Something that occurred to me as we discussed Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is that these detective stories are functionally conservative texts. That is, the texts are concerned with maintaining a white, middle-class hegemony in Victorian England amidst a time of rapid cultural upheaval as they approach the turn of the century. Holmes figures into this as the ideal British subject (white, male, middle-class, English, rational) who regularly defends the other ideal British female subject from encroaching threats of the Other, whether that be the racialized/exoticized Other that we say in the “Speckled Band”, or the impoverished, fallen man as seen in the “Man with the Twisted Lip.” In both of these texts, Holmes is the one who is shown to defeat, bring to justice, or else “correct” the threat of the Other in the British homeland. In “The Speckled Band,” the oriental Other is literally defeated as Holmes safely contains the snake imported from India. In “Twisted Lip,” the revelation that Hugh Boone is really Mr. St. Clair in disguise, making his money through “professional begging,” can be read as Holmes “correcting” the deception of a fallen man. In this vein, I think that Dr. Janzen’s observation that Paget’s illustrations often show the “dark corners” of British society rings true. Often, Paget uses the dual-tone medium to his advantage, depicting the Othered villain in shadowy blacks, and the heroes in the light.

As a final note, I think it is interesting that next week we will be looking at Wilde’s Salome which is decidedly not a conservative text, but is rather more indicative of the social and cultural changes that Doyle’s stories seem to be resisting.