Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence

By Lawrence Frank
New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.

Frank sees Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man everywhere in Holmes.  He sees Holmes' philosophy as representative of a shift in worldview post-Darwin, specifically in terms of constructing a history that has no linear origin.  The evidence we have is indicative of many vectors; there's no way to unfold a neat and tidy timeline.

He also talks about Arthur Conan Doyle's loss of faith (in Christianity) and turn to agnosticism.  Frank then goes on to argue that this influenced Holmes' methods.  

"Darwin continued, to write of "the living machinery of nature" (p. 199), appropriating the language of Paley's Natural Theology only to mock it.  He suggested that the formerly static Book of Nature was now to be read as a Book of Life that records "the incessant changes to which the organic and inorganic world has been exposed"(Frank 145).  --> The "Book of Life" is Holmes' published article.

John Tyndall's "Scientific Use of the Imagination."

"By the time of the serial publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the new historical consciousness had apparently triumphed in England.  Doyle would seem to acknowledge this triumph by organizing his novel upon a model that would be immediately accessible to his readers.  Dr. Mortimer's walking stick, that "accidental souvenir," is akin to the comparative anatomist's fossil bone or to the geologist's pebble.  Like the watch in The Sign of Four (1890), the stick becomes a piece of fragmentary evidence by which Watson, following France's Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) or England's own Richard Owen (1804-1892), reconstructs not a geological epoch or an extinct animal but a living man" (Frank 156).

***Mantell's The Wonders of Geology (1838).  "The geologist and the detective -- for Mantell can be seen as both -- inhabit a world of signs that to the unseeing eyes of others do not exist.  Each performs an act bordering on the magical to conjure up meanings out of objects and traces that seem to point to some historical process or succession of events.  It is not surprising that Watson, returning from his club after Dr. Mortimer's visit, has an almost hallucinatory experience....The geologist and the detective are sorcerers, part philologists, part Poe-esque cryptographers, living after Babel, who consult literal and figurative documents no longer written in a single, unchanging language"(Frank 162).