Research-reading Sherlock Holmes

The Curious Case of the Author and the Detective

Hi, I’m Alicia Rasley, a new Book View Café member. I write Regency romances, and I do a lot of historical research, with a special interest in 19^th Century Britain.  It’s so easy to do research now, right? Just today I googled, “When was the fountain pen invented? What was a Mayfair church built before 1814, which has its own graveyard?” 

That kind of research is quick and efficient. But googling can lead to desiccated information, dry and merely functional facts. I don’t get the feel and the texture and the emotion and the culture of that time and place. I don’t learn anything about how people felt when they buried their dead in that Mayfair graveyard, or how exciting that fountain pen was for a young Oxford student, after years of using a quill and ink pot.  

In order to get the texture of the time, I find it’s much better to turn to the fiction that was written then. I don’t mean historical fiction written by authors like us. I mean the contemporary fiction written by people who were living there in that place and that time. So to learn more about the world of Regency England, we should read Jane Austen. And for early Victorian London life, especially among the non- wealthy, there is no source better than Dickens. Right now I’m immersing myself in late Victorian world of Sherlock Holmes, reading The Collected Adventures of Sherlock Holmes while simultaneously listening to the brilliant narration of Stephen Fry in the audiobook.

In this blog series, I’m noting down what I’m learning about the London of Sherlock Holmes. Of course, I don’t go to fiction for absolute historical accuracy. (You won’t be surprised to learn that there were probably plenty of murderers in Victorian London, but that very few were as clever as Holmes’s adversary Professor Moriarty.) But from fiction we can get a much more accurate portrayal of everyday life there and then, like how people moved around London and how they communicated with each other.  Dr. Watson is a faithful reporter not just of the mysteries and clues Holmes finds, but the minutiae of life, how the two of them moved through their world and communicated with each other and their acquaintances. The Holmes adventures give an excellent example of worldbuilding by close observation of the actual world.

As I read about the tumultuous Victorian era, I was struck by the parallels between late 19th century and late 20th century. Thise are both times of immense technological transformation. I have to say that the technology changes of the 19th century were even greater than we are experiencing today. The late 20^th century/early 21^st Century technological transformation has been mostly in matter of communication and computing—computers, the internet, social media, mobile phones. The 19^th Century also experienced revolutions in communications—the telegraph, telephone, and recording—but almost more important were the extraordinary changes in transportation.

In our own day, we’ve had evolution, not revolution, in transportation. Back when I was growing up, we thought by this time we’d have flying cars and we’d be settling colonies on the moon.  But we still drive in steel cars with rubber tires on asphalt roads, and we haven’t been back to the moon in almost 50 years.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in a first-class railroad car (Artist Sidney Paget).

In contrast, Victorians like Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson went from needing 4 horses to travel 15 miles an hour in 1840, to getting on an iron train and going 50 miles an hour in 1880.  And as for travel within “the Great Smoke,” as London was called, they no longer had to risk the cold and rain and mud of carriage travel. They could walk a couple blocks and descend into the enclosed subway system, taking the “Underground” along the Metropolitan line right from Baker Street to Oxford Circus, Trafalgar Square, and Waterloo Bridge.

So in this blog series, I’m going to share with you more of what I have learned of Sherlock’s world through Watson’s precise chronicles of his cases. Next month, I’ll talk about the transportation transformation, and the month after, how Holmes made great use of the revolution in communication. After that, I’ll explore what Watson’s narratives tell us about how Victorian Londoners learned, interacted, and conversed as they went about their daily lives, and, of course, committed and solved crimes.

And if you are interested to read along, the entire Holmes canon is here: https://sherlock-holm.es/

I’d also recommend the Stephen Fry audiobook reading of The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The great actor Stephen Fry offers spot-on character voices and his own wry commentary. He confesses that his life was transformed, both positively and negatively (prison!), by his lifelong obsession with these stories.