“Cultural biography” is not the sort of classification that usually inspires much confidence. It’s generally a sure sign that the reader will be spending most of his time with everyone in contemporary society but the subject: more pages on loom weavers than on Elizabeth Gaskell, more on the Irish Famine than on Emily Brontë. In the case of Conan Doyle, that description is for once welcome, indicative of a thematic approach to Doyle’s life that takes as its ordering frame several domains of contemporary culture: sport, medicine, science, law and order, army and empire, and spirit, a system of taxonomy not only unusually interesting but also uniquely suited to the examination of a body of work like Doyle’s.
Hugh Kenner, writing in elaboration of a passage from A Study in Scarlet, noted the sheer informativeness of Doyle’s prose as a primer for urban life in the London of 1887, containing not only “all the practical guidance you would need for taking a horse-drawn cab” but also, should curiosity move to the question of driving a cab, “how you might go about that, [i.e.] how would you be paid, what might be the singular difficulties of the calling?” Kenner continues, “Fiction taught many provincials how to cope with the city.”
The salience of institutional knowledge for an author of considerable skill but little interest in Jamesian depths of consciousness—and whose work (as Douglas Kerr puts it) is “marked above all by strong narrative, punctuated by striking incident”—is considerable.
Doyle’s fine-grained detail is familiar to any reader; the larger institutional backdrop of his work is not. Here, Kerr is of considerable help in delineating the ways in which institutional thought aligned and diverged in Doyle’s creations.
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) struggled for much of his life to get out from under the shadow of Sherlock Holmes, an initiative that no reader has ever remotely supported, partially due to the tendency of readers to discover Holmes at an age when anything—especially something deerstalker-clad—casts a very large shadow. The most curious thing that any dedicated reader will discover about Holmes is not that this urban aesthete differs radically from his outdoor-loving, sportsman-patriot author (authors make characters up!) but how, repeatedly, Doyle’s work aligns intriguingly askew of the stock image of a blustery pamphleteer, reflecting disputes and distinctions in a number of fields and modes of knowledge only gradually emerging into their current form.
In some modes, Doyle’s work was quite straightforward. His English historical novels, such as The White Company (1891), are rigorously researched and lively adventures, displaying a fervent patriotism not surprising in an author whose sense of duty extended beyond the page to volunteering at a field hospital in the Boer War. Doyle displayed a similar historical verve, in more comic spirit, with his Napoleonic roustabout Brigadier Gerard, a proto-Flashman/Hornblower with a drinking problem. Sport is also rendered as a manly source of national strength, never more so than in his hearty boxing novel, Rodney Stone (1896).
The matrix of domains becomes more interesting, and particularly informative, when it comes to Doyle’s occupation by training: medicine. Holmes, the “only unofficial consulting detective,” enjoyed a prestige conceptually borrowed from the world of medicine and the Medical Act of 1858, which established a distinction between the general practitioner and the consultant. The general practitioner handled the humdrum affairs of medicine, while “the consultant, like the vampire, could do nothing unless invited across the threshold of someone’s affairs.”
Kerr’s mordant metaphor is not accidental. The cultural imaging of the consultant was bloodless and alienated, more interested in intellectual challenges than in human happiness. Kerr notes that “ ‘The Crooked Man’ is one of the most heartbreaking of the Sherlock Holmes stories,” but that pursuing the case kindles in the consulting detective “a state of suppressed excitement” and a “half-sporting, half-intellectual pleasure which communicates itself to Doctor Watson, though they are on their way to interrogate a sick and friendless cripple who has been destitute for 30 years.”
This remove was never so great as to spoil the reader’s sympathy. Other Doyle works offered a much more specific critique of these emerging possibilities of professional hubris. Take the non-Holmes story “The Case of Lady Sannox,” wherein the protagonist, a “surgical Ubermensch,” begins an adulterous affair and is then tricked by the wronged husband, in a bizarre and revolting plot, into performing a disfiguring surgical operation without anaesthetic on the woman he loves, taking his knife to her mouth. The shock destroys him, leaving “his great brain about as valuable as a cup full of porridge.”
To return to Holmes, another markedly salient parallel to not just the practical split in the profession of medicine but also the divergence in modes of knowledge that it accompanied is contained in Watson’s immortal “his ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge” passage in A Study in Scarlet.
The comment isn’t proof that Holmes is unevenly read; it’s indicative of a fundamentally dissimilar modality of knowledge. Dr. Watson reckons Holmes a virtual primitive in this particular, but Holmes’s mindset is one of striking modernity, rejecting common knowledge as useless: “In a modern knowledge economy increasingly favoring the specialist holding expertise as a commodity, general knowledge—such as what goes round what—is the epistemological small change which can be left to people like Watson.”
And yet, turning to another chapter on science: Is Holmes, the radical utilitarian, much given to a scientific method that anyone today would recognize? Not quite. Holmes isn’t engaged in deduction, nor in induction, but in the slipperier art of abduction, “the conjecture of possible generalities that could account for given particulars”—or, as Kerr puts it, “inspired guesswork, by which a hypothesis is made intuitively on the basis of observations insufficient to prove it.” It’s proven a cause for some criticism of Holmes’s method: “Holmes’s trained faculty of building a narrative about the unknown on the basis of creative and intuitive—in a word, imaginative—reading of limited data has been used as an instrument to expose and deconstruct an internal contradiction in the scientific positivism of the Holmes stories.” But as Kerr demonstrates, such processes weren’t merely cultural imaginings by scientists but the kinds of leaps common to the work of Darwin, Freud, and countless others in this fertile age of scientific imagining.
The dilettante-specialist may have been a rarity in the realm of detection, but it wasn’t in other areas. Professor Challenger, Doyle’s doughty scientist, has no official associations; he was a “non-academic gentleman scientist in the traditional mode of Darwin and Wallace.” Challenger runs into rather more problems than does Holmes when it comes to verifiability, with his claims of a Lost World disputed as nonsense. But it’s in the realm of new rising scientific associations—the Zoological Society, in this case—that Challenger is able to prove his case.
This tension between independent-minded actors and officialdom runs through much of Doyle’s work. It’s something other than the broader English cult of the amateur at work, however: These protagonists often hold aims that are parallel to but distinct from those of official bodies.
This is dramatically evident in Kerr’s consideration of the Holmes canon in its relation to law and order. Holmes’s sense of justice, in a deviation from previous crime fiction, is serially askew from any official conception of the term. Holmes is openly contemptuous of the king in “A Scandal in Bohemia”—a figure who, after all, is seeking to protect his throne through skullduggery. The second Holmes story, “A Case of Identity,” is, as Kerr notes, “a detective story without either crime or punishment.” Holmes’s cases deliver solutions far more often than they deliver justice, and Holmes’s sense of that quality is repeatedly attuned more to the spirit than to the letter of the law. Holmes isn’t simply trumping the police at their own work; he’s playing a similar but different game, in which the actual workings of official justice seem an afterthought.
The nuance of Doyle’s own game is unfailingly interesting, whether it appears in familiar quarters or in those unknown. Who knew of Doyle’s furious tract against King Leopold’s exploitation, “The Crime of the Congo,” in which Leopold is likened to Tartuffe and Jack the Ripper? Or of the anthropomorphizing science fiction of “When the World Screamed,” a later Professor Challenger story in which the Earth, in response to a miles-long drilling project, literally screams out?
To hear of such things is a surprise. To see them so keenly contextualized is the great merit of Kerr’s volume.
Anthony Paletta is a writer in Brooklyn.
