Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T20:45:26.307Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE SAVAGE GENIUS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2009

Anna Neill
Anna Neill*
Affiliation:
University of Kansas
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

When Dr. Watson first meets Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, the former is an itinerant medical veteran of the Second Afghan War who, sick and rootless, without “kith or kin” in England, is naturally drawn to London, “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the empire are irreversibly drained” (6; ch. 1). Lacking emotional ties, physical strength, and purpose of any real kind, Watson seems to demonstrate the “feverish restlessness” and “blunted discouragement” that Max Nordau described as degenerative symptoms of the age. Watson's identification with urban refuse of the empire, together with his metaphor of the metropolitan landscape as cultural sewer, suggests Nordau's degenerative “feeling[s] of immanent perdition and extinction” (2) and emphasizes both the pervasiveness of modern social decay and the destructive potential of insalubrious influences that lurk within the civilized world as much as they do on its remote peripheries.

Type
Work in Progress
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , September 2009 , pp. 611 - 626
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Brantlinger, Patrick. “What is Sensational about the Sensational Novel.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37.1 (June 1982): 1–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carpenter, William Benjamin. Principles of Mental Physiology. New York: Appleton, 1881.Google Scholar
Chamberlin, J. Edward. “Images of Degeneration: Turnings and Transformations.” Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress. Ed. Chamberlin, J. Edward and Gilman, Sander L.. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. 263–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clausson, Nils. “Degeneration, Fin-de-Siècle Gothic, and the Science of Detection:Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles and the Emergence of the Modern Detective Story.” Journal of Narrative Theory 35.1 (Winter 2005): 60–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man. London: Penguin, 2004.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. New York: Signet, 2003.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. The Voyage of the Beagle. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1959.Google Scholar
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Professor Challenger Stories. London: John Murray, 1976.Google Scholar
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The History of Spiritualism. 2 vols. New York: Arno, 1975.Google Scholar
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Hound of the Baskervilles. New York: The Modern Library, 2002.Google Scholar
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Lost World and Thrilling Tales. Ed. Gooden, Philip. London: Penguin, 2001.Google Scholar
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The New Revelation. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918.Google Scholar
Doyle, Arthur Conan. Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays. Ed. Hodgson, John A.. Boston: St. Martin's, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. Ed. Edwards, Owen Dudley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Ellis, Havelock. The Criminal. London: Walter Scott, 1913.Google Scholar
Garson, J. G. “Remarks on Skulls Dredged form the Thames in the Neighbourhood of Kew.” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 20 (1891): 20–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horn, David G.The Criminal Body: Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance. New York: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Lombroso, Cesare. The Man of Genius. Ed. Ellis, Havelock. New York: Walter Scott, 1901.Google Scholar
Lombroso, Cesare. “Nordau's ‘Degeneration’: Its Value and its Errors.” The Century Magazine 50 (May 1895-Oct. 1895): 936–40.Google Scholar
Lombroso-Ferrero, Gina. Criminal Man According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso. New York: Putnam, 1911.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maudsley, Henry. “Heredity in Health and Disease.” Fortnightly Review 39 (Jan-June 1886): 648–59.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Kathryn. “Sherlock Holmes and Clinical Reasoning.” Teaching Literature and Medicine. Ed. Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker and McEntyre, Marilyn Chandler. New York: The Modern Language Association, 2000. 299–305.Google Scholar
Myers, F. W. H.Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1903.Google Scholar
Myers, F. W. H.. “The Subliminal Self.” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 11 (1895): 334–593.Google Scholar
Nordau, Max. Degeneration. New York: Howard Ferting, 1968.Google Scholar
Oppenheim, Janet. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierce, Arthur and Podmore, Frank. “Subliminal Self or Unconscious Cerebration.” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 11 (1895): 317–32.Google Scholar
Myers, F. W. H.. Appartitions and Thought-Transference: An Examination of the Evidence for Telepathy. London: W. Scott, 1894.Google Scholar
Myers, F. W. H.. The Naturalization of the Supernatural. New York: Knickerbocker, 1908.Google Scholar
Schmitt, Canon. “Darwin's Savage Mnemonics.” Representations 88 (Fall 2004): 55–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Ronald R.Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Wallace, Alfred Russel. Miracles and Modern Spiritualism. London: George Redway, 1896.Google Scholar