The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes Read Free Page A

enough figure, although now viewed with a sentimental affection rather than seen as an almost aggressive blueprint for the future. For the methodology which Holmes employs was then radical and novel, even though it has now infiltrated all areas of life to such an extent that it is scarcely even noticed. The essence of the stories is the willingness to ignore the big picture and, instead, to apply reason to an accumulation of apparently insignificant details which then reveal the truth when properly analysed. Indeed, the more insignificant the detail, the more pure and useful it is, hence the importance of dogs that don’t bark in the night, footprints, shiny cuffs, and so on.
    The significance of this is that Conan Doyle moved into the popular realm a method of thought which was of incalculable importance in several areas of intellectual life. The Holmesian method, after all, had already been put into practice in real criminal work by criminal anthropologists who began by measuring heads, ears and so on, initially with the aim of identifying criminal types for preventive incarceration, and then more modestly merely to identify individuals after crimes had been committed. The practice was later refined by Sir Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon, who developed fingerprinting and handwriting analysis respectively – classic cases of insignificant details being made to yield significance – for the same purpose. Fingerprinting, which received little publicity until Galton’s book on the subject in 1892, is never referred to in these stories, but Holmes is an early analyst of the particularities of the typewriter, which, he saysin ‘A Case of Identity’, ‘really has quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting’.
    On the other hand, hereditarian arguments – suggesting that criminals are born and not made and can be identified by the study of physical characteristics and family trees – are of scant importance and, in the stories presented here, are referred to only in the case of Moriarty. This is perhaps a surprising omission, as eugenics, the science of race and its application, was then at the very cutting edge of research – Galton, for example, spent much of his career writing on methods of defending and preserving the race, and scientists throughout Europe confidently asserted the need for radical measures to prevent racial degeneration. Had Holmes identified criminals by using his powers of observation to spot degenerative tendencies to crime he would have been acting fully in accordance with the advanced scientific reasoning which he employs in other areas.
    Yet Conan Doyle refrains from any such device; even in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, where atavism and degeneration are important motifs, they play no significant part in solving the mystery – identifying the villain through his resemblance to an old family portrait is quite an old trick of plotting which owes little to
fin-de-siècle
scientific thought. Equally importantly, Conan Doyle declines the frequent opportunities to make orthodox remarks about the characteristics and inferiority of other races – indeed, the implications in a story such as ‘The Yellow Face’ are quite the opposite of orthodoxy. It is a quiet expression of a natural humanity which stands very much in his favour.
    Instead of such notions, it is hard external evidence of a particular kind which is of importance: ‘Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details,’ he tells Watson in ‘A Case of Identity’, an aphorism which sums up not only the whole of the Holmes stories but also much of late nineteenth-century intellectual life, from forensic science through German philological studies of the Bible and on to the dating of ancient history through potsherds or the uncovering of the fossil record through bone fragments. Holmes himself draws the parallel in ‘The