The Edwardian Detective: 1901-15 by Professor Joseph A Kestner

Author:Professor Joseph A Kestner [Kestner, Professor Joseph A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781351815277
Google: eIVHDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-11-22T04:38:57+00:00

Arthur Conan Doyle: His Last Bow (1908-1911)

Conan Doyle’s achievement in the tales collected in His Last Bow, published in October 1917, is to chart the movement from the Edwardian to the early Georgian period. As published in the recent Oxford text, this collection consists of seven stories and a preface (The Cardboard Box having been restored to its appropriate publishing period of the Memoirs). These narratives were published between September/October 1908 and September 1917, constituting a record of social transformation unrivalled in other work by Doyle. Subtitled ‘Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes’ the stories are occasional pieces. Two were published while Edward VII still reigned Wisteria Lodge and The Bruce-Partington Plans appearing in 1908, the remainder from December 1910 (The Devil’s Foot) through 1917. In his Preface to the collection, Doyle announced that Holmes had retired to

a small farm upon the Downs five miles from Eastbourne, where his time is divided between philosophy and agriculture… The approach of the German war caused him, however, to lay his remarkable combination of intellectual and practical activity at the disposal of the Government… Several previous experiences which have lain long in my portfolio have been added… so as to complete the volume. (Doyle, 1993, Last Bow, 3)

Doyle incorporates the most significant event of the early Georgian reign, the Great War, as the terminus of the volume, which appeared before the Armistice in 1918. The tide and subtitle establish not only the dramatic trope of ‘bowing but also with the word ‘reminiscences’ indicate the transition from the Edwardian era to the Georgian.

Edwards in his introduction to the volume has recognized a number of significant changes connoted by the narratives collected in His Last Bow. The detective ‘is fallible, faulted, or marginalized’ (xiii); it is ‘a disintegrating world… partly symbolized by a Holmes suffering intermittent medical ailments and at times foiled, fooled, or frustrated more by himself than by his adversaries’ (xiii). Edwards regards these elements as Doyle’s ‘awareness of increasing loss of British national confidence’ (xiii). Women receive an extraordinary prominence in the tales of this collection. Lady Frances Carfax represents the ‘vanishing aristocracy’ (xxii). The governess Miss Burnet of Wisteria Lodge, and Emilia Lucca of The Red Circle are activist women engaged in political intrigue. Edwards is correct that they constitute variants of the New Woman.

At the same time, imperialism is presented as dangerous, with its consequences wreaking havoc in Britain: Mortimer Tregennis takes the Devil’s Foot poison from Leon Sterndale’s African collection; Culverton Smith uses his lethal knowledge gained in Sumatra against Holmes in The Dying Detective. Four of the tales have strong international scenarios: Wisteria Lodge, The Red Circle, His Last Bow and The Bruce-Partington Plans. The last focuses on the armaments race, and it and His Last Bow reflect British Germanophobia. The Red Circle concerns a dangerous Italian secret society, but its reflection of other such groups, particularly Irish political organizations, engages an anxiety which found expression in the Easter Week uprising of 1916 in Dublin.

Finally, the narratives as a

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