Biomedical Science, Criminology, and Empire in the Sherlock Holmes Canon
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“A Criminal Strain Ran In His Blood”: Biomedical Science, Criminology, and Empire in the Sherlock Holmes Canon A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences by Simon Workman M.A. Wright State University June 2012 Committee Chair: Tamar Heller, PhD Abstract Nearly a century and a half after their initial publication, it is clear that Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and novels continue to be a cultural phenomenon throughout the world. However, less clear are the ways in which those works emerged in response to—and as an example of—cultural anxieties surrounding advancements in science, particularly in the fields of biology and medicine. Advances such as Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection not only called into question basic long-standing assumptions about man’s relationship to the universe; they also promised to improve the investigation of crime, as well as potentially justify certain imperialist beliefs about racial difference—beliefs that themselves influenced the development of criminal investigation. This project demonstrates how the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories both respond to and participate in the ideological nexus of biomedical science, criminology, and British imperialism by examining the ways in which certain key texts in the Holmes canon deploy medical discourse, criminological theory, and imperialist assumptions in the creation of a rational and “scientific” worldview through the characters of Dr. John Watson and Sherlock Holmes. ii iii Acknowledgements I would like to extend my gratitude to the following friends and colleagues for their support and assistance with this project: Tamar Heller, Beth Ash, Lee Person, Ed Davis, Adrienne Cassel, Barry Milligan, Erin Flanagan, Erik Banks, Myriam J. A. Chancy, Jonathan Kamholtz, Julia Carlson, Jim Schiff, Michael Griffith, Jay Twomey, Kay Berg, Jamey Dunham, Drew Strombeck, Annette Oxindine, Mary Beth Pringle, Carol Mejia-LaPerle, Carol Loranger, Dennis Loranger, Rich Bullock, James Guthrie, Hayley Hughes, Sarah Bullwinkel, Elizabeth Robbins, Anne Rothhaas, Heather Williams, Ken Hayes, Holly Jackson, Sharon Tjaden-Glass, Kristen Race, José Angel Araguz, Niven Herro, Kelly Blewett, Bess Winter, Woody Skinner, Lindsey Kurz, Elizabeth Stetler, Les Kay, Rochelle Hurt, Gwen E. Kirby, Winnie Kaur, Carla Sarr, Christiane Boehr, Christina LaVecchia, Jen Zellner, Kendall Sewell, Amber Rambharose, Madeleine Wattenberg, Steven Stanley, Sarah Strickley, Andrew Trostle, Justine McNulty Fraley, Christine Rezk, Dario Sulzman, Kara Pernicano, Nicolas Rivera, Nicole Moran, Holly Clark, Chris Collins, Dan Groves, and Kevin Honold. Special thanks to my family and friends, especially Tyler Karth, Mattie Olvera, David Olvera, Adam Solomon, Christopher Tahy, my parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and most of all Sara Workman. iv Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Doyle, Bell, Watson and Holmes 13 Chapter 2: Colonial Contamination—English Criminals “Going Native” 57 Chapter 3: Yellow Faces and Dangerous Places—Africa and Africans in the Holmes Canon 91 Chapter 4: “Look at the magnificent types!”—English and Continental Criminals 127 Epilogue: The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 163 Works Cited 168 v Introduction Nearly a century and a half after their initial publication, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales continue to be a cultural phenomenon throughout the world. The four novels and fifty-six short stories that make up the Holmes canon have inspired countless adaptations and interpretations, from the works of Agatha Christie and films starring Basil Rathbone to modern- day sensations like the BBC’s Sherlock television show. That Holmes, Watson, and the romanticized London they inhabit are here to stay seems clear. Less clear, however, are the ways in which those works emerged in response to—and as an example of—late-Victorian cultural anxieties surrounding advancements in science, particularly in the fields of biology and medicine. Advances such as Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection1 not only called into question basic long-standing assumptions about man’s relationship to the universe; they also promised to improve the investigation of crime, as well as potentially justify certain imperialist beliefs about racial difference—beliefs that themselves influenced the development of criminal investigation. This project seeks to demonstrate how the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories both respond to and participate in the ideological nexus of bio-medical science, criminology, and British imperialism by examining the ways in which certain key texts in the Holmes canon deploy bio-medical discourse, criminological theory, and imperialist assumptions 1 These “advances” include (but are not limited to): the changing view of medicine as a science (rather than an “art”); increasing awareness of the importance of the brain in relation to a person’s personality, demeanor, etc. (phrenology, psychology, psychiatry, etc.); experiments involving vivisection, which increasingly revealed humans’ similarities to the animal kingdom; the development of anesthetics and other pharmacological advances, which allowed for more effective surgeries; the rise and general acceptance of germ theory, which led to more effective vaccinations, disease prevention, etc.; a deeper understanding of genetics and heredity (at a basic, but improved, level); the use of statistical methods for tracking outbreaks of diseases and viruses; better hygienic practices and awareness of how public health policies impacted the transmission of disease. 1 in the creation of a rational, “scientific” worldview through the characters of Dr. John Watson and Sherlock Holmes. While there is a vast body of work written on the Holmes canon, surprisingly little of it has been scholarly in nature. Although there has been an increase in scholarly attention on the Holmes stories in the last fifteen to twenty years, most of the criticism on Doyle’s works has been of the “armchair” variety, amateur texts largely published by societies and fan clubs such as The Baker Street Irregulars. True scholarly work on Holmes is not non-existent, however; since the late 1970s, and especially the 1990s, there have been numerous academic studies of detective fiction and related genres, many of which examine individual works or the canon as a whole. These include influential texts like Tzvetan Todorov’s “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” Ronald Thomas’s Dreams of Authority (1990) and Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (1999), Rosemary Jann’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order (1995), and Joseph Kestner’s Sherlock’s Men (1997) and The Edwardian Detective, 1901-1915 (2000). More recent work on the Holmes canon has taken a variety of approaches, such as Pierre Bayard’s psychoanalytic “re-examination” of the most famous Holmes novel in Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles (2008), Emelyne Godfrey’s pair of works on Victorian self-defense (Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature [2010] and Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society [2012]), James O’Brien’s overview of Holmes’ forensic techniques (The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics [2013]), and Clare Clarke’s Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock (2014). Additionally, since the debut of the BBC’s Sherlock television series, scholars in both literary and film studies journals have published numerous articles on the program using a wide range of approaches. Thus, while it 2 took some time for the Sherlock Holmes tales to be accepted as a literary artifact worthy of study, in the last two decades scholarship has steadily increased in both quantity and academic rigor. The Sherlock Holmes stories’ immense popularity with Victorian readers (Strand Magazine regularly sold around 500,000 copies when a new Holmes tale was published), as well as their continuing popularity with readers throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, means they are a significant set of source texts from which to read the Victorian cultural climate and how the legacy of that culture reverberates throughout the following decades. A few critical texts have been especially important in helping shape my project, since they deal with parts of the ideological nexus I describe in relation to Victorian fiction (and detective fiction in particular). Barry Milligan’s Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (1995) studies the ways in which narcotics and imperial “Others” are continually associated with one another in Victorian culture, appearing simultaneously as threatening and as exotically attractive. This work, which examines both Charles Dickens’ early detective novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Sherlock Holmes (specifically “The Man With The Twisted Lip”) among others, was instrumental in kindling my interest in the intersections between medical science and imperialism in Holmes canon and Victorian literature in general. Similarly important in shaping my perspective, Sander L. Gilman’s 1985 article “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature” further