever in his identification of the murderer, just as it doesn’t in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.”

 

The only details at the crime scene that are relevant to Holmes’s investigation are the tracks of the four-wheeled cab in the street outside the building where the murder took place, but this detail does not identify the criminal. Rather it leads Holmes to suspect that the murderer and his victim likely arrived together in a Hansom cab. Holmes learns the identity, including the name, of the murderer not from his analysis of the crime scene, but rather from the Cleveland police, who later inform him that the murder victim was being stalked in America by a man named Jefferson Hope, and so Holmes reasonably concludes that Hope has pursued the victim to London and had likely been stalking him there. To arrive at this conclusion, Holmes does not rely on the methods of science; rather he speculates that the murderer would probably use a carriage to carry out his surveillance before the murder took place and that working as a cabman would be the most likely way for Hope to get access to a Hansom cab. Assuming his guess to be correct, Holmes recruits the Baker Street Irregulars to canvass all the cab companies in London to find out if they have anyone named Jefferson Hope working as a cabbie. And thus Hope is easily tracked down and identified since he has not changed his name. To do all this requires no expertise in science, and forensic science, in the sense of testing bloodstains at the crime scene or identifying tobacco ash and linking it to someone who smokes that brand, plays no role whatsoever in Holmes’s success in capturing Hope (or any other criminal).

 

So what are all the references to science doing in this story and in dozens of others? Their purpose, beginning with Holmes’s scientific “discovery” in the first story, is, I suggest, to confer on him the aura of science; in his actual investigation of the two murders in A Study in Scarlet, science plays an insignificant role, just as it does the rest of the stories. I would even go so far as to say that the role of science in the stories is trivial. The science in them has little to do with providing Holmes with an infallible method for detecting crimes. Rather the multiple references to science are part of Conan Doyle’s method as a fiction writer for creating the Holmes persona.  Conan Doyle’s characterization of Holmes includes his dress (the deerstalker cap and the Inverness cape), his violin playing, and the frequent attendance at musical concerts and trips to art galleries, such as the visit to an exhibition of modern Belgian paintings in The Hound of the Baskervilles. As we have seen, in A Study in Scarlet Holmes is introduced to us in a laboratory exulting over a chemical discovery. Conan Doyle’s coding Holmes as a man of science relies on the fact that most readers will transfer this character trait, an interest in experimental science, to the methods Holmes actually uses to solve mysteries, especially if Holmes himself talks a lot about his self-described “science of deduction and analysis” (the title of two chapters in the first two stories) and if he is repeatedly associated with conventional images of the experimental scientist, such as carrying out chemical experiments in the flat at 221B Baker Street, then readers will accept the idea that Holmes uses science to solve crimes. These experiments, however, have absolutely nothing to do with the case being investigated in that particular story.

 

Consider, for example, “The Naval Treaty,” which is about the theft of a secret treaty between England and Italy. In it we are introduced to Holmes

seated at his side table clad in his dressing gown and working hard over a chemical investigation. A large curved retort was boiling furiously in the bluish flame of a Bunsen burner, and the distilled drops were condensing into a two-litre measure. . . . He dipped into this bottle or that, drawing out a few drops of each with his glass pipette, and finally brought a test-tube containing a solution over to the table. In his right hand he had a slip of litmus paper.

 

Holmes excitedly says to Watson, “You have come at a crisis . . . If this [litmus] paper remains blue, all is well. If it turns red, it means a man’s life. He dipped it into the test-tube and it flushed at once into a dull, dirty crimson.” All this is part of a stage set brilliantly created by Conan Doyle. The experiment, however, has absolutely nothing to do with the case of the stolen naval treaty.  Neither chemistry, nor any aspect of science, will contribute to recovering the purloined treaty, any more than it does in Dupin’s retrieval of the purloined letter in Poe’s story of that name. In “The Copper Beeches,” after the client, Violet Hunter, leaves, Holmes turns to “one of those all night chemical researches” that Watson frequently witnesses. This vignette of Holmes as the assiduous and inquisitive experimental chemist is Conan Doyle’s way of creating for his readers the illusion that science is of paramount importance in solving Holmes’s cases. “The Dancing Men” similarly opens with a description of Holmes hunched “over a chemical vessel in which he was brewing a particularly malodorous product.” However, experimental science plays no role in that story either. The BBC News World Edition reported (16 October 2002) that The Royal Society of Chemistry was conferring on Holmes a posthumous honorary fellowship. For what? It’s like the Nantucket Historical Whaling Society posthumously awarding Captain Ahab an honorary membership.

 

Nevertheless, readers have unquestioningly assumed that the interest Holmes frequently shows in science and in chemistry is somehow evidence of the application of science to the cases he investigates. While I would not go as far as detective story writer Julian Symons, who in his history of crime fiction, Bloody Murder, claims that “Holmes is a deerstalker, a magnifying glass and a capacity for reasoning, not a human being,” Nevertheless, Symons is certainly right in seeing the “capacity for reasoning” as one of the numerous traits, on a par with the deerstalker cap, that constitute Holmes as a character, rather than as evidence of his application in the stories of a scientific methodology that exists outside the stories and that Holmes triumphantly puts into practice.

 

            Closely related to the myth of Holmes the scientist who applies the rigorous methods of experimental science to solving crimes is the myth of Holmes the brilliant logician who makes infallible deductions that lead inevitably to the solution of the mystery. So closely related are they that they tend to get conflated in many discussion of the stories. The terms science, logic, and reason are often used interchangeably. In fact, there is no more logic in the stories than there is science. Like Holmes the brilliant scientist, the familiar image of Holmes the infallible logician is simply another technique that Conan Doyle brilliantly uses to create the character of his flawed detective. A recurring pattern in the Holmes stories is to introduce Holmes as a model of the application of science and logic to a problem only to reveal the limitations of the methodology he advocates. As an example of how the aura of science hovering around Holmes is apt to mislead the reader to accept the myth of Holmes as a man of science who applies logic to solve mysteries, consider the story “The Five Orange Pips.” Early in the story Holmes is presented, or, more accurately, Holmes presents himself, as a perfect reasoning machine, doing for the science of detection what Baron Cuvier, the French naturalist and zoologist, did for the science of paleontology:

 

 “The ideal reasoner,” Holmes tells Watson, “. . . would, when he has once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it, but also all the results which would follow from it. 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. We have not [in this case] grasped the results which the reason alone can attain to. Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses.”

 

Although Holmes appears to apply Cuvier’s method in the story, his claims for what “the reason alone can attain to” are not borne out by the events of the story. However, appearances, as even fan of detective fiction knows, can be deceptive. One of the unanswered mysteries in the story is the puzzling behaviour of the detective himself. It is not just the “strange, wild events” of the story, as Watson calls them, that elude satisfactory explanation. Holmes’s conduct and behaviour is equally inexplicable. Why, one wonders, does Holmes send his client, John Openshaw, out alone onto the streets of London when he knows for certain that he is in imminent peril for his life at the hands of murderers whom Holmes also knows are in London and who certainly know that their intended victim is also there? What is puzzling about Holmes’s behaviour is not just that it is reckless and irresponsible, leading to the death of his client, but that he violates the very scientific methodology that he expounds in the passage invoking Cuvier as the model of an ideal reasoner. “The idea reasoner . . . would, when he had once been shows a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also the results which would follow from it.” Thus, given what Holmes already knows about the previous similar murders of John Openshaw’s uncle and father, both murdered by avenging members of the Ku Klux Klan, he should, by his own professed logic, be able to predict the inevitable next link in what he calls “the chain of events,” which obviously is the murder of his client John. “I do not think,” he tells him, “that there can be a doubt that you are threatened by a real and imminent danger.” After hearing John’s narrative of his family history, Holmes asserts, “The first consideration is to remove the pressing danger which threatens you. The second is to clear up the mystery and to punish the guilty parties.” However, Holmes inexplicably reverses this logical—and moral—priority and devotes all his time and mental exertion to the second consideration, leaving his poor client to his own devises. While Holmes is safely ensconced at 221b Baker Street playing his violin, his client is predictably murdered on the streets of London.  The methodology of Baron Cuvier may inspire Holmes’s theorizing about detective work, but his conduct in this story shows no signs of putting it into practice. “Logic is rare,” Holmes tells Watson in The Sign of the Four. And it is certainly rare in “The Five Orange Pips.”

 

 

It may appear that in questioning the role of science and logical reasoning in the Holmes stories I am calling attention to a fault in them. Nothing could be further from the truth. The strength of the Holmes stories, in my view, is not Holmes’s solution to puzzles, but Conan Doyle’s exposure of the limitations of Holmes\s science of deduction and analysis. The stories are not a celebration of power of science and logic, and certainly not a contribution to the new science of criminology, but a critique of the Victorians’ exaggerated faith in the power of science. This aspect of the stories, the foundation of their artistic success, has been overlooked by Conan Doyle scholars and by Sherlock Holmes fans for whom the Great Detective is an object of admiration, if not idolatry. My explanation for this astonishing misreading is that critics and fans alike have come to the stories with the prior assumption that they are pure ratiocinative detective stories and that a defining characteristic of that form is its primary focus on a detective who solves mysteries with logic, reason and science. It rarely occurs to them to adopt a critical attitude to the detective—his very faults are endearing. However, if we can free ourselves from our prior assumptions about what we have come expect to find in the Holmes stories, we may be able to view them in a new light and perhaps even agree with Conan Doyle that while Holmes’s science of detection and analysis can answer many questions, there remain many that it cannot answer. And it is those questions that Conan Doyle the artist leaves his readers to ponder.  

 

(This essay is a shortened version of a public lecture given for The Humanities Research Institute at the University of Regina, November 16, 2018.)

 

Nils Clausson is Professor Emeritus at the University of Regina (Saskatchewan, Canada). Before retiring he taught a course on the history of detective fiction and in 2018 revived the course for the Lifelong Learning Centre at the University of Regina. He has published articles on Conan Doyle in both scholarly journals, such as Journal of Popular Culture and Narrative Theory, and in such Holmes magazines as Canadian Holmes and The Sherlock Holmes Journal. In 2008 he convened an international Conan Doyle symposium at the University of Regina and in 2018 published Arthur Conan Doyle’s Art of Fiction: A Revaluation (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), which was short-listed for the 2019 H. R. F. Keating Award in the UK.