Abstract
The first installment of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles appeared in the August 1901 issue of The Strand Magazine. The serialized novel, which was to run through to April 1902, reintroduced Sherlock Holmes to the readers of The Strand some eight years after “The Adventure of the Final Problem” was published in December 1893. In that story Holmes’s struggle with Professor Moriarty had apparently ended as the two men, “locked in each other’s arms,” fell to their deaths “in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam” into which Dr. Watson peered in his search for his friend.1 Holmes was to return unambiguously from the dead in The Strand only in October 1903, in “The Adventure of the Empty House.” The events that Watson records in the case of the spectral hound of Dartmoor occur in 1889, several years before those related in “The Final Problem,” a fictional circumstance that need not have guaranteed further adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The Hound of the Baskervilles was perhaps Doyle’s reluctant response to the clamor of his reading public and to his publishers’ entreaties, in Britain and the United States, for more of Holmes. In 1893 Doyle had reportedly said to his friend Silas Hocking, “I shall kill [Holmes] off at the end of the year… . If I don’t … he’ll kill me.”2
If the earth told a true story, then Stapleton never reached that island of refuge towards which he struggled through the fog upon that last night. Somewhere in the heart of the great Grimpen Mire, down in the foul slime of the huge morass which had sucked him in, this cold and cruel-hearted man is forever buried.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
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Notes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Final Problem,” in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 2 vols (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1930), I, 480. All further references to other Holmes stories or novels are to this edition and appear in the text.
See Richard Lancelyn Green and John Michael Gibson, A Bibliography of A. Conan DoyIe, Soho Bibliographies, no. 23 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 76–77. Also, see John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949).
See W. W. Robson, introduction to The Hound of the Baskervilles: Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle, ed. W. W. Robson, Oxford Sherlock Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. xi-xxix.
For an account ot Lyell and Darwin and their concern with “Uniformitari-anism” or “Actualism,” see Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Richard Kirwan, Geological Essays (London: D. Bremner, 1799), pp. iii-iv.
M. Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth, trans. Robert Kerr (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1813), pp. 1–2.
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, 3 vols (1830–33; reprint as Principles of Geology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990–91), I, 73. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
Mrs. Lyell, ed., Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart., 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1881), I, 251.
The discussion that follows has been influenced by William C. Dowling, Jarneson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to “The Political Unconscious” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); and Louis O. Mink, “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument,” in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, eds Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 129–49.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, ed. J. W. Burrow (1859; reprint, Penguin Books, 1968), p. 440, emphasis added. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
My discussion has been influenced by Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology, 2nd edn (New York: Science History Publications, 1976); and by Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). In “The Adventure of the Empty House,” the first story in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1903–04), Holmes explicitly employs the family tree to explain why Colonel Sebastian Moran “began to go wrong”: “There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height, and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it often in humans. I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors, and that such a sudden turn to good or evil stands for some strong influence which came into the line of his pedigree. The person becomes, as it were, the epitome of the history of his own family” (Complete Sherlock Holmes, II, 494, emphasis added).
See John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980); and Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition (Copenhagen: Gec Gad, 1961).
For accounts of this episode, see Sidney Spokes, Gideon Algernon Mantell, LL.D., F.R.C.S., ER.S., Surgeon and Geologist (London: John Bale, Sons and Danielsson, 1927), pp. 29–30, 84–85; and The Journal of Gideon Mantel!, Surgeon and Geologist, Covering the Years, 1818–1852, ed. E. Cecil Curwen (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), pp. 59–62. For a more recent account of Mantell’s career, see Dennis R. Dean, Gideon Mantell and the Discovery of Dinosaurs (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Gideon Algernon Mantell, The Wonders of Geology; or, A Familiar Exposition of Geological Phenomena; Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Brighton, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: Relfe and Fletcher, 1839), I, 127–28.
For discussions of Lyell and the Principles of Geology, see Stephen Jay Gould, Times Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); and Nicolaas A. Rupke, The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the English School of Geology (1814–1849) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). For discussions of a nineteenth-century geological controversy that touches on issues of epistemology and narrative, see Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and James A. Secord, Controversy in Victorian Geology: The Cambrian—Silurian Dispute (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Christopher Clausen’s “Sherlock Holmes, Order, and the Late-Victorian Mind,” in The Moral Imagination: Essays on Literature and Ethics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), pp. 51–85, and Geoffrey H. Hartman’s “Literature High and Low: The Case of the Mystery Story,” in The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, eds Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), pp. 210–29, explore the unsatisfactory nature of the ending to The Hound of the Baskervilles in particular and to detective stories in general.
Thomas H. Huxley, “Palaeontology and the Doctrine of Evolution,” in Discourses: Biological & GeologicaI, vol. 8 of Collected Essays (1894; reprint, London: Macmillan, 1908), p. 342. All further references to the essay appear in the text. For a discussion of Huxley and detective fiction, see Ian Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 153–55.
Rudwick, Meaning of Fossils, p. 252. In Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), Adrian Desmond provides a different version of the episode (pp. 471–85). Also, see Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1982), pp. 71, 520–23.
See Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 130–49.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure 01 Scientipc Revolutions, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 65, 67, 77.
See Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science, Cambridge History of Science, eds George Basalla and Owen Hannaway (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Gold-Bug,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 585. All further references to Poe stories are to this edition and appear in the text.
See Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest-Romance,” in Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), pp. 3–24; and Ross Macdonald, “The Writer as Detective Hero,” in Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robin W. Winks (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), pp. 179–87.
Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle, Under the Command of Captain Fitzroy, R.N. from 1832 to 1836 (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), p. 227. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
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© 2003 Lawrence Frank
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Frank, L. (2003). Reading the Gravel Page: Lyell, Darwin, and Doyle. In: Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919328_7
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