‘Clap if you believe in sherlock holmes’: Mass culture and the re-enchantment of modernity, c. 1890–c. 1940

Historical Journal

Volumn 46, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 599-622

  Saler, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749995655     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X03003170     Document Type: Article

References (115)

1. Arthur Conan Doyle, The coming of the fairies (1922; London, 1997), p. 7.
2. In the 1980s the girls admitted that they faked the photographs using paper cutouts. Terry Staples, ‘The Cottingley fairies’, in Jack Zipes, ed., The Oxford companion to fairy tales (New York, 2000), pp. 109–110.
3. Daniel Stashower, Teller of tales: a life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (New York, 1999), p. 356.
4. Richard Lancelyn Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters (London, 1986), p. 28.
5. As Jacques Barzun noted, this ‘has happened in no other book and no other character in recent times. It's a phenomenon.’ Jacques Barzun, ‘The adventures of Sherlock Holmes: a radio discussion’, in Philip A. Shreffler, ed., The Baker Street reader: cornerstone writings about Sherlock Holmes (Westport, CT, 1984), p. 25.
6. S. C. Roberts, Adventures with authors (Cambridge, 1966), p. 228.
7. Harold Orel, ed., Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: interviews and recollections (London, 1991), p. 81.
8. G. K. Chesterton, ‘Sherlock Holmes the God’, G.K.'s Weekly, 21 (21 Feb. 1935), pp. 403–404.
9. Roberts, Adventures with authors, p. 231.
10. Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, p. 40.
11. For an analysis of the eighteenth-century Pamela ‘craze’, see James Grantham Turner, ‘Novel panic: picture and performance in the reception of Richardson's Pamela’, Representations, 48 (1994), pp. 70–96;
12. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: a biography (Oxford, 1971), pp. 119–153.
13. For an interesting exploration of the vogue for the late Victorian comic-strip character Alley Sloper, see Peter Bailey, ‘Ally Sloper's half-holiday: comic art in the 1880's’, in Peter Bailey, Popular culture and performance in the Victorian city (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 47–79.
14. A. O. Scott, ‘A hunger for fantasy, an empire to feed it’, New York Times (16 June 2002), Section 2, p. 26.
15. Janet Oppenheim, The other world: spiritualism and psychical research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 338–97;
16. Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, technology and magical thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 15.
17. As Jay Winter has argued, ‘The Great War, the most “modern” of wars, triggered an avalanche of the “unmodern”. One salient aspect of this apparent contradiction is the wartime growth in spiritualism.’ Jay Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning: the Great War in European cultural history (Cambridge, 1998), p. 54. Terms like ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ are complex and not necessarily mutually exclusive; there were significant efforts to reconcile the two by intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
18. See Robert Alter, Necessary angels: tradition and modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, MA, 1991);
19. Peter J. Bowler, Reconciling science and religion: the debate in early-twentieth-century Britain (Chicago, 2002);
20. Bruno Latour, We have never been modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA, 1993). But this line of thought, arguably, was not the dominant one in Europe during the fin-de-siècle: contemporaries tended to see modernity and tradition as opposing one another.
21. See J. W. Burrow, The crisis of reason: European thought, 1848–1914 (New Haven, 2000), pp. 112–113.
22. Michael Saler, The avant-garde in interwar England: ‘medieval modernism’ and the London underground (New York, 1999).
23. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the order of nature: 1150–1750 (Cambridge, MA, 1998).
24. Arthur Conan Doyle, The complete Sherlock Holmes (New York, 1992), p. 176.
25. While many nineteenth-century writers feared that positivism excluded the imagination as a legitimate source of knowledge, a closer reading of the positivists themselves reveals that several were less antagonistic towards art and the imagination than their contemporaries gave them credit for. See Peter Allen Dale, In pursuit of a scientific culture: science, art, and society in the Victorian age (Madison, WI, 1989);
26. Jonathan Smith, Fact and feeling: Baconian science and the nineteenth-century literary imagination (Madison, WI, 1994). And the turn towards idealism in late Victorian intellectual culture also gave wider sway to the imagination than was to be found among the scientific naturalists and materialists;
27. see Bowler, Reconciling, pp. 18–19. Nevertheless, the dominant discourse of mid- to late nineteenth-century positivists, materialists, scientific naturalists, and cultural pessimists associated Western modernity with a narrow form of rationality inimical to wider sources of meaning, and this pervasive association of modernity with disenchantment continued to be perpetuated among intellectuals in Europe and America through the twentieth century: ‘To be a member of a modern elite is to regard wonder and wonders with studied indifference; enlightenment is still in part defined as the anti-marvelous.
28. ‘Daston and Park, Wonders, p. 368. In recent years, however, a number of scholars have attempted to redress this discourse by demonstrating ways in which modernity can be reconciled with enchantment.
29. See Jane Bennett, The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics (New Jersey, 2001);
30. Kelly Besecke, ‘Speaking of meaning in modernity: reflexive spirituality as a cultural resource’, Sociology of Religion, 62 (2001), pp. 365–81;
31. James Cook, The arts of deception: playing with fraud in the age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA, 2001);
32. Simon During, Modern enchantments: the cultural power of secular magic (Cambridge, MA, 2002);
33. Edward A. Tiryakian, ‘Dialectics of modernity: reenchantment and de-differentiation as counterprocesses’, in Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser, eds., Social change and modernity (Berkeley, CA, 1992), pp. 78–93.
34. Doyle, The complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 687.
35. The complete Sherlock Holmes, pp. 338–339.
36. The complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 347.
37. For a discussion of intellectuals who tried to fuse the ‘two cultures’ of science and art, see Wolf Lepenies, Between literature and science: the rise of sociology (Cambridge, 1988).
38. The phrase ‘science fiction’ and the first magazine devoted to it were established in America by the Luxembourg immigrant Gernback. Amazing Stories was established in 1926
39. to publish ‘scientifiction’; Gernsback modified the ungainly phrase to ‘science fiction’ in 1929.
40. Jack Williamson, ‘Scientifiction, searchlight of science’, Amazing Stories Quarterly, 1 (1928), p. 435.
41. Doyle, The complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 191.
42. The complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 317.
43. Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, p. 35.
44. Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens (1938; London, 1970), p. 233.
45. James E. Combs, Play world: the emergence of the new ludic age (Westport, CT, 2000).
46. Richard Rorty, Times Literary Supplement, 3 Dec. 1999, p. 11.
47. Shreffler, ed., Baker Street, p. 17.
48. Vincent Starrett, The private life of Sherlock Holmes (New York, 1933), p. 93.
49. Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, pp. 15–86.
50. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 98.
51. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 161.
52. T. S. Blakeney, Sherlock Holmes: fact or fiction (London, 1932), p. 126.
53. Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 37.
54. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 162.
55. Doyle, The coming of the fairies, p. 32. Doyle's Uncle Richard was a famous illustrator, who was known for his depictions of fairies; his father, Charles, had also been interested in fairy lore, and drew fairies while he was confined to a sanitarium.
56. Arthur Conan Doyle's willingness to believe in fairies may thus have had personal as well as spiritual origins. See Martin Booth, The doctor, the detective, and Arthur Conan Doyle: a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle (London, 1997), p. 321.
57. Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, p. 4.
58. The General Post Office continued to receive letters for Holmes through the 1950s. Booth, The Doctor, p. 111.
59. Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, p. 64.
60. Tit-Bits, 27 (27 Oct. 1894), p. 67.
61. Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, pp. 143–144.
62. The Sherlock Holmes letters, p. 148.
63. The Sherlock Holmes letters, pp. 173–174.
64. See, for example, ‘Some inconsistencies of Sherlock Holmes’, Bookman, 14 (1902), p. 446;
65. Christopher Morley, ‘Notes on Baker Street’, Saturday Review, 18 (28 Jan. 1939), p. 12.
66. Orel, ed., Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, p. 79.
67. Jonathan Rose, The intellectual life of the British working classes (New Haven, 2001), p. 97.
68. see Deborah Wynne, The sensation novel and the Victorian family magazine (New York, 2001). And in Britain, at least, public education in the years immediately after the 1870 Education Act did not necessarily train students to distinguish among different genres of writing.
69. David Vincent argues that at this time the schools tended to provide students with ‘an acquaintance with literacy rather than an effective command’. David Vincent, Literacy and popular culture: England, 1750–1914 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 90.
70. Some critics, such as Patrick Brantlinger, have argued that this genre was a reaction against realism and return to the Gothic. But, as Nicholas Daly notes in his rebuttal to this line of argument, this was not how contemporary critics envisaged it, a finding my own research supports. Patrick Brantlinger, The reading lesson: the threat of mass literacy in nineteenth-century British fiction (Bloomington, 1998), pp. 171–209;
71. Nicholas Daly, Modernism, romance and the fin de siècle: popular fiction and British culture, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 12.
72. Anonymous [Andrew Lang], He (London, 1887), n.p.
73. Peter Beresford Ellis, H. Rider Haggard: a voice from the infinite (London, 1978), p. 119.
74. Neil Harris, ‘Iconography and intellectual history: the halftone effect’, in Neil Harris, Cultural excursions: marketing appetites and cultural tastes in modern America (Chicago, 1990), pp. 304–317.
75. H. Rider Haggard, She (London, 1887), p. 10.
76. For a discussion on how photography was used as evidence by the Victorians, see Jennifer Tucker, ‘Photography as witness, detective, and imposter: visual representation in Victorian science’, in Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian science in context (Chicago, 1997), pp. 378–408.
77. Ellis, H. Rider Haggard, p. 108.
78. Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard: his life and works (London, 1960), pp. 102–116.
79. Orel, ed., Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, p. 80.
80. Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, p. 80.
81. The Sherlock Holmes letters, p. 28.
82. Stashower, Teller of tales, p. 351.
83. Ronald A. Knox, Essays in satire (London, 1928).
84. Franco Moretti suggests that Doyle's detective stories may have become canonical, unlike those of his rivals, because of Doyle's novel emphasis on the use of clues in the narrative. Franco Moretti, ‘The slaughterhouse of literature’, Modern Language Quarterly, 61 (2000), pp. 207–227.
85. Shreffler, ed., Baker Street, p. 26.
86. Doyle, The complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 196.
87. G. K. Chesterton, ‘A defence of detective stories’, in G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (London, 1901), pp. 119–121.
88. For a comparison of mysteries with myths and fairy tales, see David Lehman, The perfect murder: a study in detection (Ann Arbor, 2000), pp. 23–36.
89. Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, p. 79.
90. Tit-Bits, 28 (1895).
91. Blakeney, Sherlock Holmes, p. 120.
92. David Frisby, Fragments of modernity: theories of modernity in the work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge, MA, 1990). For a response to this fear by German scientists who turned to biological holism in the interwar period as a way to reconcile modernity and enchantment
93. see Ann Harrington, Reenchanted science: holism in German culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (New Jersey, 1996).
94. Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, pp. 78–79.
95. Shreffler, ed., Baker Street, p. 39.
96. Jon L. Lellenberg, ed., Irregular memories of the thirties: an archival history of the Baker Street Irregulars' first decade, 1930–1940 (New York, 1990), p. 228.
97. Irregular memories of the thirties: an archival history of the Baker Street Irregulars' first decade, p. 253.
98. Shreffler, ed., Baker Street, p. 5.
99. Roberts, Adventures, p. 231.
100. Hans Vaihinger, The philosophy of ‘as if ’, a system of the theoretical, practical and religious fictions of mankind, trans. C. K. Ogden (1911; London, 1924 edn).
101. Edward Salmon, Juvenile literature as it is (London, 1888), p. 105.
102. For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concerns about the moral and spiritual effects of reading fiction, see Brantlinger, The reading lesson; Vincent, Literacy; Richard D. Altick, The English common reader: a social history of the mass reading public, 1800–1900 (Chicago, 1957).
103. Humphrey Carpenter, Secret gardens: the golden age of children's literature (Boston, 1985).
104. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and leaf (Boston, 1989), pp. 45–51.
105. H. P. Lovecraft, Selected letters, 1911–1924 (Sauk City, WI, 1965),III, p. 140.
106. Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular realities: early mass culture in fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998).
107. Michael North, Reading 1922: a return to the scene of the modern (New York, 1999), pp. 206–208.
108. James Cook, The arts of deception (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
109. Rose, The intellectual life, p. 99.
110. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the book (New Jersey, 2001).
111. Martin Meisel, Realizations: narrative, pictorial, and theatrical arts in nineteenth century England (New Jersey, 1983).
112. There are several interesting overlaps between the Sherlock Holmes societies and gatherings of those who play fantasy role-playing games such as ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’ For a sociological analysis of the phenomenon of these games, see Gary Alan Fine, Shared fantasy: role-playing games as social worlds (Chicago, 1983).
113. Anon., ‘Welcome faces in the family album’, Sunday Times, 15 July 2001, p. 9.
114. Ellis, H. Rider Haggard, p. 109.
115. R. Ivar Gunn, ‘The Sherlock Holmes Society’, British Medical Journal, 11 Aug. 1934.