“I see it, I deduce it.”

Subject of detection

Subject to inspection

The case ofSherlock Holmes

April 30, 2014 SU

Serhat Uyurkulak

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)

Studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh between 1876-81

Modeled Sherlock Holmes on his university teacher Joseph Bell:

"It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes. Round the center of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man.”

Was a skilled medical diagnostician

1887, A Study in Scarlet

1890, The Sign of the Four

1892, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (a collection of stories published in the Strand Magazine, including “A Scandal in Bohemia”)

1894, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (short stories, including “The Adventure of the Final Problem”)

1902, The Hound of the Baskervilles

1905, The Return of Sherlock Holmes (short stories)

1917, His Last Bow (short stories)

1927, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (short stories)

The Sherlock Holmes “Canon”

Detective Fiction as an “Urban” Literary Genre

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49)(Amateur Detective Auguste Dupin. Method: ratiocination)

1841, “The murders in the Rue Morgue” (Paris, murders of two women)1843, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (Paris, a dead body found in the River Seine)1845, “The Purloined Letter” (Paris, the Police ask Dupin to help find a letter stolen from a lady by a minister)

“You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist out of stories.” (Dr. Watson, “A Study in Scarlet”)

"So I got the idea for Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock is utterly inhuman, no heart, but with a beautifully logical intellect. I know nothing about detective work, but theoretically it has always had a great charm for me. The best detective in fiction is E. A. Poe's Mons. D.” (Doyle, Boston Herald 1893?)

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. [R]evolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”

From The Communist Manifesto (1848)

(“whole populations conjured out of the ground”)

Demographic movements from the countryside + demographic diversification inside the metropolis

Experience of Modernity and Urbanization

“A town, such as London, where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the inference that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing. This colossal centralization, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point, has multiplied the power of this two and a half millions a hundredfold; has raised London to the commercial capital of the world, created the giant docks and assembled the thousand vessels that continually cover the Thames. I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames offers during the ascent from the sea to London Bridge.”

From Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)

Friedrich Engels on London

“After roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, making headway with difficulty through the human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles, after visiting the slums of the metropolis, one realizes (…) [t]he very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? (…) [T]hey crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honor another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. (…) The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extremes.”

Social contract no longer meaningful or able to hold people together?

F. Engels continued: Urban Isolation and Alienation

Economy and Metropolitan Attitude to Life and Others

“The metropolis has always been the seat of money economy because of the many-sidedness and concentration of commercial activity have given the medium of exchange an importance which it could not have acquired in the commercial aspects of rural life. (…) Money is concerned only with what is common to all, i.e. with the exchange value which reduces all quality and individuality to a purely quantitative level. All emotional relationships between persons rest on their individuality, whereas intellectual relationshipsdeal with persons as with numbers, that is, as with elements, which, in themselves, are indifferent, but which are of interest only insofar as they offer something objectively perceivable.”

From “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, Georg Simmel (1903)

Reduction of all quality and individuality to numbers (quantifiable and objectifiable aspects) One thing or person can substitute/replace another idefinitely, infinitely: ANONIMITY of the metropolitan type, of the objects

Policing the City, Urban Masses, “Classes and Ranks”

Eugene François Vidocq (1775-1857)Ex-criminal turned into a law enforcer – Authorized by Napoleon Bonaparteto form the National Security Force (Paris Police Department) in 1813Founder of modern criminology – First private (consulting) detective

Vidocq is invited to Britain in 1829to help create the Metropolitan Police Service in LondonPolice reports and stories of urban crime investigated by Scotland Yard become very popular and highly demanded Crime becomes part of popular culture and imagination Adding “safe” terror and excitement to the life of reading public AND restoring belief in the necessity of more “law and order”

"My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession –or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world." From The Sign of Four

“Dull Routine” of Modernity vs. Crime as Riddle or Mystery

That’s also why Poe and Doyle invented the genre, and why we read or watch crime stories, detective fiction, mystery novels, horror films, etc.

Sherlock Holmes’ London: The New “Jungle”

The WestEnd:Baker Street221Bandupperclasses

The East End:“criminal”classes,working class,the un-employed

South of the Thames

Illustration by Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine

“My dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, "life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. (…) If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”

From “A Case of Identity”

“Peeping Tom” of London?

On Holmes’ London:

Atlas of the European Novel, Franco Moretti (p.136)

“Unlike Doyle’s first two novels, which take place mostly southof the Thames (…)The short stories publishedin the Strand Magazinefrom 1891 onwards focus almost entirelyon the West End and the City. As the early novels were not very successful, whereasthe short stories were immediately extremelypopular, Holmes may wellowe his success to this shift in location, with which Doyle ‘guessed’ the right space for detective fiction.”

South of the Thames and the East End: Spaces of “Violent” Crimes

Whitechapel murders: Jack the Ripper’s murder sites, late 1888, London

Reporting (representing)violent crimesfrom the peripheries,circumferenceof the City

Jack the Ripper:The Victorianpublic sensation

Whitechapel Murders: “Annie Chapman, Before and After…”

“East End Horrors: When Will They Cease?” “A Terrible Case of Throat Cutting”

Police Force after Jack the Ripper: “When will the murderer be…?”

“Police Constable Watkins signalling for assistance”

Public/Police Detective Fighting Crime (!?)

DetectiveInspectorFrederickAbberline

(InspectorLestradein the Holmes“Canon”)

Incapable “public eye”

Failure to “see anddeduce it”

Jack the Rippers: Where Do “They” Come From?

“There floats a phantom on the slum's foul air,

Shaping, to eyes which have the gift of seeing,

Into the Spectre of that loathly lair.

Face it—for vain is fleeing!Red-handed, ruthless, furtive,

unerect,'Tis murderous Crime—

the Nemesis of Neglect!”

Social neglect, devastation, poverty, class inequalities as sources of crimeSomething that detective fiction isn’t interested to depict

John Tenniel, Punch Magazine,”The Nemesis of Neglect” (Sep. 29, 1888)