Abstract
This chapter explores the kinship between Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle’s next best-known serial protagonist, Professor George Edward Challenger, examining some of the ways that Challenger is a continuation and a criticism of what Holmes embodied. Holmes the “scientific detective” is taken here as an instantiation of the modern professional expert, a pivotal figure in the Victorian knowledge revolution. The portrayal of Holmes’s powers is an index of the awe in which Conan Doyle and his contemporaries held these experts, but it also reveals an anxiety about the way these masters of knowledge could appear inhuman and irresponsible. These tendencies in Holmes reappear in the person of Challenger, the scientific investigator pursuing knowledge with an egotistical disregard for the consequences.
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Notes
- 1.
References in this chapter to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are to the Penguin edition.
- 2.
For example, the adding machine patented by William Seward Burroughs in 1888, the year after the first appearance of Holmes in print.
- 3.
In A Study in Scarlet Holmes expounds his own theory of interpretative backtelling in his article “The Book of Life,” which speaks of inferring an Atlantic or a Niagara from a drop of water (23).
- 4.
“Rationally regulated association within a structure of domination finds its typical expression in bureaucracy…The charismatic structure of domination rests upon individual authority which is based neither upon rational rules nor upon tradition” (ii 954).
- 5.
For a more detailed exposition of the relation of Doyle’s life and writing to cultures of knowledge, see Kerr (41–122).
- 6.
Masculine pronouns seem appropriate for generalizations about Victorian doctors. See Digby, Loudon, Porter, and Perkin. Women were utterly debarred from the profession until the 1870s, and began to practice in very small numbers thereafter. See Dixon Smith, and Doyle’s story “The Doctors of Hoyland” (Round the Red Lamp 256–72).
- 7.
See Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok.
- 8.
He wrote about what he saw in Berlin in a letter to the Daily Telegraph (Letters to the Press 35–37), a commissioned article for W. T. Stead’s Review of Reviews (“Dr Koch”), and later in the memoir Memories and Adventures (87–91), in which he details Bergmann’s bullying and unprofessional bad manners as he “rushed on with his court all grinning at the snub which the presumptuous Englishman had received.” Doyle was less critical of Koch, while suggesting, and in later tellings confirming, that Koch’s tuberculin treatment was not an effective cure for the disease. He later claimed his Telegraph letter was “the very first which appeared upon the side of doubt and caution” about the cure (90). See also Kerr (79–99).
- 9.
Challenger does not appear ever to have held a university position, and finances his work by private means. His title may be simply honorific, as seems also to be the case with his irascible exact contemporary, Professor Henry Higgins in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912). It appears later, in The Land of Mist (278–79), that Challenger did practice as a doctor in his youth.
- 10.
This is a trope that goes back to Aristotle, but had also figured in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which scientific research is consistently represented as a stripping and penetration of feminized nature.
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Kerr, D. (2017). Holmes into Challenger: The Dark Investigator. In: Naidu, S. (eds) Sherlock Holmes in Context. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_10
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