ENGL 231 FA 26: Sherlock Holmes (Doyle and Ritchie)

Today, we are going to map start mapping Sherlock Holmes (2009), Guy Ritchie’s film adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories, which began with A Study in Scarlet in 1887 and then from 1891 ran in The Strand Magazine. We are going to map real places connected to the film: where Doyle lived and wrote, the places where readers and fans made Holmes’s world feel real (including the famous address that does not exist), where the film’s Victorian London was actually shot, the studios and companies that made it, the places where its score was recorded and its sound mixed, and where the cast and crew were born and built their careers. We are going to put all of this together on one map, showing how a story set in Victorian London was rebuilt in 2008 and 2009 from locations in Manchester, Liverpool, Kent, and London, from studio sets, from digital effects, and from the work of a team spread across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany. COVE’s mapping tools let us see the stories and the film side by side, and connect to a bigger point: Holmes may be the most remixed character in English literature, and adaptations keep changing as new tools let more people remix and reimagine stories themselves.