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32 (p. 616) Swan: In 1860 English chemist and physicist Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914) invented a primitive electric light; in 1880 both Swan and Thomas Edison produced a practical light bulb.

33 (p. 674) Kneller . . . Reynolds: German-born Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723) was a court painter for Charles II, William III, and other monarchs; he became the leading portrait painter of his time. Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), one of the great names in English painting, was also known for portraits.

34 (p. 675) Rodney . . . Baskerville . . . Pitt: British admiral George Brydges Rodney (1718-1792), won a number of important naval battles against the French, Spanish and Dutch. William Pitt (1759-1806) was prime minister for eighteen years under George III.

35 (p. 695) the De Reszkes: Jean de Reszke (1850-1925), renowned Polish tenor, was the leading singer in Paris between 1884 and 1889. He often appeared with his brother Edouard and sister Josephine.

COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the history of the stories. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.

Comments

G. K. CHESTERTON

In attempting to reach the genuine psychological reason for the popularity of detective stories, it is necessary to rid ourselves of many mere phrases. It is not true, for example, that the populace prefer bad literature to good, and accept detective stories because they are bad literature. The mere absence of artistic subtlety does not make a book popular. Bradshaw’s Railway Guide contains a few gleams of psychological comedy, yet it is not read aloud uproariously on winter evenings. If detective stories are read with more exuberance than railway guides, it is certainly because they are more artistic. Many good books have fortunately been popular; many bad books, still more fortunately, have been unpopular. A good detective story would probably be even more popular than a bad one. The trouble in this matter is that many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil. To write a story about a burglary is, in their eyes, a sort of spiritual manner of committing it. To persons of somewhat weak sensibility this is natural enough; it must be confessed that many detective stories are as full of sensational crime as one of Shakespeare’s plays.

There is, however, between a good detective story and a bad detective story as much, or, rather more, difference than there is between a good epic and a bad one. Not only is a detective story a perfectly legitimate form of art, but it has certain definite and real advantages as an agent of the public weal. . . .

The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtraction sums. Anything which tends, even under the fantastic form of the minutiæ of Sherlock Holmes, to assert this romance of detail in civilization, to emphasize this unfathomably human character in flints and tiles, is a good thing.

—from The Defendant (1901)

THE ATHENÆUM

The work that has made this author popular is the series of tales, admirable in their way, associated with Sherlock Holmes, a character, as is now generally known, imitated from Poe. Sherlock Holmes has so seized the popular ear that he almost alone of the abundance of men and women provided