In Victorian crime novels, the city of London is portrayed in many different ways. In this thesis I will investigate the representation of this city in the detective novels of Sherlock Holmes, written by Arthur Conan Doyle. Because the stories of Sherlock Holmes were published between 1887 and 1927, I will examine the shift from Victorian London to the modern city as portrayed in the novels of Sherlock Holmes. To quote G.K. Chesterton from his article “A Defence of Detective Stories”: “Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious the detective story is certainly the Iliad”. The stories of Sherlock Holmes provide us with many examples of the mystery of the big city and the problems of metropolitan life.
The central research question I will answer is: how is the city of London represented and what role does this play in the stories of Sherlock Holmes? My aim is to contribute to the contemporary discussion of the perception of the modern city, specifically of Conan Doyle.
I will also investigate if the way the modern city is portrayed in the novels is characteristic for that period. The general point of view on the modern city is that a fragmented environment shaped a new type of urban consciousness and gave rise to “an interrelated concern with the observation and understanding of the city”. Today’s scholars believe this point of view to be too general and rather look at each city separately; they believe that looking at a city rather than looking at the city in general is the correct way to fully understand a specific modern city. In this thesis I will look at the city of London as the specific modern city.
The sub question to the central research question is: how is the contrast between the civilized Victorian London on one hand and the dark, foggy, mysterious London on the other hand represented in these novels? In the novels of Sherlock Holmes, crime takes place in this dark side of the city, where the city itself enables the crime. The detective, who lives in the comfortable area of Baker Street, solves the crimes and with that he becomes the connection between those two faces of London.
Chapter 1: Introduction to Victorian and modern life in London
The Victorian Era, named after the period of Queen Victoria’s rule over the British Empire, lasted from 1837 till 1901. It was one of the most flourishing periods of the Empire, especially for the capital London. The Victorian period brought the city a lot of prosperity, and it became the world’s largest city. Besides the immense increase in the population of London, the number of houses grew rapidly as well. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a population of one million people lived in London and that number increased to almost five million by the end of it. According to Peter Ackroyd, “every eight minutes of every day of every year, someone died in London; every five minutes, someone was born.” London also housed a high number of immigrants; by 1840 17 per cent of London’s population were immigrants. By 1870 more Irishman were living in London than in Dublin, and more Catholics than in Rome. Russians and Poles resided in London as well, and from 1850 the Chinese were also settling, arriving on ships. Soon London became the largest city in the world and it maintained this position for a hundred years, up till 1925, when New York took over this title.
Because of this expansion of the population more houses were built. The Building News reported at the time that “the fungus-like growth of houses manifests itself stretching from town to suburb and village”. Victorian London was a permanent building site. In fact, so many houses and buildings were erected that most of the London one sees today is “Victorian either in its fabric or its layout”. The destructive Victorian building attitude had a lot of consequences that could be regretted these days. Numerous churches were demolished to give way to new buildings, even the ones with great historical roots such as many Wren churches. Christopher Wren designed St. Paul’s Cathedral – one of London’s most visited historical buildings today – and with that knowledge in mind, the importance and the immense loss of other Wren churches can be understood. Another consequence of the aggressive building was the disappearance of the so called pleasure garden, a public garden used for recreation. These gardens were built over by houses, other buildings and later on by railways.
Houses spread in all directions and the city became a “bricken wilderness” and a labyrinth. London’s inhabitants experienced an endlessness of streets because the city grew larger and larger. The reason it could become a labyrinth was that for the first nine decades of the nineteenth century, London did not have an elected body which was responsible for its housing (or for its transport, schools or hospitals). Therefore a chaos of buildings could grow without any type of planning. It was not before 1889 that the wild growth of buildings would stop due to the introduction of the London County Council, the government body that was elected to solve the city’s worst social problems, including the chaos of its housing. As a result of this election the London County Council could put a stop to the spread of London’s labyrinth and prevent it from expanding irregularly throughout the city. Of course, London still grew massively after 1889, but the irregular Victorian growth, which made the city into a maze, was slowed down.
Because Victorian London was such a labyrinth, and because it was constantly expanding, people could get lost in their own city. London became so large that it created a secret side to itself. No one in the capital could ever know all of London through and through and there would always be secret places because of its constant expansion. It is said that London could be mapped, but it could never be fully imagined or experienced.
One of the developments vital to the image of Victorian London was the arrival of the railway. The first railway in London – in fact the first railway in any capital city in the world – was built in 1836, and at the start of the Victorian Era in 1837 a major railway station at Euston was erected, and many would follow. Its importance for the city was immense. London now became the true centre of Great Britain, due to its accessibility. But there was also a dark side to this great invention: the railway companies needed land to build the tracks and they could not afford to buy the properties of the rich. As a result, the houses of the poor were demolished to make way for the railway and according to Ackroyd around 100,000 people were displaced in this process.
One of the reasons the railway was so important for the image of London, was because it helped to further expand the city. Already existing suburban areas became within range of the people, but more importantly, new living areas were created, mainly to house the poor. Hence, the city grew larger and larger, not only with brick-built buildings, but also with people. London had a lot of trouble coping with this massive expansion, which showed in the high rates of poverty and homeless people. According to Roy Porter, London had up to 40,000 street people around 1850. The eminent Victorians were more shocked by criminality than by poverty, indicating that poverty did not impress them very much. Still, the striking images of the poor and suffering standing in the street are the ones best remembered today.
The railway was not the only reason that houses and people had to be moved. Halfway the Victorian Era, one of the most important Victorian inventions was born out of necessity: the Underground railway. London needed fast transportation in the centre of town, but because it was already too crowded with horse traffic any railways overground were impossible to accomplish. The obvious solution was to build railways underground. Because the trains were still steam-powered, the tunnels needed ventilation so it was not possible to dig deep holes. Therefore they had to use the so-called ‘cut-and-cover’ method, which meant that a trench was excavated and later roofed over. Due to the use of this method, the tunnels were just below the surface so ventilation shafts could be embedded into the ground. These shafts allowed steam to escape and let fresh air into the tunnels.
Although the arrival of the Underground had a lot of advantages, this cut-and-cover method meant that, just as with the arrival of the railway, a lot of people lost their homes. But this time it affected the centre as well. The first Underground-track was opened in 1863 and ran from Paddington to Farringdon. Because of the trenches that had to be cut, a lot of houses were demolished.
With the arrival of electricity at the end of the Victorian Era the Underground network transformed. It was now possible to use a different method to create the tunnels, the so called ‘deep-hole’ boring. As the tunnel boring machines created tube-like tunnels, the name of the Underground quickly changed into its nickname ‘the Tube’. Due to the use of electricity there was no need for ventilation shafts anymore so the tunnels could become deep-level. The first electric deep-level Tube ran between the Stockwell and King William Street (now Bank and Monument) tube stations. This line also ran through the centre, or rather, únder the centre, but there was no need to disrupt the townscape anymore while constructing it.
With the enormous growth and the relatively quick change of the city, a lot of mixed feelings were brought about among the inhabitants of London. The feeling of living in the largest growing city in the world was sometimes one of admiration, but at the beginning of the Victorian Era most of the time the overwhelming feeling of anxiety dominated the people. This slowly changed into feelings of dullness and tiredness, because this great city seemed to drain energy and to wear the people out.
Because the metropolis became so much larger in a short period of time, it also became much more anonymous. It was a more public city, but, according to Peter Ackroyd, also a less human one: “Within the immensity of London any individual becomes insignificant and unnoticed”. The feelings that were accompanied by this anonymity were both positive and negative. Ackroyd describes how the feeling of being anonymous in London overwhelmed Thomas De Quincey, and made him experience “utter loneliness” . Nobody regarded De Quincey and nobody seemed to hear or see him. It was the largest city in the world, but also the most impersonal. Yet for some citizens, this quality of London was a source of fascination and sometimes a relief. In the anonymity of the city you could easily go unnoticed. A.N. Wilson describes the rise of the hotel, a ‘deeply Victorian institution’, and connects it with a positive feeling of anonymity because now anyone could come up and stay in London without having to know anyone. But on the other hand, some people said that London was simply too big and that it had no soul.
It was a striking paradox for Victorian London, because it was a city of contradictions in many ways. Peter Ackroyd asks himself: “Is it the heart of empire, or the heart of darkness?”, which illustrates the ambiguous feeling people had at the time towards their capital. “This monster London is really a new city”, the author Charles Pascoe wrote in 1888. London was a city indeed, with progressive inventions and new intelligence, but also a monster due to its poverty and hardship. Some people noticed the blessings of trade and commerce, others only saw the unattractiveness and the miserable side of it all. For some, the new transport of the city provided energy but for others, this new speed created confusion. And of course, there was the huge opposite between rich and poor, living together in a city already so full of contradictions.
It is impossible to deal with Victorian London without mentioning the one aspect for which the city became notorious: the fog. Although this phenomenon was already recorded as early as 1257, it is “commonly believed that nineteenth-century London created the foggy darkness.” Reports on Victorian London speak of the fog that had “wiped London out [like] a sponge”. The French historian Hippolyte Taine wrote in the 1860s about a “thick yellow fog [that] fills the air, sinks, crawls on the very ground”. Most of the accounts mention yellow-coloured fog and a sulphurous smell, which could explain that particular colour. But the fog could also be of different colours and texture, as R. Russel, the author of London Fogs explains in 1880:
A London fog is brown, reddish-yellow, or greenish, darkens more than a white fog, has a smoky, or sulphurous smell, is often somewhat dryer than a country fog, and produces, when thick, a choking sensation. Instead of diminishing while the sun rises higher, it often increases in density, and some of the most lowering London fogs occur about midday or late in the afternoon. Sometimes the brown masses rise and interpose a thick curtain at a considerable elevation between earth and sky. A white cloth spread out on the ground rapidly turns dirty, and particles of soot attach themselves to every exposed object.
In the 1880s Henry James, the American writer, mentioned the fog in his list of complaints about the London particulars: “The fogs, the smoke, the darkness, the wet...the ugliness, the brutal size of the place...” . He mentions the fog, smoke and darkness as different complaints, while in fact these three were linked. The fog was caused by the smoke and created the darkness, even during daytime. Gas lights were turned on throughout the day in order to create some light, both inside the houses and outside on the streets. The thick fog was caused by the smoke of the sea coal fires that escaped from trains, the non-electric Underground, chimneys, factories, and so on. The whole London economy depended on sea coal and therefore there was no possible escape from this particular London fog during the Victorian Era.
Apart from darkness, the fog created a mysterious atmosphere in the city. Samuel Butler, a British novelist, describes his view of a foggy St. Paul’s Cathedral as “a commingling of earth and some far-off mysterious palace”. Due to the thick and damp fog all the sounds of the street were muffled and people seemed to disappear like ghosts. Because of the fading footsteps and voices like whispers the city became a world of concealment and secrets. Within the fog things could happen that nobody noticed. This aspect of Victorian London is of great importance in recognizing the way in which the city created a scenery in which crime could flourish. Within the darkness of the fog theft, violence and rape could occur on an unprecedented scale. Fog is normally a natural meteorological symptom, but in this case the city created its own fog and therefore its own crime. Part of this was to blame on the absence of gas lights in many small streets and alleys, hence covering up crimes and disgraces in the thick fog.
Despite these negative aspects, the fog was as much a concrete part of the Victorian metropolis as the railway or the Underground. Henry Mayhew, an English journalist, wrote in 1849: “To behold the metropolis without its smoke – with its thousand steeples standing out against the clear blue sky sharp and definite in their outlines is to see London as it is not – without its native element”. So, without the fog, there was no London.
It is therefore no surprise that in nineteenth-century literature the fog plays a significant role. Ackroyd claims it can be said that the fog is the greatest character in nineteenth-century fiction and that the novelists looked upon fog as people might have done upon an object. The London fog also played an important role in nineteenth-century art where painters such as Whistler and Monet saw it as London’s greatest attribute. In literature, one of the greatest novels of Victorian fog is The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886. The fog also plays an important role in the Sherlock Holmes stories, which will be discussed in great detail later in this thesis.
When Queen Victoria died in 1901 it meant the end of the Victorian Era. The period that followed is called the Edwardian period, named after King Edward who succeeded his mother. Although King Edward died in 1910, the Edwardian period is often extended to the beginning of World War I in 1914, and sometimes even to the end of the War, in 1918. This period is also often called the Modern period, named after the modernisation that took place in Britain during that period. This modernisation was the continuation of the Victorian period, in which many changes had already been started off. For London, the Modern period seemed a much calmer period than the intense and chaotic Victorian Era. The inventions and changes that occurred during the nineteenth century seemed to proceed calmly in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, the Edwardian period saw many changes as well. First of all, the growth of the houses in the city continued, primarily in the suburbs, which caused the centre of London to maintain its Victorian style. The population expanded as well. At the end of the Victorian Era five million people inhabited London, by 1911 this number had risen to seven million and by 1925 the population of London consisted of almost eight million people.
Transportation became more coordinated at the beginning of the Edwardian period and due to the invention of electricity it changed to a great extent. This period is sometimes called ‘the period of mobility’, because of the ‘electric change’ in transportation, making people more mobile. Not only the tube, as described above, but also other means of transportation became electrified. One of the biggest inventions was the electric tram, created in 1901, which replaced the horse-drawn tram. In fact, all transportation in Victorian times involved horse-drawn means and now, due to electricity, the horses began to disappear from the streets. But at the beginning of the introduction of electricity in transport, the already crowded streets of London became even busier. The horse-drawn and electric vehicles both got in each other’s way and the average speed remained only twelve miles per hour. Ironically, this is still true nowadays, suggesting that the introduction of electricity in London’s traffic could not help speed things up at all.
The most characteristic feature of Victorian London, the fog, diminished as the new century proceeded. The exact reason for this phenomenon is still unknown, but one of the guesses is that the expansion of the city had paradoxically lowered its own levels of fog. The industries and the people were now more widespread and with that, the sources of the fog spread as well. This remarkable fact has been described in an essay by Henry T. Bernstein, whose title indicates how extraordinary the phenomenon really was: “The Mysterious Disappearance of Edwardian London Fog”. According to Peter Ackroyd, the last real thick and heavy fog in London was present on December 23, 1904, thus in the very early years of the Modern period. After that, the fog appeared from time to time, but it was not really noteworthy until the heavy ‘smogs’ of the early 1950s. The word ‘fog’ had at the beginning of the twentieth century transformed into ‘smog’ – a portmanteau of the words ‘fog’ and ‘smoke’ – and the phenomenon became notable in other cities as well. It now was no longer a specifically London characteristic, because all over the world large cities experienced thick smog caused by air pollution such as exhaust gasses and industrial fumes. That one particular Victorian London city-element slowly diminished in the Modern period, not only from sight but also from language.
One of the most interesting differences between Victorian London and the modern city are the feelings the people had towards life in the city and the city itself. In the early years of the Victorian Era overwhelming feelings of anxiety dominated, but slowly transformed into feelings of boredom. But in the Modern period, this all changed. The city embodied a much more energetic and young spirit, which created an atmosphere of liveliness and activity. As Ackroyd puts it: “[I]t [was] as if the city had come alive with the new century.” The heavy Victorian feelings seemed to have disappeared and people enjoyed life more than before. The whole city was full of life. The different means of transportation that were introduced in the Victorian period had caused confusion then, but now the city moved forward and enjoyed the speed of life, literally.
Of course, there were always people who would keep dwelling on the negative aspects of the big city. London became even busier and noisier during the Edwardian period, and the City, a borough in the centre of London, housed more hotels and banks than ever before. According to Arthur Conan Doyle, central London became “a great cesspit into which all the loungers of the Empire are irresistibly drained”. This negative attitude towards the modern sides of the city could have contributed to the development of the stories of Sherlock Holmes, in which London’s Victorian aspects are glorified.
Chapter 2: The modern city, an individual city
The Modern period as discussed above has through the years been examined and investigated by many different scholars. The three most important thinkers on urban modernity are Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Georg Simmel (1858-1918) and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Baudelaire was interested in the social forms of modernity, while Simmel investigated the effects of modern experience on the mind of the individual. The German philosopher Benjamin on the other hand examined both the mythology and the historical sociology of a city. He wrote about city life, urban architecture and metropolitan experience. In his studies, Benjamin was mainly concerned with “the grotesque character of the city and the dehumanizing tendencies of metropolitan daily life”. He attempted to give voice to the character of both individual and collective experiences within the urban setting. Benjamin was an “urbanite” and a “metropolitan” whose feelings towards the modern city were dual: the city gave him feelings of both hope and despair, of both love and hate. Despite these paradoxical feelings, the exposure of the delusion of the urban environment was the basis for Benjamin’s fascination with the modern city.
In the essay “Paris is not Rome, or Madrid: locating the city of modernity”, published in 2002, Deborah L. Parsons discusses temporary perspectives on the modern city. She describes the different types of commonplaces which still rule among scholars nowadays. One of those is the idea that “the fragmented and defamiliarised environment of the modern city shaped both a new type of urban consciousness, and an interrelated concern with the observation and understanding of the city”. Parsons believes this point of view to be too general, because it undermines the individualistic character of a specific city.
She asks herself what it means to study the city of modernity and what kind of city the scholars mean when they talk about the modern city. Until now, the general way to examine a modern city was to neglect its specifically historical context and to look at the city more generally. Even in 1984, scholars tended “to view the modern city in monolithic terms, as if Boston, New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles were one and the same place”. But now, “[a] growing alertness to the heterogeneity of global modernity [...] is [...] revitalising the field of modernist studies”. Parsons argues that “any individual city is partly composed from its specific history of traditions, customs, representations and self-identifications.” Consequently, for today’s scholars it is important to look at each city separately and looking at a city rather than looking at the city in general is the correct way to fully understand a specific modern city. Although I fully agree with that, in my opinion Parsons takes it a bridge too far when she claims that, when examining urban modernity, you should dismiss all your preconceptions and theoretical frameworks, along with the knowledge of ‘typical terms of modernity’ such as ‘the culture of everyday life’, ‘the crowd’, ‘the prostitute’ and ‘the flâneur’ – terms used by Baudelaire, Simmel and Benjamin. I think it could be useful to use these concepts when describing urban modernity. But I also think it is very important to recognize that every city is different and unique, and that, just like Parsons claims, it would be “fallacious to suggest either that [...] changes [within a city] took place simultaneously, or that they followed the same pattern of emergence across Western society.”
One of the reasons why I think it is very important to investigate every modern city as an individual city, is because every city has its own unique qualities and role in history. In the case of London that is certainly true. It had a very special and unique status in the world because it was, for almost a hundred years, the largest city in the world. To quote Peter Ackroyd: “London had become known as the greatest city on the earth, the capital of empire, the centre of international trade and finance, a vast world market into which the world poured.” In his essay “Recent work in Victorian Urban Studies”, Richard L. Stein describes what made London a typical modern city: “...its placement at the center of the increasingly textualized global economy of finance and information”.
It was the largest city in the world, and as a result of that it became one of the first cities ever forced to deal with the burdens of “metropolitan problems” – or, to use a term frequently used in Dutch, “grootstedelijke problematiek”. Consequently, London can be considered ahead of other metropolitans around the world.
It may be clear that because of its magnitude and early development, London had a very unique position in the world. Another reason why London was so unique in comparison with a lot of other cities, is described by A.N. Wilson: “The contrast between Paris and London – or between London and many of the major European capitals [...] – is very marked. Wretched as the plight was of the London poor, it remained an aspirant city, one in which those in the gutter aspired to rise.” Despite their poverty, the poor still had dreams and, most important, hopes for a better life. Here, Wilson talks about the Victorian Age, but the poor’s optimistic attitude towards the future continued in the following period, where everybody seemed to sense the optimism of a new century. Evidently, two completely different cities cannot be treated as if they are the same. Each city has to be studied in its own, proper light, and I shall therefore investigate London’s urban modernity, taking into account its historical context. Benjamin’s theories will be applied to this analysis as it will prove valuable in investigating the transition from the Victorian to the modern city.
Chapter 3: The city as a character
The last word of the title of this chapter is ‘character’. This word implies an active role, and I do believe that a city itself can be active through history and that it is capable of causing certain things to happen. This is especially true for a city like London, and this shows the individuality of the city. I believe London has been capable of changing the course of its own history and that it has influenced its inhabitants.
The use of the word ‘character’ also implies that London has certain human features. Peter Ackroyd has named his all-embracing and very high-valued book London: The Biography. The word ‘biography’ is generally used to describe an account of a person’s life, not the history of a city. In his introduction, which is called “The city as body”, Ackroyd explains his vision on London as “half of stone and half of flesh”. The city contains, according to Ackroyd, multiple human body parts such as veins, represented by the byways of the city, and lungs, represented by its parks, hence, the title “Biography”. Just like a human body, London could not cope with the fact that it grew fat during the Victorian Era when all its veins got blocked. The city did not look after its people as well as before, and more and more people lost their homes and were forced to live on the streets. It became a very unhealthy city.
Not only Peter Ackroyd but also other writers have ascribed human characteristics to the city of London. Daniel Defoe had, already in the eigthteenth century, described London as a great body which “circulates all, exports all, and at last pays for all”, and with that description he portrayed the city as a “living and suffering being”. I think that portrait is a wrong one. Of course, London has had to endure many difficulties. It suffered fires many times, of which the Great Fire of 1666 is considered the greatest, and it has suffered horrible diseases such as the plague, of which the Great Plague of 1665-1666 was the last major outbreak. But to portray London merely as a suffering being gives a wrong and short-sighted image. After the Great Fire the plague did not return to the capital, and it looks as if the city had taken care of its own problems by destroying not only itself, but more importantly the disease’s source. This is a great example of the city providing its own cares and needs. Despite all the ordeals – according to Ackroyd the city was “perpetually doomed” – London kept standing. It certainly was not a weak city.
Another and perhaps most important reason why I claim that London has been capable of influencing its own history, is because the city has been capable of enabling its own crime. Because of the growth of the city and the expansion of the population the crime rate increased during the Victorian Era. As mentioned earlier, the fog and the darkness made sure crime could flourish as never before. The world’s most famous murderer Jack the Ripper operated mostly in dark alleys where, because of the fog and bad lighting, nobody noticed him. At the end of the Victorian Era, as we have seen, most of the streets were illuminated by gas lights, which were turned on even during the day in order to spread some light in the darkness caused by the fog. However, there were still many streets and alleys that had no lighting at all and although it was claimed that by 1841 “the metropolis now burn[ed] gas in every square, street, alley, lane, passage, and court”, even at the end of the Victorian period, this was still not the case. It was also claimed that “half the work of prevention of crime was accomplished” because of gas lighting. But, as explained earlier, crime still flourished in the darkness without people noticing it. London created its own fog and its own darkness and therefore its own crime. Every part of the city participated in the crime: the fog, caused by fumes, the darkness, caused by fog and the lack of gas lights, and the topographical situation, because the city had too many dark and isolated alleys.
The connection between London and murder was made a long time before the Victorian period, but due to the ‘perfect’ Victorian circumstances as described above, crime rates increased enormously. It is that particular quality that made Arthur Conan Doyle choose London as the home base for the world’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle was born and raised in Edinburgh, and lived in Portsmouth when he wrote the first Sherlock Holmes novels. It was only in 1891, four years after the publication of his first novel A Study in Scarlet, that he moved to the capital himself. In those first novels the attentive reader will notice that many streetnames used by Conan Doyle to describe certain London areas are actually Edinburgh’s. One example is ‘Duncan Street, Houndsditch’, where the name Duncan Street is taken from an Edinburgh street known to Conan Doyle , and Houndsditch taken from a real street in London, located in the City. Another example is ‘Mayfield Place, Peckham’, where again Peckham is an actual existing place in London – a suburb of the city – whereas Mayfield Place is in Edinburgh.
The reason for Conan Doyle not to choose Edinburgh as the main location in the Sherlock Holmes novels despite the fact that he knew the city of Edinburgh much better than the city of London, might partly be explained in Irving S. Saposnik’s essay “The Anatomy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. Saposnik describes how Stevenson needed a setting for his story where the Victorian division in men and society could really come alive. This setting was vital because the morality of the story lay at the centre of the Victorian world and therefore location would be the most important detail. Saposnik explains that many critics have pointed out that this morality was actually more of a Scottish feature than an English one. Hence, the more suitable setting would have been Edinburgh. However, according to Saposnik, “they fail to recognize that only London could serve as the locus classicus of Victorian behavior. An enigma composed of multiple layers of being, its confines held virtually all classes of society conducting what were essentially independent lives.” Not only the Victorian conduct but also the fact that the city of London itself was “a macrocosm of the necessary fragmentation” meant that the capital served as a perfect setting for Stevenson to present his themes. Just like Stevenson, Conan Doyle did not choose Edinburgh as the location for his novels because London was the only place where the centre of the normative Victorian world represented itself.
Not only did Conan Doyle use London as a geographical place, he also used it as a symbolic centre of the British Victorian world. London was both “the emporium of crime and the palladium of Christianity. It [was] in fact, the great arena of conflict between the powers of darkness and the ministry of heaven.” This description of London is similar to the London as outlined in the Holmes novels. With the dark, criminal side on the one hand and the civil world and safe haven of Baker Street on the other, Sherlock Holmes could serve as the perfect connection between those two worlds, as will be demonstrated below.
Chapter 4: Introduction to Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes novels were published in London between 1887 and 1927. He wrote four novels and 56 short stories. His first two novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four were published in respectively Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887 and Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890. After that, he wrote 23 short stories, all published in The Strand Magazine between 1891 and 1893. The first twelve stories appeared in book form in 1892 as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and the other eleven stories were published in 1893 under the title The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. The last story from that collection, titled “The Final Problem”, is particularly important because it is the story in which Conan Doyle puts an end to the life of Sherlock Holmes. He felt that he did not get enough credit for his other stories – it may come as a surprise that he indeed wrote other stories – and he allowed Holmes’ arch-enemy Professor Moriarty to throw the detective into the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Conan Doyle did not take great pride in his famous creation, as can be concluded from the introduction to his autobiography in which he speaks of his achievements in life but does not say a word about the detective. In the preface to his last collection of stories he explains: “[Sherlock Holmes] may perhaps have stood a little in the way of the recognition of my more serious literary work.” Therefore, he intended “The final problem” to be his last story about Holmes, but heavy and sometimes angry reaction from his readers made him decide to publish one more novel, probably his most famous one today, The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was published in The Strand in 1901 and in book form in 1902.
The truth is that Sherlock Holmes kept dominating Conan Doyle’s life. After The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was set before Holmes’ death in Switzerland, the public was still not satisfied because a posthumous Holmes did not live up to their expectations. They wanted a detective who could solve crimes at the present day. Hence, Conan Doyle decided to resurrect Sherlock Holmes and this resulted in another collection of stories The Return of Sherlock Holmes, published in The Strand between 1903 and 1904 and in book form in 1905. After that, the author published two more story collections, called His Last Bow, published between 1908 and 1913, and in book form in 1917, and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, published between 1921 and 1927, and in book form in 1927. With the death of Conan Doyle in 1930, the original written life of Sherlock Holmes had finally come to an end. But the legend of the world’s most famous detective never ended.
Sherlock Holmes is known all over the world as a Victorian detective. This is partly because of the time setting of the novels and stories, as most of them take place during the Victorian Era. The stories cover a period from around 1875 – “The ‘Gloria Scott’” published in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes – up to 1907, with one final case during the First World War set in 1914 – “His Last Bow”, which appeared in the similarly named collection of 1917. So although many stories were written in the Modern period, Conan Doyle still placed his detective at the crossing of both times.
Another important reason why Holmes is remembered as Victorian, is because of the scene setting. In the novels and stories the London streets are portrayed as particularly Victorian, with gas lights on every corner and fog swirling down the streets. Horse traffic dominated the scenes, especially cabs pulled by horses. Sherlock Holmes used the cab as main transportation, he only traveled by tube once. In fact, the image of Sherlock Holmes in a cab is so familiar that the London Transport Museum mentions the detective in its description of the Hansom Cab. The hansom, a fast type of cab with no luggage space, is the type of cab Holmes mainly used. The fact that this Victorian cab is associated with Holmes in the Transport Museum shows that he is perceived today as a Victorian detective.
Two other aspects that connect the Victorian city with the famous detective, are the frequent mentioning of the fog and the use of gas lights. Although the first interior use of electric light occurred in 1887, Sherlock Holmes kept using gas lights all his life. The fog, a typically Victorian phenomenon, plays a very important role in the novels and stories and may serve as another reason why the detective will always be remembered as Victorian.
Despite the fact that Sherlock Holmes is seen as a Victorian individual, many stories were written and published in the Modern period. Thirty-three of the short stories and one or two of the novels – that depends on The Hound of the Baskervilles which was published in 1901 and 1902 but probably written some years before that – were written after the Victorian period. I believe that because of this fact Sherlock Holmes should not be seen as just a Victorian character, but also as partly modern. I am convinced that Conan Doyle, who moved to London in 1891, became influenced by the city in which he lived and by the tendency towards a more modern life. Traces of modern life, as well as hints at urban modernisation in London, can be found in the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels. To investigate these theories I will examine the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels closely and focus mainly on the ones that are situated in London.
Chapter 5: Sherlock Holmes, Benjamin, and the city of London
Earlier I have mentioned the German philosopher Walter Benjamin as one of the most important thinkers on urban modernity. His view on the modern city has shaped the way we look at the modern city today. I will make use of parts of his theory to examine the modern elements as present in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, but I will keep in mind the individuality of the city of London.
In his work, Benjamin focused on the modern individual and his or her experience. One thing he was particularly interested in was the function of the crowd in modern life and the effect it had on the individual. For him, the characteristic feature of the modern metropolitan experience was the ‘encounter with the crowd, the reaction of the individual to the great assemblage of strangers.’ According to Benjamin, the Modern period created the first confrontation of the individual with strangers. The emotions that followed such an experience were ‘fear, revulsion, and horror’ . These feelings can be compared to the feelings London inhabitants had when they had to deal with the anonymity of the rapidly expanding city. London always had a large number of crowds in comparison with other great cities, but, according to Peter Ackroyd, the attitude of the crowd changed in the nineteenth century. It became increasingly impersonalised.
Ackroyd notices that there are two types of London crowd people. There is one type, which gets confused by the chaos and cannot cope with the quick movement, and there is the other type, which feels satisfied in this stream of life and time. Among this last type there were people who could benefit from the crowd, as they could use it as a safe place to hide. It provided comfort due to its anonymity created by people that were similar. People who could profit from that fact were for example criminals, as they could vanish into the mass. For this reason Benjamin, rightly it turned out, marked the detective story as a genre with a great future. The rise of the crowd gave rise to an extra difficulty in the work of the detective, but at the same time made it more exciting. Instead of the detective being able to distinguish the criminal from the rest, the villain could vanish into the crowd and disappear without a trace. Normally, the detective already had to look for the smallest traces to find him, but now the search became even more difficult.
The crowd is mentioned a large number of times in the Sherlock Holmes stories. In the novel The Sign of Four, Watson’s feelings become one with the crowd as his future wife – whom he has at that moment just met – disappeared from his sight, “in the sombre crowd”. Here Watson himself feels sombre and he projects his greyness onto the people on the street. A moment later, when Holmes and Watson drive through the city in a cab, once again the crowd is portrayed through the eyes of Watson as a pitiful pack of people: “There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghostlike in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light”. Now, the crowd is seen as frightening and spooky. It appeared as though Watson did not think much of the crowd, which is supported by an event in the short story “A Scandal in Bohemia” where Sherlock Holmes gets attacked by members of the crowd when he tries to protect a lady, Irene Adler, from getting hurt: “[B]ut, just as [Holmes] reached her, he gave a cry and dropped to the ground, with the blood running freely down his face.” This fragment shows that the crowd can be very dangerous.
As mentioned earlier, the crowd could have different functions. Besides being dangerous, it could also serve as a safe hiding place where a criminal could vanish without the detective able to catch him. This happens for instance in The Sign of Four, where Sherlock Holmes chases a villain with a hunting dog to catch the smell of creosote, which the villain carries with him. Unfortunately, the criminal is able to disappear into the crowds where a lot of other traces of creosote can be found. In the story “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax”, Holmes searches for two criminals and the innocent Lady Carfax, but “[a]mid the crowded millions of London the three persons [he] sought were as completely obliterated as if they had never lived.”
Walter Benjamin was highly interested in the effect the crowd had on the individual. To Watson, the crowd was mainly gloomy and depressing. For Sherlock Holmes, the crowd sometimes proved a difficult opponent but one he had learned to work with. Not only could a crowd serve as a perfect hiding place for criminals, it could just as well be of use for a detective. “The masses”, Benjamin writes, “efface all traces of the individual”. Holmes likes to disguise himself and can, in that way, very easily hide among all the other people in the crowd. For instance, in the story “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone”, he disguises himself as “a workman looking for a job” and even “an old woman”. He is so talented at disguising himself that even Watson does not recognize him in “The Empty House”, the story in which Holmes suddenly comes to life again. Holmes blends in with the crowd very well, disguised as an old man, and even his best friend and partner in crime is not able to identify him. Georg Simmel wrote: “[T]he metropolitan type [takes] naturally on a thousand individual modifications” and this perfectly applies to Sherlock Holmes and his disguises.
Holmes does not only benefit from the crowd’s safety, at times he also benefits from the crowd in other ways. In “The Final Problem” Professor Moriarty chases the detective with intentions to harm him. This chase leads into Victoria Station, where Holmes and Watson jump on a train that Moriarty also hopes to catch. Fortunately, “[t]he train already begun to move as Holmes spoke. Glancing back [Watson] saw a tall man pushing his way furiously through the crowd and waving his hand as if he desired to have the train stopped. It was too late, however...”. In the short story “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman” it is Watson who manages to lose the criminal in the London crowd when he is followed by him: “I saw him once more at London Bridge, and then I lost him in the crowd. But I am convinced that he was following me.”
It may be clear that Sherlock Holmes felt very comfortable among a flock of strangers, and although the crowd sometimes could get in his way, he did not fear the streets and would always go out to investigate his mysteries. Of course it must be said that the crowd Benjamin talks about is the modern type of crowd, a new phenomenon, which arose during the Modern period. The London crowd on the other hand already existed during the Victorian period. However, as I have explained before, the city of London was ahead of its time and the Victorian city was more developed than other cities. London’s individuality as described by Benjamin is actually quite similar to the world Sherlock Holmes and Watson inhibit.
Another remark that can be made about Benjamin’s theory, is that his description of the modern individual as someone who fears the crowds, cannot be applied to Sherlock Holmes. According to Benjamin, the individual may even experience some shock when facing a crowd but for Sherlock Holmes the feeling that dominated was certainly not one of shock or fear. His feelings were dual. When chasing a criminal or solving a crime he felt excited and alive. But without his most favourite activities, he pined away from the longing for adventure. At the beginning of the story “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”, before anything exciting happens, the detective sighs: “But is not all life pathetic and futile? [...] We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow – misery.” The same emotions can be found in the novel The Sign of Four, where Sherlock Holmes explicitly states that he “cannot live without brainwork.” He continues: “What else is there to live for? [...] Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world?” The only thing left for Holmes to pass the time is the use of cocaine. This was not illegal at the time, but it still might have come as a shock to the readers, just as it did for Watson. At the beginning of The Sign of Four, Conan Doyle introduces this cocaine addiction for the first time. Holmes gives the explanation for his habit in that same story, when Watson asks him if he has any “professional enquiry on foot at present”: “None. Hence the cocaine.” At the end of the novel, when the adventure is over and the criminal caught, Watson asks him what Holmes will do, now that the crime is solved. Holmes replies: “For me [...] there still remains the cocaine bottle.” This novel is not the only story in which the cocaine addiction of Sherlock Holmes is mentioned. On many different occasions, Conan Doyle refers to the detective’s need in times of boredom, “alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition” . Without the excitement of crime, Holmes was nothing more than a person who needed stimulating drugs to cope with the dullness of life, a feeling that dominated the end of the Victorian period. For Holmes it meant there was no real life without crime.
As I have remarked above, Benjamin has marked the detective story as the new modern genre, and not only because the crowd formed a perfect décor. Benjamin wrote: “[T]he detective story [...] does not glorify the criminal, though it does glorify his adversaries and, above all, the hunting-grounds where they pursue him.” This certainly can be said of the stories of Sherlock Holmes, in which the ‘adversary’, the detective, is highly glorified, not only by Watson but also by the people who hire him and almost the entire London police force, including some high officials at Scotland Yard. The ‘hunting-ground’ Benjamin talks about is the city of London, where Sherlock Holmes tracks down criminals. This city hunting field forms the centre of the stories, not only because Sherlock Holmes himself lives in London, but also because many times he has to chase the villains around town and once even on the river Thames. According to Benjamin, the city can transform into a “place of danger, of intrepid and daring figures, of heroic exploits and deeds of magnificent infamy [...] in order to avoid the tedium of the homogeneous crowd.” This is also the case in the Holmes novels, where the city sometimes can be dangerous and magnificent at the same time.
With the rise of the urban crowd in the modern city, the individual perspective came to an end. The crowd could erase all the traces of the individual and he could lose himself within the great mass. However, in the detective story the individual still plays a very important part. According to Benjamin, in the detective story the individual is enthroned as a hero, because only the individual could solve the crime within the hostile city environment. This is certainly true regarding Sherlock Holmes. He is the only individual who is able to solve certain crimes and is repeatedly asked by the London police force, Scotland Yard and even the British government to help unravel certain mysteries. Holmes is a typical individualist. He prefers being alone, and although he shared his ‘headquarters’ in Baker Street with Watson for a couple of years, he is usually not very considerate with his roommate. Sometimes he is up all night, or he “lie[s] upon the sofa in the sitting-room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night.” He is also very much on his own, he actually “loath[s] every form of society” and can stay for weeks on end in his lodgings in Baker Street.
Sherlock Holmes was not only an individual detective, he also thought he was very unique. In A Study in Scarlet Holmes tells Watson for the first time about his occupation: “Well, I have a trade of my own. I suppose I am the only one in the world. I’m a consulting detective.” In The Sign of Four he is even more sure that there is no other detective like him: “That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.” Holmes does not like being compared to others, because when Watson says: “You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin”, Holmes’ answer is: “[I]n my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow.” Watson tries again and says: “Have you read Gaboriau’s works? [...] Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?”, but Holmes answers angrily: “Lecoq was a miserable bungler”. According to Esme Miskimmin, who investigated the transition from the Victorian to the Golden Age of detective fiction – the time between both World Wars – Sherlock Holmes deliberately set himself apart from society in order to be a solitary observer. The symbolic fact that he lived ‘above’ the city in his apartment on Baker Street – his address is 221b Baker Street, which, because of the ‘b’, implies that his rooms were above streetlevel – makes him even more of an outsider and a segregated individual. He sat high up in his symbolic tower and was an outsider in London society.
The modern villain is the last element I will discuss analysing the modern elements of the city in the stories of Sherlock Holmes. According to Benjamin, in the modern detective story, “the focus of attention was [...] the aristocratic villain, the gentleman criminal who [...] seeks the challenge and excitement of crime for its own sake, not merely for pecuniary benefit.” Graeme Gilloch, author of the book Myth and Metropolis – Walter Benjamin and the City, points out that a good example of such an ‘aristocratic villain’ can be found in Professor Moriarty, Holmes’ arch-enemy. I would like to examine this character and other ‘gentleman criminals’ more closely.
Moriarty’s name is mentioned in seven of the Holmes narratives; six short stories: “The Final Problem”, “The Empty House”, “The Norwood Builder”, “The Missing Three-Quarter”, “His Last Bow”, “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client”, and the novel The Valley of Fear. Although he physically appears in only two of those stories, he is Holmes’ most famous opponent. This is probably related to the fact that he is the one who ‘killed’ Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, and with the fact that there are no other criminals who make a second or a third appearance in the novels. Moriarty is also considered to be the only villain who can match Holmes’ intellectual powers and intelligence. This may serve as yet another reason why he, like Holmes, appears immortal. However, Moriarty, unlike Holmes, did actually die that afternoon on the 3rd of May 1891. In the story “The Final Problem” Holmes describes Moriarty as a man with a forehead that “domes out in a white curve” . This large head was seen as a sign of intellect during Conan Doyle’s time. Sherlock Holmes himself has a very large forehead, just like his brother Mycroft, who is also considered very bright. Because of this intellect, Holmes considers Moriarty to be very dangerous. In The Valley of Fear he is introduced as the highest member of a criminal gang, which he rules with an iron grip. After his death, Holmes sighs “From the point of view of the criminal expert, [...] London has become a singularly uninteresting city since the death of the late lamented Professor Moriarty.” Here, Holmes admits that Moriarty was the only one who could really challenge his intellectual qualities.
The Professor is not a normal criminal, but much more dangerous than that, as Sherlock Holmes explains to Watson: “[I]n calling Moriarty a criminal you are uttering libel in the eyes of the law – and there lies the glory and the wonder of it! The greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every devilry, the controlling brain of the underworld, a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations – that’s the man!” Moriarty for sure is a aristocratic villain, for he is “a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty”. He is the master of the “higher criminal world of London”, the “Napoleon of crime”. It is certain that Moriarty seeks ‘the challenge and excitement of crime for its own sake’, as Benjamin claims the modern villain does, because in “The Final Problem” he starts a personal vendetta against Holmes. He does not get any ‘pecuniary benefit’ out of it, but simply wants revenge for the fact that Holmes has broken up his gang.
Besides Moriarty, there are some other aristocratic villains in the stories of Sherlock Holmes. There is “[t]he second most dangerous man in London”, Colonel Sebastian Moran, who went to Eton and Oxford and spent most of his time in the military. To Watson, it is “astonishing” that Moran’s career is that of an “honourable soldier”. He is of good descent, his father was once the British Minister to Persia. When Moriarty is killed by Holmes, Moran seeks revenge and tries to kill the detective.
Another ‘gentleman criminal’ can be found in the story “Charles Augustus Milverton”, where Milverton is described by Holmes as “[t]he worst man in London. [...] I’ve had to do with fifty murderers in my career, but the worst of them never gave me the repulsion which I have for this fellow.” Milverton’s favourite activity is to blackmail people with a secret from their past. He is “the king of all the blackmailers”. He enjoys his work, because “with a smiling face and a heart of marble, he will squeeze and squeeze until he has drained them dry.” The only problem is that he cannot be arrested, because his work is not illegal. Milverton is definitely a gentleman criminal, just like Professor Moriarty and Colonel Moran, but with the only difference that besides the fact that he gets excited from the blackmailing itself, he also enjoys the other benefit of the crime: the incoming money.
It may be clear that Sherlock Holmes has dealt with some upperclass criminals, people who enjoy being a criminal because of the excitement and challenge of crime. This can be compared to the motives Holmes himself has for being a detective: “I play the game for the game’s own sake”. Actually, he has the same urge the villains have, as Watson explains in the story “Black Peter”:
Holmes [...] lived for his art's sake, and [...] I have seldom known him claim any large reward for his inestimable services. So unworldly was he [...] that he frequently refused his help to the powerful and wealthy where the problem made no appeal to his sympathies, while he would devote weeks of most intense application to the affairs of some humble client whose case presented those strange and dramatic qualities which appealed to his imagination and challenged his ingenuity.
It is shown that Sherlock Holmes has the same mentality as the villains, as both look at their activities from the same perspective.
Chapter 6: Sherlock Holmes, and the streetscape of London
In this next chapter I will investigate the contrast between the civilized London on one hand and the dark and mysterious London on the other hand. As I have said before, I believe that London is capable of enabling and maybe even creating its own crime. In the real Victorian world the crime rate went up due to the fog and the darkness. In the novels and stories of Sherlock Holmes this is also the case. The fog, created by the city, plays an important part in most of the stories and is portrayed as a very negative aspect of the city. When Holmes and Watson have to leave the city in order to solve a crime on the countryside, Watson cries “with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street”. He seems very delighted that he is liberated from the fumes of the city.
Sherlock Holmes also gets affected by the fog. His feelings towards the world are connected with the density and amount of fog on the streets, as is described very well in The Sign of Four when he says: “Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material?” The atmosphere created by the fog is one of darkness and depression. Another example of such an atmosphere can be found in the short story “The Copper Beeches”, where Holmes and Watson sit around the fire in the old room at Baker Street: “A thick fog rolled down between the lines of dun-coloured houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark, shapeless blurs, through the heavy yellow wreaths.” Here, the city of London is seen as a very depressing site because of these fogs.
There is however no story where the fog plays such an significant role as “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”, set in London. This story is set in November 1885 which was, according to Peter Ackroyd, the worst decade and especially the worst month for fogs. Throughout the whole story the fog is so thick that “one could not see three yards”. Watson doubts that it was ever possible to “see the loom of the opposite houses” from their windows in Baker Street during those days. In fact, the fog was so thick that taking a cab was useless, for they could not drive any faster than a pedestrian could walk and it could be dangerous to drive.
These brutal conditions were the perfect cover for someone with criminal intents. At the beginning of the story, Sherlock Holmes reflects on the existence of the fog, and makes a remark which underlines my theory that the city fog is capable of enabling crime:
‘The London criminal is certainly a dull fellow,’ said he in the querulous voice of the sportsman whose game has failed him. ‘Look out of this window, Watson. See how the figures loom up, are dimly seen, and then blend once more into the cloud-bank. The thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim.’
Without a doubt crime can occur in the city on a large scale because of the fog. Nobody is able to see the criminal, except the victim himself. This makes London a very dangerous place to be in times of fog. He even worries for his own life:
‘Suppose that I were Brooks or Woodhouse, or any of the fifty men who have good reason for taking my life, how long could I survive against my own pursuit? A summons, a bogus appointment, and all would be over. It is well they don't have days of fog in the Latin countries – the countries of assassination.’
In the story of the Bruce-Partington Plans the fog, and with that, the city allows the crime to happen. In this story, a man is found dead on the tracks of the Underground. The man, Arthur Cadogan West, had mysteriously left his girlfriend out on the streets the night before he died. It turns out that Cadogan West had stolen some very important papers of the government, which he wanted to sell. The reason that he was able to steal those papers without getting caught, was, of course, the fog. There was a watchman present in the building, but “[h]e saw nothing that evening. Of course, the fog was very thick.”
The body of the murdered man was found on the Underground tracks but there were no witnesses to the crime, because “[t]here was a thick fog, and nothing could be seen.” One passenger who passed the scene of the crime thought he heard a heavy thud but, once again, “[t]here was dense fog, however, and nothing could be seen.” Here, the fog is a perfect cover for the crime, because no one could see what happened that night.
At the end of the story it turns out that Arthur Cadogan West has not, as they first presume, been murdered on the Underground, but that his dead body was placed on top of the train and later fell off the carriage once it was under the ground. As described earlier, the first Underground tracks were steam-powered and therefore needed ventilation holes. The murderer of Cadogan West had the misfortune to live next to one of those ventilation shafts, but in this case he could use it for his own benefit. He could throw the body on to a passing train in order to cover up the murder that took place in his own house. This was very easy, as he explains to Sherlock Holmes at the end of the story, because “[the fog] was so thick that nothing could be seen, and we had no difficulty in lowering West’s body on to the train.” Once again, it is because of the fog that crime can take place. If it had not been so foggy that night, someone might have seen the murderer dispose the body and he could have been caught red-handed. Of course, Sherlock Holmes is able to catch the criminal despite of the fog but without him, the crime would still be unsolved and covered up by the city.
However, not only does the real criminal get help from the fog in times of need, it is also Sherlock Holmes who gets cover from the mist. In the same story, Holmes plans to break into the house of the murderer in order to receive some evidence of the crime. Although this is, of course, illegal, the detective believes this is allowed to get justice done. On his way to Caulfield Gardens, the criminal’s -fictional- address, Holmes and Watson get cover from the fog on their journey: “The fog still hung about and screened us with its friendly shade.” It is shown here that the fog protects the criminal, or in this case, the detective who wants to commit a crime in the eyes of the law. The fog always seems to sympathise with the villains of the story and whenever a criminal act has to take place, the fog appears as cover.
Another reason why London can be seen as the enabler of crime, can be found in the topographical situation of the city. As mentioned before, during the Victorian Era London became a labyrinth due to the expansion of the houses. The city grew larger and larger without any type of planning and people got lost in their own city. According to Peter Ackroyd, the city “[could] not be conceived in its entirety but [could] be experienced only as a wilderness of alleys and passages, courts and thoroughfares, in which even the most experienced citizen [might have lost] the way”. Because of this city labyrinth, villains and criminals could easily hide and get away from the police or other pursuers. In the stories of Sherlock Holmes this is also the case. More than once Watson describes how they wander through the city, “through an endless labyrinth of gas-lit streets”. It seems as if the city, with all its streets and alleys formed as one big labyrinth, sometimes deliberately works against them when Holmes and Watson are chasing someone.
In the short story “The Blue Carbuncle”, a man followed by the police is able to get away because he vanishes “amid the labyrinth of small streets which lie at the back of Tottenham Court Road”. Because of the impenetrability of the city, the police cannot catch him. When searching for the villains in The Sign of Four, Holmes finds out that the criminals have taken a boat in order to get away. Watson suggests that they also get a vessel and try to find them on the river Thames, but Holmes answers: “My dear fellow, it would be a colossal task. [The boat] may have touched at any wharf on either side of the stream between here and Greenwich. Below the bridge there is a perfect labyrinth of landing-places for miles. It would take you days and days to exhaust them, if you set about it alone.” Here, the criminals get ahead of the detective, because of the city’s maze of landing-places in the river. The topographical situation of the city makes it difficult for the detective to catch the villains.
In most of the stories, the city creates confusion because people get lost in the maze of the metropolis. But even though the most experienced citizens will lose their way in the wilderness of alleys and thoroughfares, Sherlock Holmes never gets confused by the labyrinth: he knows the city by heart. He has visited all areas of London, not only the rich and wealthy, but also “the lowest portions of the city”. Holmes explains to Watson in “The Red-headed League”: “It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London.” And his knowledge is phenomenal: “There is Mortimer's, the tobacconist, the little newspaper shop, the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank, the Vegetarian Restaurant and McFarlane's carriage-building depot.”
Holmes also knows every street in the city. When Watson and the detective get driven in a cab through foggy London in The Sign of Four, Watson tries to keep up and remember where they are, but he fails: “At first I had some idea as to the direction in which we were driving; but soon, what with our pace, the fog, and my own limited knowledge of London, I lost my bearings, and knew nothing, save that we seemed to be going a very long way.” Watson gets tricked by the city, but Holmes is not so easily fooled:
[He] was never at fault, however, and he muttered the names as the cab rattled through squares and in and out by tortuous by-streets. ‘Rochester Row,’ said he. ‘Now Vincent Square. Now we come out on the Vauxhall Bridge Road. We are making for the Surrey side, apparently. Yes. I thought so. Now we are on the bridge. You can catch glimpses of the river.’
A moment later, they are dashing through “a labyrinth of streets upon the other side” of the river, a less fashionable region of London. But once again, Holmes knows his city: “‘Wandsworth Road,’ [says Holmes]. ‘Priory Road. Larkhall Lane. Stockwell Place. Robert Street. Coldharbour
Lane’”. Here, the novel shows that the city does not have any secrets for Sherlock Holmes. Watson may get fooled, but the great detective does not. He dominates the city, just like he dominates the crime.
The Sign of Four is not the only novel where the streets are mentioned by name. The names of the different streets, railway stations and other notable places Holmes and Watson pass, are mentioned specifically in all the novels and short stories, without exception. There seems to be much emphasis on the specific locations Holmes and Watson visit. I believe that this shows Holmes’ knowledge of the city and with that the power he possesses to master it. The city does not have any secrets for the detective and because of that, he is able to unravel all the mysteries the city produces.
In the stories of Sherlock Holmes, the city of London is a character and has a very active role. The city interferes constantly with the story and places itself dominantly in the novels. It wants to be in constant spotlight and it is clear that London has a big influence on the stories. It might be said that the stories are urban detective stories and Sherlock Holmes is an urban detective. His playground is the city that he knows by heart. He recognizes the danger of such a large metropolis but approaches it with respect. As Ackroyd states: “[W]e must regard it as a human shape with its own laws of life”, and that is exactly what Holmes does. Ackroyd “truly believe[s] that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory, the place [...] speaks”, and Sherlock Holmes is one of those people. He is able to master the city, and despite of the loneliness that surrounds him, he becomes the only person in the city the people can trust and rely on. More than once his clients come to him because they know they can depend on him, and no one else. Sherlock Holmes becomes the connection between the civilized London on the one hand and the dark, criminal and mysterious London on the other hand.
The detective himself lives in the comfortable area of Baker Street, and although his address, number 221b is fictitious, the street is not. The area around Baker Street is a very respectable and civilized one. However, Holmes is not only familiar with the respectable areas of London, he also knows the lowest portions of the city, as stated above. One of the stories where this is best shown is the short story “The Man with the Twisted Lip”. In this story Watson searches for an old friend, who presumably resides in “an opium den in the farthest east of the City”, in the Bar of Gold in Upper Swandam Lane, which is a “vile alley”. In this bar, Watson not only finds his old acquaintance but he also comes across Sherlock Holmes, who is there in search of one of his enemies. He is disguised as an old man, “very thin, very wrinkled, bent with age, an opium pipe dangling down from between his knees”, which shows that he knows how to survive in this London underworld. Holmes describes the opium den as “the vilest murder-trap on the whole riverside” and it is clear that he knows the darkest places of the city.
Holmes’ own house in Baker Street is portrayed as a “safe domestic enclosure” where both Holmes and Watson are protected from the dangerous criminal world outside. From this safe headquarter Holmes investigates the crime in London, of course with the knowledge that he is always able to return to Baker Street. It functions as a safe haven in the stories to which Holmes and Watson are always able to retreat. It forms a neutral place between the two worlds Holmes lives in, the civilized and the criminal London. Even the colours of Baker Street are neutral, as Watson describes in “A Case of Identity”: a “dull neutral-tinted London street”.
Almost all the adventures start and end at the lodgings in Baker Street, where all is safe and quiet. They usually return to their home during the stories once or twice, and it is mostly there that Sherlock Holmes comes up with the solution of the case. It is there where Holmes connects the two cities of London: the civilized world of Baker Street and the criminal underworld.
As stated before, Sherlock Holmes is always considered a Victorian detective because he lived in a Victorian world. According to Irving S. Saposnik, “most of the [Victorian] story’s action is physically internalized behind four walls”. He admits that most of the late Victorian literature is set in cities, but claims that “it grows increasingly internal” and that “the action of those novels takes place within interior settings.” This does not seem to apply to the Sherlock Holmes stories, because there most of the action takes place outside, in the city. Although Baker Street is used as a safe retreat, the actual adventure is situated outside of the house. Thus, the stories of Sherlock Holmes are no typical Victorian literature. According to Graeme Gilloch, in his work “Benjamin focuses on the shifting relationship between interior and exterior spaces, public and private life.” This is the case in the Holmes stories as well, where there is also a shifting relationship between the interior and exterior. The interior, the comfortable house at Baker Street, is the safe place where Holmes has his own private life. In the exterior spaces, the streets in the city of London, Holmes is at his best. There, he can live his public life, he can be a detective and he does not need cocaine to cope with the dullness of the interior life. The arousal of chasing villains and the excitement of disguising himself give him energy. Sherlock Holmes comes to life with the help of the city.
The first stories of Sherlock Holmes were written at a time when the crime in London was at its peak. Jack the Ripper dominated the city since his first murder in 1888 and the people were scared. In this age of crime they needed a man who could rescue them and solve it all. In Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography it is suggested by Nick Rennison that Holmes actually helped the police with the cases of Jack the Ripper. Of course, this can never have happened, but the idea of a detective brave enough to face even the most horrible murderer of the London history might have given people some comfort.
Sherlock Holmes is familiar with the criminal underworld and gives the inhabitants of London what they need: a master of their city and a creator of order in the chaos. Although London itself enables part of the crime, the city paradoxically gives Sherlock Holmes the energy he needs to conquer the crime and to control the city. While other people understand that “it is wise to bow down before the immensity” of the city, Holmes attempts to control the vicious wilderness and he manages to bring some balance in the chaos.
In his book Myth & Metropolis Graeme Gilloch explains Benjamin’s vision on the modern city: “For Benjamin, the great cities of modern European culture were both beautiful and bestial, a source of exhilaration and hope on the one hand and of revulsion and despair on the other. The city for Benjamin was magnetic: it attracted and repelled him in the same moment.” For Sherlock Holmes, this is also the case. The city of London gives him the source of exhilaration he needs in order to survive, but at the same time he knew it was a terrible place to live in. To him, London was “the city [...] where the wonderful and the terrible existed simultaneously”. So actually, Holmes and Benjamin share their views on the modern city. They both are attracted by the excitement and the adventure, but the city carries also a negative atmosphere along with it. Holmes admits that he often yearned for a soothing life in nature, in contrast with a city life, during “the long years spent amid the gloom of London”. After the case of “The Adventure of the Creeping Man”, Holmes decides that he is going to live the life in nature he dreamed about and moves to Sussex to become a beekeeper. The exact date of his departure is not known, however his last city adventure takes place in September of 1903 and his first (and only) one in Sussex in 1907. In this last story, it becomes clear that Holmes has lived there for a while, and it can therefore be concluded that he moved to his farm somewhere between 1903 and 1906.
I have tried to explain above that Sherlock Holmes is a Victorian detective with modern features, who is able to master the city. The detective has an active role in the stories as he really changes the face of the city. He is able to lift the veils of the fog and with that he pierces through the impenetrability of the city. He masters the fog, he masters the labyrinth, he masters the crime: he masters the city.
However, there comes a time when even the urban detective abandons his career to live on a farm on the countryside. So although he was able to master the city, it seems as if the city has overpowered Sherlock Holmes in the end. It is very interesting to look at the time frame here. Holmes leaves London around the year 1903, which is at the beginning of the Modern period. This last city adventure, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man”, was published in Conan Doyle’s last collection of stories, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes in 1927. It seems as if the city’s modernisation had forced Conan Doyle to drive Sherlock Holmes out of London. The urban detective, who mastered the city during the Victorian period, is forced to leave his hometown. I believe that the city’s modernisation during the Edwardian period can be blamed for this. In a world without horse-drawn transportation, fog and gas lights, a world with electricity and motor cars, Sherlock Holmes was not able to live. As I have stated before, Arthur Conan Doyle had a very negative attitude towards the modern sides of London, which he called the “great cesspit”. This mentality could have contributed to the fact that he created a detective who could not handle the modern life. Conan Doyle moved Sherlock Holmes to the countryside, away from the city.
David Stuart Davies, who wrote the introduction to the collection The Best of Sherlock Holmes, says: “The world of the twentieth century was one from which so many of the accoutrements of the Holmes adventures [...] were disappearing”. That is certainly true, and I claim that the loss of these accoutrements was the detective’s motive to leave the city, and with that, the work he loved. Sherlock Holmes could not be killed off by Conan Doyle, but in the end he is defeated by the modern city.
Conclusion
In this thesis I have answered my central research question: how is the city of London represented and what role does this play in the stories of Sherlock Holmes? Holmes is generally seen as a typically Victorian detective but I claim that his world is one that is in transition. Therefore, I have investigated the way the city of London is portrayed in the novels and short stories of Sherlock Holmes. I have examined the shift from the Victorian to the modern city, and I have compared the modern elements I found in these stories with urban modernisation as described by Walter Benjamin.
In his work, Benjamin focused on the modern individual and his or her experiences in the modern city. One of the features of the modern city mentioned by him is the crowd. This crowd can cause fear and shock, but also satisfaction because of the anonymity provided by people who were the same as you. Sherlock Holmes benefits from the crowd in many ways. He is challenged by the fact the villain can disappear in a large group of people, but he still manages to find the criminal.
Another modern element described by Benjamin is the fact that in the modern detective story the hunting-grounds are highly glorified. In the stories of Sherlock Holmes, this is also the case. The city of London, Holmes’ hunting-ground, forms the centre of attention in the stories.
The last modern element Benjamin mentioned in his work is the modern villain. This aristocratic criminal can also be found in the Sherlock Holmes stories, in the characters of Sebastian Moran, Charles Augustus Milverton and especially in Professor Moriarty.
In order to answer my sub research question, I have examined the contrast between the two worlds in the city of London as portrayed in the stories of Sherlock Holmes. I have discovered that the city is indeed capable of enabling its own crime, with help from the fog, the crowds and the topographical situation of the city. However, the famous detective manages to master the crime because he is able to master the city. He is gifted with the talent to work around this fog, these crowds and the labyrinths of the city.
Sherlock Holmes is an urban detective and the city of London does not have any secrets for him. He knows all the street names and neighbourhoods, both rich and poor. This makes him the connection between the civilized London on the one hand, and the criminal and dark London on the other hand. Baker Street functions as a safe haven and as a neutral place between these two London worlds.
However, although Sherlock Holmes is able to master the fog, the labyrinth, the crime, and with that, the city, Conan Doyle lets him retreat to the countryside around the year 1903. I believe this is caused by the London’s transformation to a modern city where Holmes was not able to live anymore. So although the stories of Sherlock Holmes have many modern features, as I have discussed above, in the end, the world’s most famous detective gets defeated by the modern city.
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