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The Savage Genius of Sherlock Holmes
Neill, Anna
Neill, Anna
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Abstract
When Dr. Watson first meets Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, the former is an itinerant medical veteran of the Second Afghan War who, sick and rootless, without “kith or kin” in England, is naturally drawn to London, “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the empire are irreversibly drained” (6; ch. 1). Lacking emotional ties, physical strength, and purpose of any real kind, Watson seems to demonstrate the “feverish restlessness” and “blunted discouragement” that Max Nordau described as degenerative symptoms of the age. Watson's identification with urban refuse of the empire, together with his metaphor of the metropolitan landscape as cultural sewer, suggests Nordau's degenerative “feeling[s] of immanent perdition and extinction” (2) and emphasizes both the pervasiveness of modern social decay and the destructive potential of insalubrious influences that lurk within the civilized world as much as they do on its remote peripheries.
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This is the published version, made available with the permission of the publisher. Copyright 2009, Cambridge University Press.
Date
2012-06-01
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Cambridge University Press
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Sherlock Holmes
Citation
Neill, Anna. "The Savage Genius of Sherlock Holmes." Victorian Literature and Culture 37 (2009): 611-626. http://dx.doi.com/10.1017/S1060150309090378