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THE SAVAGE GENIUS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2009

Anna Neill
Anna Neill*
Affiliation:
University of Kansas
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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

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