how do sherlock holmes and arthur conan doyle handles class differences
Answers
Throughout the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes stories, there is quite a bit of commentary concerning the social classes of the Victorian era. Whether Doyle was depicting Holmes as “upholding the status quo” of the time is a topic that is frequently debated because class inequality was a frighteningly real thing at the time. Women were often thought of as less intelligent than their male counterparts and there was a growing tension between the upper class and the middle and lower classes. Doyle also spends a good amount of time talking about a “criminal class” who are predisposed to take to a life of crime and often composed of people of the lower and working classes. This, by itself, would suggest that Doyle believed that poor people were destined to a life of crime, but I believe it’s a little more complicated than that. There are many tongue-in-cheek passages throughout the Sherlock Holmes works and I believe Conan Doyle was using Holmes to address the issues of social inequality rather than to ultimately solve them. In my opinion, Arthur Conan Doyle was questioning the status quo by using villains that didn’t fit in with the criminal class of the time, presenting women as a gender role that could rival men, and by depicting members of the upper class as foolish as well as mean-spirited.
During the story “The Adventure of the Empty House”, Sherlock Holmes comes back from the dead to root out the villains that were on Professor Moriarty’s payroll before the professor fell into the Reichenbach Falls and was killed in “The Final Problem”. One of the men, who was employed by Moriarty, was a character named Colonel Moran, and by the end of the story it was proved that he had attempted to kill Sherlock Holmes and had succeeded in killing Ronald Adair, governor of one of the Australian colonies. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle demonstrated in this story that even somebody as esteemed as a former soldier with connections with the British government could turn to evil and work against the establishment. In fact, Holmes expresses multiple times that he believes criminals do not belong to one solitary class. In “The Adventure of the Empty House” Holmes remarks:
“I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole processions of his ancestors, and that such a sudden turn to good or evil strands for some strong influence which came into the line of his pedigree.”