Professionalism and the cultural politics of work in the Sherlock Holmes stories

Abstract

Nicola Humble contends that middlebrow fiction is ‘very much the literature of the middle classes, paying a meticulous attention to their shifting desires and self-images’ (Humble, 2001: p. 5). This is the type of literature, Humble argues, which ‘the majority of people read’: which makes book-of-the-month club lists in newspapers, sells in its tens of thousands, and packs the shelves of lending libraries (ibid.). The 12 Sherlock Holmes stories, published in The Strand magazine from 1891-92, and which would later be collected as the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), appeared 30 or so years before the term ‘middlebrow’ existed (see Macdonald ‘Introduction’, this volume). Nonetheless, the Holmes stories themselves, their publishing history, the position of The Strand within the late-Victorian literary marketplace, and the career of Arthur Conan Doyle more broadly, engage with the issues of class, money, popularity and value which framed later debates on the middlebrow. The ‘battle of the brows’ which took place in interwar Britain echoes many late nineteenth-century anxieties about literary hierarchy and the morality of writing for money. Doyle’s Holmes stories are infused with these issues.