The Best of Sherlock Holmes Group

Question:

pinki
pinki
Student
High School - 9th Grade

How does Sir Arthur Conan Doyle explore the genre of the Victorian detective story in his Sherlock Holmes stories?

Include:
-Quotations

-Introduction; the social setting, jack the ripper

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Posted by pinki on Friday February 29, 2008 at 9:29 AM and tagged with detective, story, the best of sherlock holmes, victorian.

Answers:


  1. gbeatty Teacher
    College - Freshman

    Well, to be honest, mostly he does not do so—because the Victorian detective story didn't really exist as a coherent genre. There were mysteries a plenty, but they were more part of the larger Gothic novel. Works like "The Castle of Otranto" or "Frankenstein" had mysteries in them. Odd things happened, and they needed to be resolved. However, the rules weren't really set. The odd things weren't always crimes that were to be resolved through legal actions, and so the genre…didn't much happen. It's there in Poe (the Dupin stories) and Collins, and traces in Dickens, but otherwise, it didn't much exist.


    That said…Holmes fits with the rationalized Gothic. The events are often odd, seemly impossible or supernatural, and he resolves them through reason. He often dips into the underworld and into dark passions.

    Sources:
    http://www.crimeculture.com/Contents/VictorianCrime.html

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    Posted by gbeatty on Monday September 1, 2008 at 12:04 PM