Abstract
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–02) closes with the requisite coda of the detective novel, the summing up of the case in a coherent narrative organized chronologically and causally with no apparent omissions—with no enigmas, conundrums, or hieroglyphic puzzles unresolved. At first glance, the effect of such “A Retrospection” seems to consolidate the implicit worldview of the art of detection modeled on the reconstructions of the nineteenth-century historical disciplines. In his summing up Sherlock Holmes invokes empirical data, rejects appeals to the supernatural, and offers a narrative account that forgoes teleological claims of any sort, whether theistic or positivistic.
Darwin, in short, is the extraordinary man who, all by himself, embodied the only three beings proclaimed worthy of respect by Baudelaire — for he pulled down an old order, and came to know a large part of the new world that he created. Il n’existe que trois êtres respectables: le pretre, le guerrier, le poète. Savoir, tuer, et crèer. There exist only three beings worthy of our respect: the priest, the warrior, and the poet. Know, kill, and create.
Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002)
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Notes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 2 vols (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1930), II, 766. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man (1872; reprint, Stark, Kans.: De Young Press, 1997), p. 430.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924), pp. 26, 27.
Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905), I, 372–73. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life (New York: Free Press, 1999), pp. 4–5, emphasis added.
Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002), p. 167.
See Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).
Phillip E. Johnson, “Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism,” in Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives, ed. Robert T. Pennock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 68, 66. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. Margaret Cardwell, Clarendon Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 118.
See Gould, Structure of Evolutionary Theory: “variation [in individual organisms] must be unrelated to the direction of evolutionary change; … This fundamental postulate gives Darwinism its ‘two step’ character, the ‘chance’ and ‘necessity’ of [Jacques] Monod’s famous formulation” (p. 144).
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols in 1 (1871; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), II, 405.
Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882 (London: Collins, 1958), p. 92.
For a Darwinian investigation of the history of human societies, see Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). At one point Diamond observes, “Thus, the difficulties historians face in establishing cause-and-effect relations in the history of human societies are broadly similar to the difficulties facing astronomers, climatologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, geologists, and paleontologists” (p. 424). For a recent discussion of the historical imagination in a similar vein, see John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
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© 2003 Lawrence Frank
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Frank, L. (2003). Epilogue: A Retrospection. 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_9
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