Fig. 1.1
“The Death of Sherlock Holmes” by Sidney Paget. From “The Final Problem,” by Arthur Conan Doyle. Strand Magazine Dec. 1893, p. 558. (Image credit: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)
At the heart of this book is an absence: a person missing, presumed dead. That person is Sherlock Holmes. In December 1893, a mere six years after his natal appearance, when the great detective had been starring in The Strand Magazine for less than two years, at the height of his popularity with the late-Victorian reading public, his creator Arthur Conan Doyle killed him. In “The Final Problem,” Sherlock disappeared over the Reichenbach Falls in a struggle with master-criminal Professor Moriarty (never previously mentioned in a Holmes story), and both were swallowed up by a “dreadful caldron of swirling water and seething foam” (Doyle, “Final” 570). If the full-page Sidney Paget illustration facing the story’s opening page (Fig. 1.1), depicting Holmes in a tussle with another man and seemingly about to topple off the side of the waterfall, left readers in some doubt about the detective’s fate, the legend emblazoned beneath did not: “The Death of Sherlock Holmes,” it trumpeted (Doyle, “Final” 558). At the time of the story’s composition and publication, Doyle firmly believed that his creation was dead and that this would be the last of Holmes. He considered his detective fiction a “lower stratum of literary achievement,” and felt that with Holmes out of the way he could capitalise on his literary celebrity and attract an audience for what he termed his “highest … conscientious, respectable” work, his long historical novels (Memories 84; Stashower, Lellenberg, and Foley 301). Authors, it seems, are not always the best arbiters of their own work.
Indeed, seven years later, provoked by the wild success of William Gillette’s stage adaptation Sherlock Holmes, which was touring in the United States, Doyle, ever the savvy businessman, had second thoughts and decided to resurrect Holmes. He pitched the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles to the editors of the Strand. It went on to be serialised in the magazine from 1901 to 1902 and set in motion the rekindling of the relationship between Doyle, Holmes, and the Strand which would last for almost another 30 years. The final Holmes story, “Shoscombe Old Place” was published by the Strand in April 1927. But this book is concerned with the years when Sherlock Holmes was dead. With the successors who took his place.
As Stephen Knight reminds us, “The vast majority of detective, and indeed crime, stories written in the nineteenth century did not appear in book form, but in the pages of elusive magazines and regularly appearing newspapers. This the sea in which the detectives are born and first swim” (Knight, Art of Murder 11). Indeed, the Victorian fin-de-siècle was truly the age of the periodical press. The expensive and bulky triple-decker novel was dying; by 1897, the number of three-volume novels published annually in Britain had fallen to four (Keating 26). Publishing costs were dropping as taxes on paper and advertising were repealed, at the same time as paper production and printing technology advanced. The abolition of taxation on newspapers also led to the “rapid development of provincial journalism,” with provincial newspapers outnumbering and outselling London publications from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1950s; these provincial weekly newspapers combined local news with features borrowed from the new journalism of the London press, including competitions, London letters, and syndicated serial fiction (Qtd. in Hobbs 4). Typesetting, which at the start of the nineteenth century had been done by hand, was revolutionised by the invention of the linotype machine, allowing multiple lines of text to be run at once. The commercialisation of half-tone technology as a means of producing low-cost, high-quality illustrations meant that photographs and drawings could be incorporated with basic linotype printing. Growing train networks also enabled fast and wide distribution of print material. Over 800 W. H. Smith railway bookstalls were established in the second half of the nineteenth century, meaning that the middle-class commuter could not only buy good quality reading material for their journey but could even borrow it at one station and return it at another.
Perhaps most importantly of all, Forster’s 1870 Education Act made elementary education compulsory for those between the ages of five and twelve in England and Wales, as well as setting up board schools for the children of the working classes for the first time. Literacy rates rose and, by the time the first generation of children to benefit from the Act became adults in the late 1880s, new forms of cheap ephemeral media and genres of popular fiction were springing up to cater for their reading tastes and preferences. Periodicals and cheap provincial newspapers were born of this combination of social change and new technology and catered to this new mass literate reading public. By 1900 there were over 50,000 periodicals in circulation in Britain and the colonies; magazines and newspapers catering to every taste and budget: from cheap weekly penny papers to six-shilling deluxe monthly magazines. As the president of the newly formed Society of Authors, Walter Besant, described in The Pen and the Book (1899), his guidebook for aspiring authors, this development presented boundless opportunities for writers and publishers:
there are at this moment in the country hundreds of papers and journals and magazines, weekly and monthly … The circulation of some is enormous, far beyond the wildest dreams of twenty years ago: they are the favourite reading of millions who until the last few years never read anything: they are the outcome of the School Board, which pours out every year by thousands, by the hundred thousand, boys and girls into whom they have instilled … a love of reading. (54–55)
It was not in novels, but in short stories published in weekly or monthly magazines or newspapers catering to this newly literate mass readership that most Victorian fictional detectives were born, conferring immense popularity on the publications in which they appeared. Following the publication of the first Sherlock Holmes short story in July 1891, the magazine’s already impressive sales figures soon boomed at well over 500,000 copies per issue (Brake and Demoor 604). After Holmes disappeared over the Reichenbach Falls, apparently never to return, the Strand and other newspapers and magazines became desperate to retain or capture the readers who had become addicted to Doyle’s serialised detective fiction. As John Sutherland has noted, as a reaction to the success of Sherlock Holmes stories for the Strand, “by the mid-1890s, it has been estimated that of the 800 weekly papers in Britain, 240 were carrying some variety of detective story” (181). As a clerk at a W. H. Smith’s bookstall explained, when he was interviewed by The Speaker in 1893 about the public’s reading habits: “He would not undertake to phrophesy the success of any book outside the limits of detective fiction. Any detective story, whatever its merits might be, he could sell from morning to night” (“A Literary Causerie” 383).
Holmes rivals, clones, parodies, and inversions began to fill up the pages of countless family magazines such as the Windsor, the Ludgate, Pearson’s, and in the Strand itself, as well as provincial newspapers, for the rest of the century. A vast (and largely uncharted) treasure trove of detective stories was published in periodicals, newspapers, and magazines in the years 1893–1900. Many of these works have been unknown, undiscovered, or inaccessible, owing to the nature of their ephemeral modes of publication. Victorian newspapers and periodicals were until recently only available to those who had the time and wherewithal to visit the British Library’s Colindale depository and to sift through catalogues, boxes, and microfiche in order to access frail copies of magazines and papers, whose pages were filled with multiple columns of tiny print. In the 1970s, many decades before newspaper and periodical digitisation, Hugh Greene trawled the archives to produce four fine anthologies of lesser-known Victorian detective fiction for Penguin, which unearthed many of these forgotten “successors to Sherlock Holmes.” In successive years, similar edited anthologies such as Douglas Greene’s Detection by Gaslight (1997); Alan K. Russell’s Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1993); Michael Cox’s The Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories (2002); Michael Sims’s The Penguin Book of Gaslit Crime (2009), The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime (2011), and The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Detective Stories (2011); Nick Rennison’s The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (2008), Supernatural Sherlocks (2017), and More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (2019), all built upon Greene’s work, concentrating on collecting stories from well-known nineteenth-century authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, alongside less well-known writers such as Headon Hill, Arthur Morrison, and L.T. Meade.
However, as Anne Humpherys’ and Andrew Radford’s surveys of scholarship on the crime genre—completed in 1998 and 2008, respectively—both noted, critical work on Victorian detective fiction was slower and more resistant to include these lesser-known and difficult-to-access works, which, until the early 2000s at least, were still being mostly overlooked by scholars “in favour of an obsessive return of critical analysis to a handful of canonised texts by three male writers—Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle” (259). In The Art of Murder (1998) Stephen Knight also argued that the notion of the crime genre being rooted in a small number of canonical texts by Poe and Doyle was more than somewhat problematic. For Knight, the fact that so many crime and detective stories appeared in the pages of periodicals and magazines meant that the genre did not have “so simple or so gratifying a genealogy … as the classic account suggests” (The Art of Murder 11). Indeed, this type of limited genealogy of genre is notable in a number of otherwise valuable critical histories of crime fiction such as Ian Ousby’s Bloodhounds of Heaven (1976), Peter Thoms’s Detection and Its Designs: Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction (1998), and Lawrence Frank’s Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence (2003).
Thankfully, processes of Victorian newspaper and magazine digitisation by the British Library, Gale-Cengage, and the British Newspaper Archive have recently begun to make access to these stories much easier. We can now begin to search for and identify the detective serials in those 240 weekly papers carrying detective stories, mentioned by Sutherland, amongst other things. And by doing this, we can undertake the important work of developing a broader and more inclusive picture of nineteenth-century detective fiction—one that goes beyond traditional canonical boundaries and recuperates popular yet virtually unknown writers and stories. This book hopes to build upon a body of scholarship appearing in the last ten years or so which has helped to uncover and illuminate such works of Victorian detective fiction. As such, this study is a companion piece to my monograph Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock (2014). In it, I examined crime fiction from the years 1...