The Historical Journal, 46, 3 (2003), pp.

599–622 f 2003 Cambridge University Press

DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X03003170 Printed in the United Kingdom

‘CLAP IF YOU BELIEVE IN SHERLOCK

H O L M E S ’: M A S S C U L T U R E A N D T H E
R E - E N C H A N T M E N T O F M O D E R N I T Y,
c. 1890 – c. 1940
MICHAEL SALER
University of California, Davis

A B S T R A C T. Since the late nineteenth century, Western intellectuals have tended to depict ‘modernity ’ as
being incompatible with ‘ enchantment ’. Thus Max Weber argued that two aspects intrinsic to modernity,
rationalization and bureaucratization, were inimical to the magical attitudes toward human existence that
characterized medieval and early modern thought. His gloomy image of the ‘iron cage ’ of reason echoed the
fears of earlier romantics and was to be repeated by later cultural pessimists through the twentieth century.
This article recovers a different outlook that emerged during the fin-de-siècle, one that reconciled the
rational and secular tenets of modernity with enchantment and that underlies many forms of contemporary
cultural practice. The popularity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is taken as an exemplary
instance of a specifically modern form of enchantment. First, Holmes’s own form of rationalism, ‘ animistic
reason ’, offered an alternative to the narrower instrumental reason that cultural pessimists claimed as a
defining element of modernity. Second, many adult readers at the turn of the century and beyond were able
to pretend that Holmes was real, and his creator fictitious, through the ‘ironic imagination ’, a more
capacious and playful understanding of the imagination than that held by the early Victorians. Both
animistic reason and the ironic imagination made Holmes an iconic figure who enacted and represented the
reconciliation of modernity and enchantment, whereas Doyle, unable to accept this reconciliation, resorted
to spiritualism, a holdover of ‘premodern ’ enchantment.

In 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published an article in The Strand magazine
affirming his belief in the existence of fairies. Accompanying the article were sev-
eral photographs of the alleged sprites, taken by two young girls from Yorkshire
in 1917, which had convinced Doyle of a discovery he termed ‘ epoch-making ’.1
‘ Obvious faking ’ was the preferred term of many of his readers, however. Fans
of the rationalist detective Sherlock Holmes were appalled that his creator, a
trained physician, could display such credulity. Did not Doyle even wonder why
many of the preternatural creatures in the photos were wearing contemporary
evening dresses and had their hair cut in the fashionable ‘ bobbed ’ style ?2 Doyle

1
Arthur Conan Doyle, The coming of the fairies (1922; London, 1997), p. 7.
2
In the 1980s the girls admitted that they faked the photographs using paper cutouts. Terry Staples,
‘The Cottingley fairies’, in Jack Zipes, ed., The Oxford companion to fairy tales (New York, 2000),
pp. 109–10.

599
600 MICHAEL SALER

had already come under public criticism for his wholehearted adoption of spiri-
tualism in 1917, but with his acceptance of fairies even the spiritualists began to
keep their distance.3 In the ‘ Adventure of the chuckle-headed doctor ’, one of
Doyle’s critics had Sherlock Holmes confess to being as baffled as the public : ‘ But
how, ’ Holmes asks, ‘ did a sober-minded and apparently abstemious doctor, last
seen at midnight at the National Sporting Club, come to be found at four a.m. on
the Mendip Hills, bereft of his wits and professing to have spent the night dancing
with fairies ? ’4
The wonderful irony of this situation is that at the same time that Doyle was
criticized for claiming that fairies were real, many of his readers were claiming
that Sherlock Holmes was real. Indeed, Holmes was the first character in modern
literature to be widely treated as if he were real and his creator fictitious.5 Since
his appearance in The Strand magazine in 1891, many either believed Holmes
existed or at least claimed that they did ; and the interwar period witnessed an
outpouring of articles in prominent magazines, and books from respectable pub-
lishers, which treated Holmes and Watson as real individuals, and that never
mentioned Doyle. For example, scholarly ‘ biographies’ of both Holmes and
Watson appeared in 1932, inspiring equally scholarly reviews and leading articles
debating such fine points as which college Holmes attended or how many wives
Watson had. Looking back years later, the author of the Watson biography stated
he was ‘ amazed at the number of columns which editors allotted to reviews of
these two books’.6 He was not alone in his surprise. Doyle, who clearly was willing
to countenance many unusual ideas, nevertheless thought it was ‘ incredible how
realistic some people take [this imaginary character] to be ’.7 G. K. Chesterton
observed, ‘ The real inference [of these works] is that Sherlock Holmes really
existed and that Conan Doyle never existed. If posterity only reads these latter
books it will certainly suppose them to be serious. It will imagine that Sherlock
Holmes was a man.’8
Was this simply a further peculiarity of the English ? One English reviewer
thought so : ‘Does anything puzzle a foreigner more … than the enthusiasm with
which our learned men … investigate the character and career of two purely
imaginary persons ? ’9 But the fancy that Holmes and Watson were real was an
international phenomenon. Americans also published articles and books treating
Doyle’s characters as real. The Saturday Review of Literature under Christopher

3
Daniel Stashower, Teller of tales: a life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (New York, 1999), p. 356.
4
Richard Lancelyn Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters (London, 1986), p. 28.
5
As Jacques Barzun noted, this ‘has happened in no other book and no other character in recent
times. It’s a phenomenon.’ Jacques Barzun, ‘ The adventures of Sherlock Holmes: a radio discussion’,
in Philip A. Shreffler, ed., The Baker Street reader : cornerstone writings about Sherlock Holmes (Westport, CT,
1984), p. 25.
6
S. C. Roberts, Adventures with authors (Cambridge, 1966), p. 228.
7
Harold Orel, ed., Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: interviews and recollections (London, 1991), p. 81.
8
G. K. Chesterton, ‘Sherlock Holmes the God’, G.K.’s Weekly, 21 (21 Feb. 1935), pp. 403–4.
9
Roberts, Adventures with authors, p. 231.
 ‘C L A P I F Y O U B E L I E V E’ 601
Morley’s editorship in the 1930s and 1940s published many pieces asserting the
reality of the characters ; and even a mystery novel of 1940, Anthony Boucher’s
The case of the Baker Street Irregulars, could not resist injecting a note of realism into
the fictional proceedings : the dedication read ‘All characters portrayed or
referred to in this novel are fictitious, with the exception of Sherlock Holmes, to
whom this book is dedicated.’10
Today we have little trouble pretending that fantastic characters exist, as Star
Trek fandom or concordances to The lord of the rings prove. But Sherlock Holmes
was the first fictional creation that adults openly embraced as ‘real ’ while delib-
erately minimizing or ignoring its creator, and this fetishization of Holmes has
continued for over a century. There were other fictional characters preceding
Holmes who evoked considerable public interest, of course : Richardson’s Pamela,
Goethe’s Werther, and Dickens’s Little Nell immediately come to mind. But the
Holmes cult was significantly different from the sporadic fads for these other
characters. Many readers identified directly with Pamela, Werther, and Little
Nell, all of whom were noted for their passionate sensibilities, which encouraged
sentimental identification ; Holmes, on the other hand, is a distinctly fantastic
creation who provides little room for the affective release these other characters
elicited. And Holmes’s fantastic nature, his apparent divorce from the concerns of
the mundane world, is not the only notable difference between him and these
popular precursors. The cult of Holmes focuses not just on a singular character,
but on his entire world : fans of the ‘canon ’ obsess about every detail of the
fictional universe Doyle created, mentally inhabiting this ‘ geography of the im-
agination ’ in a way that was never true for the partisans of earlier characters.
( The desire to envisage this fictional world as autonomously ‘ real ’ is such that
many readers, particularly the self-professed Sherlockians, self-consciously ignore
the existence of its creator ; meetings of the ‘ Baker Street Irregulars’, for example,
deliberately avoid mentioning Doyle. Richardson, on the other hand, was often
invoked in the discussions and satires stemming from Pamela, just as Goethe and
Dickens were inextricably linked with their popular creations. These links tended
to preclude the characters from being mistaken as real, whereas there were many
readers who thought Sherlock Holmes actually existed, as will be discussed below.)
And the Holmesian phenomenon has continued for over a century, far longer
than the intermittent eighteenth-century vogues for Pamela, let alone the more
restricted generational enthusiasms for Werther, Little Nell, and others.11
Sherlockian devotion is thus a departure from preceding public infatuations
with fictional characters, and a template for succeeding public infatuations for the

10
Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, p. 40.
11
For an analysis of the eighteenth-century Pamela ‘craze’, see James Grantham Turner, ‘Novel
panic: picture and performance in the reception of Richardson’s Pamela’, Representations, 48 (1994),
pp. 70–96; T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: a biography (Oxford, 1971),
pp. 119–53. For an interesting exploration of the vogue for the late Victorian comic-strip character
Alley Sloper, see Peter Bailey, ‘Ally Sloper’s half-holiday: comic art in the 1880’s’, in Peter Bailey,
Popular culture and performance in the Victorian city (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 47–79.
602 MICHAEL SALER

characters and worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, and so on : as

the New York Times reported recently, ‘ today there are hundreds of thousands,
perhaps millions of people, whose grasp of the history, politics and mythological
traditions of purely imaginary places could surely qualify them for an advanced
degree’.12 The popular fascination with Holmes commences this widespread
embrace of fictional and often fantastic worlds during the past century. The
question is, why Holmes ?
There are several answers to this question, but the most important has to do
with the climate of cultural pessimism among intellectuals during the waning
decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. This
particular stance towards modernity was famously captured by Max Weber’s
discussion of the ‘ disenchantment of the world ’, which he believed was the
consequence of capitalist instrumental rationality and the growth of the bureau-
cratic state. Many at the turn of the century mourned the apparent absence of
communal beliefs and higher ideals in an age that seemed dominated by posi-
tivism and materialism, and turned to alternative sources of spiritual sustenance.
These ranged from the nostalgic medievalism of the arts and crafts movement,
to a fascination with non-Christian beliefs and non-Western art, to attempts to
reconcile science and religion through spiritualism, occultism, and psychical
research.
However, these and other efforts to escape from the ‘ iron cage of rationality ’
that Weber imputed to the modern West were uneasy compromises between the
past and the present that left many unsatisfied. ‘Modernity’ was widely associated
with progress towards the rational and away from the supernatural, and efforts
by believers to impart the veneer of scientific respectability to the supernatural
were frequently greeted with scepticism if not outright disdain by contemporary
commentators. Thus psychical research and spiritualism, both nineteenth-
century efforts at finding a via media between science and religion, tended to be
marginalized by established science at the turn of the century. Several of the
prominent scientists in the Society for Psychical Research who supported spiri-
tualism, such as Sir William Crookes, Sir W. F. Barrett, and Oliver Lodge, were
viewed by most of their professional peers as credulous believers who tried to
legitimate their faith with scientific rhetoric but without compelling scientific
evidence – just as Doyle’s belief in fairies was to be viewed.13 And while the
efflorescence of spiritualism at the popular level in Britain during and immedi-
ately after the Great War was an understandable emotive reaction to the
tremendous losses suffered by many, it too was often represented as a ‘ traditional ’

12
A. O. Scott, ‘A hunger for fantasy, an empire to feed it’, New York Times (16 June 2002), Section 2,
p. 26.
13
Janet Oppenheim, The other world: spiritualism and psychical research in England, 1850–1914
(Cambridge, 1985), pp. 338–97; Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, technology and magical thinking, 1880–1920
(Cambridge, 2001), p. 15.
 ‘C L A P I F Y O U B E L I E V E’ 603
rather than ‘ modern ’ phenomenon (using the binary oppositions common to the
period) and one that was diminishing by the 1930s.14
This is not to deny that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries wit-
nessed significant attempts to reconcile the traditional and the modern in Britain
and America, but only to emphasize the ambivalent and contested nature of these
efforts.15 Among elites in Europe, a more categorical association between mod-
ernity and disenchantment had a long history, extending back to the seventeenth
century ;16 despite acknowledging the advantages of modernity, by the fin-de-siècle
the discourse had become tinged with pessimism. Adherents of positivism,
materialism, and scientific as well as literary naturalism often presented a bleak
picture of human existence, governed by bestial instincts that were themselves
reducible to mere chemical and physical processes. Disenchantment was pro-
nounced in the writings of cultural pessimists ranging from Arthur Schopenhauer
at the onset of the nineteenth century to Max Nordau, author of Degeneration, at
the century’s end. Perhaps proving that you can never get too much of a bad
thing, the discourse continued into the new century in the writings of Toynbee,
Spengler, Freud, and many others.
The character of Sherlock Holmes, however, represented and celebrated
the central tenets of modernity adumbrated at the time – not just rationalism and
secularism, but also urbanism and consumerism. The stories made these tenets
magical without introducing magic : Holmes demonstrated how the modern
world could be re-enchanted through means entirely consistent with modernity.
Because Holmes represented the values of modernity in ways that addressed the
criticisms of the cultural pessimists, he spoke to the dissatisfactions and hopes of
adults as well as to the imaginations of children. Like many of his readers, Holmes
yearned for enchantment, confessing to his ‘ love of all that is bizarre and outside
the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life ’. But Holmes was also
able to gratify his sense of wonder by embracing modernity, rather than turning
nostalgically to the past : ‘ for strange effects and extraordinary combinations we

14
As Jay Winter has argued, ‘The Great War, the most ‘‘modern’’ of wars, triggered an avalanche
of the ‘‘unmodern’’. One salient aspect of this apparent contradiction is the wartime growth in
spiritualism.’ Jay Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning: the Great War in European cultural history
(Cambridge, 1998), p. 54. Terms like ‘tradition’ and ‘ modernity’ are complex and not necessarily
mutually exclusive; there were significant efforts to reconcile the two by intellectuals in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. See Robert Alter, Necessary angels: tradition and modernity in Kafka, Benjamin,
and Scholem (Cambridge, MA, 1991); Peter J. Bowler, Reconciling science and religion: the debate in early-
twentieth-century Britain (Chicago, 2002); Bruno Latour, We have never been modern, trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge, MA, 1993). But this line of thought, arguably, was not the dominant one in Europe
during the fin-de-siècle: contemporaries tended to see modernity and tradition as opposing one another.
See J. W. Burrow, The crisis of reason: European thought, 1848–1914 (New Haven, 2000), pp. 112–13.
15
Michael Saler, The avant-garde in interwar England: ‘medieval modernism’ and the London underground
(New York, 1999).
16
Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the order of nature: 1150–1750 (Cambridge, MA,
1998).
604 MICHAEL SALER

must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the
imagination ’.17
Sherlock Holmes became a modern icon partly because he utilized reason in a
manner magical and adventurous, rather than in the purely instrumental fashion
that many contemporaries feared was the stultifying characteristic of the age.18
He expanded the definition of rationality beyond a narrow, means-ends instru-
mentalism to include the imagination – he calls his procedure ‘ the scientific use of
the imagination ’19 – resulting in a more capacious concept that can be termed
‘ animistic reason ’ because it imbues its objects with meaning. It was through his
animistic reason that Holmes the private detective bested professional detectives
on cases, as he himself admitted. (In one case he confides to Watson that ‘Inspector
Gregory, to whom the case has been committed, is an extremely competent
officer. Were he but gifted with imagination he might rise to great heights in his
profession. ’)20 Holmes solved cases by relating seemingly discrete facts to a more
encompassing and meaningful configuration, whose integuments were derived
from a combination of rigorous observation, precise logic, and lively imagination.
The professional investigators whom Holmes trumps in these cases tend to be
unimaginative positivists who miss everything that is not presented directly before
their senses, or are unable to interpret creatively those facts that are :
‘Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention ? ’
‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. ’
‘The dog did nothing in the night-time. ’
‘That was the curious incident ’, remarked Sherlock Holmes.21

17
Arthur Conan Doyle, The complete Sherlock Holmes (New York, 1992), p. 176.
18
While many nineteenth-century writers feared that positivism excluded the imagination as a
legitimate source of knowledge, a closer reading of the positivists themselves reveals that several were
less antagonistic towards art and the imagination than their contemporaries gave them credit for. See
Peter Allen Dale, In pursuit of a scientific culture : science, art, and society in the Victorian age (Madison, WI,
1989); Jonathan Smith, Fact and feeling: Baconian science and the nineteenth-century literary imagination
(Madison, WI, 1994). And the turn towards idealism in late Victorian intellectual culture also gave
wider sway to the imagination than was to be found among the scientific naturalists and materialists ;
see Bowler, Reconciling, pp. 18–19. Nevertheless, the dominant discourse of mid- to late nineteenth-
century positivists, materialists, scientific naturalists, and cultural pessimists associated Western mod-
ernity with a narrow form of rationality inimical to wider sources of meaning, and this pervasive
association of modernity with disenchantment continued to be perpetuated among intellectuals in
Europe and America through the twentieth century: ‘To be a member of a modern elite is to regard
wonder and wonders with studied indifference ; enlightenment is still in part defined as the anti-
marvelous.’ Daston and Park, Wonders, p. 368. In recent years, however, a number of scholars have
attempted to redress this discourse by demonstrating ways in which modernity can be reconciled with
enchantment. See Jane Bennett, The enchantment of modern life : attachments, crossings, and ethics (New Jersey,
2001) ; Kelly Besecke, ‘Speaking of meaning in modernity: reflexive spirituality as a cultural resource’,
Sociology of Religion, 62 (2001), pp. 365–81; James Cook, The arts of deception: playing with fraud in the age of
Barnum (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Simon During, Modern enchantments: the cultural power of secular magic
(Cambridge, MA, 2002); Edward A. Tiryakian, ‘Dialectics of modernity: reenchantment and de-
differentiation as counterprocesses ’, in Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser, eds., Social change and
19
modernity (Berkeley, CA, 1992), pp. 78–93. Doyle, The complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 687.
20 21
Ibid., pp. 338–9. Ibid., p. 347.
 ‘C L A P I F Y O U B E L I E V E’ 605
Holmes’s dramatic use of animistic reason was the mass culture exemplification
of a complex of ideas that circulated as part of the fin-de-siècle revolt against
the dominant discourses of positivism, materialism, and scientific naturalism. In
creating Holmes, Doyle had been influenced by earlier writers, such as Edgar
Allan Poe and Jules Verne, whose tales linked the processes of ratiocination with
an imaginative sense of wonder, and many of Doyle’s contemporaries – figures as
diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Oscar Wilde, Ernst Mach, Henri
Poincare, and William James – were among those who maintained that reason
and the imagination were inextricable.22 By insisting on the integration of
reason and the imagination, these thinkers – and popular icons such as Holmes –
gainsaid the fashionable cultural pessimism of the period and made it possible to
see modernity and enchantment as compatible rather than antagonistic.
At the level of mass culture, this effort took on momentum with the increasing
popularity of detective fiction in the wake of Holmes. It was aided by the estab-
lishment of ‘ science fiction ’ as a defined literary genre in 1926, when Hugo
Gernsback published Amazing Stories in America, the first magazine devoted
entirely to what he initially termed ‘ scientifiction ’.23 An early contributor to
Amazing Stories highlighted the role that Gernsback intended this new genre to
play in breaking down the seeming antagonism between reason and imagination,
modernity and enchantment : ‘ Scientifiction is the product of the human imagin-
ation, guided by the suggestion of science. It takes the basis of science, considers
all the clues that science has to offer, and then adds a thing that is alien to
science – imagination. ’24 While writers like Poe and Verne and the later genres
of detective and science fiction celebrated the romance of reason, providing an
antidote to the narrower construal of rationality so pervasive at the time, it was
arguably Holmes who made this romance most explicit and attractive to a mass
reading public in sixty narratives published over the course of four decades.
These tales made analysis an adventure, quotidian facts an infinite source of
wonder: ‘Depend upon it, ’ insists Holmes, ‘there is nothing so unnatural as the
commonplace. ’25 When Watson suggests that Holmes’s analytical methods are
the most exciting aspects of the stories he narrates, Holmes demurs: ‘Pshaw, my
dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly
tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer
shades of analysis and deduction !’26 Perhaps this was true before Holmes came
into their lives. But it was his example that helped thousands of readers to perceive
the romance of reason, ranging from elites disillusioned with the instrumentalized,
means-ends form of cognition that seemed to embody the spirit of the age, to

22
For a discussion of intellectuals who tried to fuse the ‘two cultures’ of science and art, see Wolf
Lepenies, Between literature and science: the rise of sociology (Cambridge, 1988).
23
The phrase ‘ science fiction’ and the first magazine devoted to it were established in America
by the Luxembourg immigrant Gernback. Amazing Stories was established in 1926 to publish
‘scientifiction’ ; Gernsback modified the ungainly phrase to ‘science fiction’ in 1929.
24
Jack Williamson, ‘Scientifiction, searchlight of science’, Amazing Stories Quarterly, 1 (1928),
25 26
p. 435. Doyle, The complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 191. Ibid., p. 317.
606 MICHAEL SALER

ordinary readers who might not have associated reason with disenchantment –
but probably did not associate it with enchantment, either. After encountering
Holmes, many of them did.
Indeed, numerous fans of the great detective emulated his own methods by
bringing their intellects and imaginations to bear on Doyle’s stories, scrutinizing
every particular as if Holmes himself was a mystery that had been presented to
them to solve. Some actually believed that Holmes existed – ‘naı̈ve believers ’ –
but most were ‘ ironic believers ’, who were not so much willingly suspending
their disbelief in a fictional character as willingly believing in him with the double-
minded awareness that they were engaged in pretence. Since the Enlightenment,
belief in imaginary beings had been relegated to an immature stage of devel-
opment, one more suited to children, the lower classes, or ‘ primitives ’ than to
bourgeois adults. But the fin-de-siècle recognition that perceived reality was to some
extent an imaginative construct, and that reason itself was beholden to imagin-
ative insights and desires, made indulgence in the imagination more permissible :
one could actively believe, albeit ironically, in fictions, rather than merely sus-
pending one’s disbelief in accordance with Coleridge’s formulation. By emulating
Holmes’s deployment of animistic reason, adults could immerse themselves
in imaginary worlds without relinquishing their practical reason : they could
‘ believe’ in Holmes in an ‘enchanted ’ yet still rational way. The Times noted in
1932 that the authors who treated Holmes and Watson as real did so with the
greatest sobriety, but that this was ‘ only their fun – the single-minded fun of
spiritually young Sherlockians at play ’.27
‘ Play ’ was precisely what many cultural pessimists thought had been driven out
of the modern world by the ineluctable advance of an impoverished instrumental
reason. Johan Huizinga, in his classic survey of the role of play in the creation of
civilization, Homo ludens (1938), ended on a morose note : ‘More and more the sad
conclusion forces itself upon us that the play-element in culture has been on the
wane ever since the eighteenth century.’28 But the widespread ‘ belief ’ in Sherlock
Holmes is a telling illustration that precisely the opposite situation existed in
Western culture at the very time Huizinga was writing. With the wider accept-
ance of the interrelations between reason and imagination in everyday life, as well
as the extension of leisure and the spectacularization of culture in the forms of
mass literature, films, and radio, individuals were both encouraged and enabled
to play without relinquishing their grip on reality.29 The double-minded con-
sciousness of the ‘ironic imagination ’ accompanied these intellectual and social
changes ; rational adults could immerse themselves in imaginary worlds of mass
culture without mistaking these worlds for reality because between the fin-de-siècle
and the interwar period these adults had become highly conscious of the artifices
that comprise human subjectivity and ‘ reality ’ itself.

27
Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, p. 35.
28
Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens (1938; London, 1970), p. 233.
29
James E. Combs, Play world: the emergence of the new ludic age ( Westport, CT, 2000).
 ‘C L A P I F Y O U B E L I E V E’ 607
Thus a widespread form of modern rationality has become the animistic reason
employed by Sherlock Holmes, and a prevailing form of the modern imagination
is the ironic imagination deployed by many of his devotees. Together they con-
tribute to a particular form that enchantment takes in the modern period. The
conceptual intertwining of reason and imagination in the twentieth century yields
modern, secular enchantments that replace the supernatural enchantments of
the premodern period : as Richard Rorty argues, the progressive disenchantment
of the world through science ‘ force[s] us to the conclusion that the human
imagination is the only source of enchantment ’.30 Modern enchantments are
enjoyed as constructs in which one can become immersed but not submerged.
Rationalist scepticism is held in abeyance, yet complete belief is undercut by
an ironic awareness that one is holding scepticism at bay. Cultural pessimists have
frequently criticized mass culture as a form of false consciousness or dismissed
it as a pernicious escape from reality. While both of these positions can have
a measure of truth, depending on the situations they discuss, neither takes into
account the buffering roles of animistic reason and the ironic imagination, which
inhibit complete acceptance or acquiescence into any particular cultural con-
struct. This rational and ironic stance distinguishes modern enchantment from
earlier forms of enchantment : the distinction, as we shall now see, between
Conan Doyle’s premodern belief in preternatural fairies, and his readers’ mod-
ern, ironic belief in the fictional Sherlock Holmes.

I
Many of the early readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories assumed that the author
must share those attributes that made Holmes so quintessentially modern : his
secularism, his rationalism, his scepticism. But from an early age Doyle had
expressed ambivalence about modernity. He had been raised as a Catholic and
educated by Jesuits, but as a young man he renounced Catholicism and gravi-
tated toward the rationalist and positivist stance of his medical school instructors
at the University of Edinburgh. Yet he was not comfortable with modern atheism
and materialism either ; his disenchantment with these aspects of modernity, and
dissatisfaction with agnosticism, led him to explore spiritualism beginning in
1886, a year before he wrote the first Holmes story. His spiritualist convictions
increased over the decades, and he announced his full-fledged conversion to
spiritualism in 1917 (before either his son or his brother were killed in the Great
War).
The Holmes stories reflect Doyle’s ambivalence about modernity. Twentieth-
century critics often argue that Holmes’s continued popularity is partly due to
the nostalgic vision of the late Victorian era the stories convey : T. S. Eliot, for
example, claimed that ‘ Sherlock Holmes reminds us always of the pleasant

30
Richard Rorty, Times Literary Supplement, 3 Dec. 1999, p. 11.
608 MICHAEL SALER

externals of nineteenth-century London ’,31 and Vincent Starrett wrote that

Holmes and Watson ‘ still live … in a nostalgic country of the mind : where it is
always 1895 ’.32 But aside from the occasional reference to a cozy fire in the hearth
or buttered toast on the table at 221B Baker Street, Doyle’s stories tend to
emphasize the unpleasant rather than pleasant externals of nineteenth-century
London. In the first Holmes tale, ‘A study in scarlet ’, London is described by
Watson as ‘ that great cesspool ’ and ‘ the great wilderness ’ ; other descriptions of
the urban environment focus on dank fog, murky clouds, ‘mud-colored streets’,
‘ dingy streets and dreary byways’, and so on.33 In ‘The sign of four ’ the externals
remain the same: in London the ‘ mud colored clouds dropped sadly over the
muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused
light which threw a feeble, circular glimmer upon slimy pavement. ’34 Once you
start to notice this trend, which continues through the series, it is difficult to
imagine ‘ pleasant externals ’ in the London of Doyle’s imagination. Twentieth-
century critics have projected their own nostalgia for a distant era on to the
stories – an important reason for Holmes’s popularity, particularly during the
troubled thirties – but the stories themselves depict the squalor and anomie of
modern urban existence.
Doyle’s ambivalence is also reflected in the character of Holmes, who is as
much a victim of modern reason as he is, in Watson’s words, ‘ the most perfect
reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen ’.35 Holmes is often
trapped in the iron cage of reason : the banal routine of modern life bores him,
and at times he resorts to cocaine for stimulation. As he tells Watson in ‘ The
wisteria lodge ’, ‘Life is commonplace, the papers are sterile; audacity and
romance seem to have passed for ever from the criminal world. ’36 Yet when an
interesting case does arrive, Holmes snaps out of his lethargy : mystery has been
restored to the world, however briefly, and as Holmes notes, ‘mystery … stimu-
lates the imagination ’37 and restores romance to the world. But this is a modern
form of romance in which reason provides the magic, and indeed Holmes’s use
of reason is so uncannily effective that Watson remarks, ‘You would certainly
have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago. ’38 In the Holmes stories,
rationality is the problem, but it is also the solution.
Doyle was not satisfied with the romance of reason, however. He grew tired
of Holmes and tried to end the series in 1893 by having Holmes and his arch-
nemesis Professor Moriarty plunge into the Reichenbach Falls. Public demand
and a very lucrative contract from his publisher, however, led Doyle to revive
Holmes a decade later. But Doyle never had many good words to say about
his most famous character, and believed that his most lasting novels would be his

31
Shreffler, ed., Baker Street, p. 17.
32
Vincent Starrett, The private life of Sherlock Holmes (New York, 1933), p. 93.
33 34
Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, pp. 15–86. Ibid., p. 98.
35 36
Ibid., p. 161. T. S. Blakeney, Sherlock Holmes : fact or fiction (London, 1932), p. 126.
37 38
Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 37. Ibid., p. 162.
 ‘C L A P I F Y O U B E L I E V E’ 609
medieval romances The White Company and Sir Nigel. Doyle was not simply bored
with Holmes, as he himself maintained ; rather, Holmes’s ambivalences about the
modern world were those of his creator, but Holmes’s solution – the use of reason
to re-enchant the world – was not one that Doyle found possible. Like Holmes,
Doyle had been trained to be analytical and sceptical, but unlike Holmes (as far
as we can tell), Doyle had also been brought up in a religious environment, and
he continued to crave the unambiguous certainties, along with the traditional
mysteries, that religion provided. Thus Doyle converted to the faith of spiritual-
ism in 1917, and in 1920 eagerly accepted the photographic evidence of fairies :
‘ these little folks … will become familiar ’, he proclaimed in his article for The
Strand. ‘ The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth-century
mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a
glamour and a mystery to life. ’39 But Doyle’s belief in fairies and supernatural
spirits, a premodern form of enchantment, no longer had a future. Instead, many
of his readers believed in Sherlock Holmes as a way to re-enchant the modern
world without rejecting the secular and sceptical tenets of modernity.

II
Many readers of the Holmes stories no doubt took them as little more than
entertaining fictions, but Holmes also found readers who believed in his existence
from his earliest appearance. After the second Holmes story was published in
1890, Doyle wrote to his editor, surprised that ‘ a … tobacconist actually wrote to
me under cover to you, to ask me where he could get a copy of the monograph in
which Sherlock Holmes described the difference in the ashes of 140 different types
of tobacco ’.40 There were two types of Holmes believers : the ‘ naı̈ve believer ’ and
the ‘ ironic believer’. Let me take each in turn.
The naı̈ve believer genuinely believed that Holmes and Watson were real. The
press had field days reporting on these naı̈ve believers, who wrote letters to
Holmes requesting his assistance or scoured Baker Street looking for his residence.
Doyle received numerous letters addressed to Holmes, as did the magazines that
ran the stories.41 Some responded coyly to their earnest enquirers ; in 1892 the
penny weekly Tit-Bits remarked, ‘ Buttons wishes to know whether Sherlock
Holmes, the detective genius … is or is not an actual person. We cannot positively
say … [ I ]f … we should find that no such person is in existence, we shall then

39
Doyle, The coming of the fairies, p. 32. Doyle’s Uncle Richard was a famous illustrator, who was
known for his depictions of fairies; his father, Charles, had also been interested in fairy lore, and drew
fairies while he was confined to a sanitarium. Arthur Conan Doyle’s willingness to believe in fairies
may thus have had personal as well as spiritual origins. See Martin Booth, The doctor, the detective, and
Arthur Conan Doyle: a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle (London, 1997), p. 321.
40
Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, p. 4.
41
The General Post Office continued to receive letters for Holmes through the 1950s. Booth, The
Doctor, p. 111.
610 MICHAEL SALER

be very much disappointed indeed. ’42 (Although a note of exasperation could

also be detected in the editor’s comments, as in the following to reader ‘H.L. ’ :
‘ It is not true that Oliver Wendell Holmes was the father of Sherlock Holmes ; as
a matter of fact, they were not related at all. ’)43 Interestingly, the press identified
many of these naı̈ve believers as foreigners, perhaps reflecting unease with the
idea that British common sense could in practice be so uncommon. In 1926
a leader in The Times noted that
In certain backward countries, it is said, full obituaries of the great Sherlock were published
as of a real man ; and those who spent any time on the Continent about twenty years ago
may recall seeing … what seemed to be whole libraries of apocryphal Holmes literature,
not by any means translations, but the free creations of a mythological fancy, rather like the
Eastern legends of Alexander the Great.44
And in 1930 one writer to The Times observed that ‘ thousands of people ’ believed
Holmes was real, citing among the thousands the Turks in Constantinople.45 But
press reports of naı̈ve believers were not simply an instance of Orientalism ; in
1937 The Times also enjoyed reporting about an elderly Danish couple who had
written a respectful letter to Holmes requesting financial assistance.46
The naı̈ve belief in Sherlock Holmes can be explained in part by the dynamics
of mass publishing and the beginnings of celebrity culture in the 1880s and 1890s.
The Holmes stories quickly garnered a wide readership among an increasingly
literate population. Doyle’s own talents as an author, and Holmes’s distinctive-
ness as a character, were of course central to the popularity of the series. Several
commentators stressed how lifelike Holmes was in comparison with the detectives
of Edgar Allan Poe and Emile Gaboriau, or of Doyle’s contemporary imitators.47
Doyle also maximized the size of his avid audience by writing the continuing
adventures of his character as self-contained short stories rather than serial
chapters, enabling new readers to become involved with Holmes at any point
in the run of stories, and established readers to become eager anticipators of
his next adventures. George Newnes, the publisher of The Strand and Tit-Bits,
promoted the Holmes stories vigorously in both mass circulation magazines.
While The Strand, in which the Holmes short stories first appeared, was aimed at
a middle-class audience, the penny-weekly Tit-Bits extended Doyle’s readership
into the working classes. Tit-Bits reprinted the Holmes stories after they appeared
in The Strand, and published editorial material implying Holmes was real, as well
as frequent references to, contests about, and parodies of the stories. In addition,
Holmes received enormous media exposure both when Doyle tried to end the
series by killing him in 1893, and when Doyle bowed to public pressure and
brought Holmes back in 1902. Holmes was also one of the first characters to
become ubiquitous through being taken up by all the new mass media. He was

42 43
Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, p. 64. Tit-Bits, 27 (27 Oct. 1894), p. 67.
44 45 46
Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, pp. 143–4. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., pp. 173–4.
47
See, for example, ‘Some inconsistencies of Sherlock Holmes’, Bookman, 14 (1902), p. 446 ;
Christopher Morley, ‘ Notes on Baker Street’, Saturday Review, 18 (28 Jan. 1939), p. 12.
 ‘C L A P I F Y O U B E L I E V E’ 611
visually recognizable through Sidney Paget’s remarkable illustrations in The
Strand ; Doyle said of Paget ‘ he illustrated the stories so well that he made a
type which the whole English-reading race came to recognize’.48 He also became
recognizable through William Gillette’s portrayal of him in a very popular stage
dramatization that toured America and Britain at the turn of the century, through
numerous short films that appeared by the mid-twenties, and through radio
dramatizations as well as feature-length films in the thirties.
Thus Holmes became a media celebrity in his own right, in a period when the
culture of celebrity was new and not yet fully understood. The synergistic effect
of all this attention devoted to Holmes may have encouraged less sophisticated
readers to approach the stories as non-fictional rather than fictional. As Jonathan
Rose has noted, working-class readers who were used to interpreting the Bible
literally might also approach secular literature in the same manner if they were
not familiar with diverse forms of writing, and ‘[e]ven into the early twentieth
century, many older working people had not learned a different method of
reading ’. (The son of one such reader recalled what happened when his mother
read Tom Jones : ‘ She believed every word of it and could not conceive how a man
could sit down and invent the story … out of his head. ’)49 Doyle wrote the stories
in a realist style, with allusions to contemporary events and earlier ‘case-histories ’ ;
readers who were unused to distinguishing among different modes of writing
might easily have fallen into the trap of believing Dr Watson’s compelling, ‘ factual ’
narratives.50
Indeed, Doyle was one of several prominent writers of the fin-de-siècle who
reacted against the dominance of literary realism by artfully combining the em-
piricism and apparent objectivity of the realists with the imaginative fabulations
of the early nineteenth-century romantics. Following the precedents set by Edgar
Allan Poe and Jules Verne, writers like Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis
Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells, and others clothed their
fantastic tales in the guise of realism, creating the genre of the New Romance.51

48
Orel, ed., Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, p. 79.
49
Jonathan Rose, The intellectual life of the British working classes (New Haven, 2001), p. 97.
50
Editors could deliberately efface the distinction between ‘fact ’ and ‘fiction’ in order to attract
readers; at other times sensationalist fiction and reportage were juxtaposed within the same journal or
newspaper. For examples of the blurring between sesational fiction and sensational reportage in the
1860s, see Deborah Wynne, The sensation novel and the Victorian family magazine (New York, 2001). And in
Britain, at least, public education in the years immediately after the 1870 Education Act did not
necessarily train students to distinguish among different genres of writing. David Vincent argues that
at this time the schools tended to provide students with ‘an acquaintance with literacy rather than an
effective command’. David Vincent, Literacy and popular culture : England, 1750–1914 (Cambridge, 1989),
p. 90.
51
Some critics, such as Patrick Brantlinger, have argued that this genre was a reaction against
realism and return to the Gothic. But, as Nicholas Daly notes in his rebuttal to this line of argument,
this was not how contemporary critics envisaged it, a finding my own research supports. Patrick
Brantlinger, The reading lesson: the threat of mass literacy in nineteenth-century British fiction (Bloomington, 1998),
pp. 171–209; Nicholas Daly, Modernism, romance and the fin de siècle: popular fiction and British culture,
1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 12.
612 MICHAEL SALER

To contemporaries, these new works appeared to redress the sense of pessimism

expressed by scientific and literary naturalism during the last third of the century.
‘ The world is disenchanted ’, wrote the critic Andrew Lang in an 1887 sonnet
about Haggard’s She (1887). But, he continued, it can become re-enchanted
through imaginative leaps exemplified by Haggard’s epic.52 Writing about
Haggard’s King Solomon’s mines (1885) and She, the critic W. E. Henley observed
‘ just as it was thoroughly accepted that there were no more stories to be told, that
romance was utterly dried up, and that analysis of character … was the only thing
in fiction attractive to the public, down there came upon us a whole horde of
Zulu divinities and the sempiternal queens of beauty in the caves of Kor ’.53
Many of the works of the New Romance were themselves spectacular texts
for the new age of the spectacle. They utilized the latest advances in printing
technologies, such as half-tone lithography, to incorporate photographs, drawings,
diagrams, and maps as a complement to the authors’ aim of imbuing their
fantasies with an aura of scientific authenticity.54 She, for example, contains
numerous footnotes – a mark of objective scholarship – by both the narrator and
an unnamed ‘ editor ’ to correct or elaborate on the narration. (Thus footnote 2,
attributed to the narrator, begins ‘ The Kallikrates here referred to by my friend
was a Spartan, spoken of by Herodotus (Herod. Ix.72) as being remarkable for his
beauty. He fell at the glorious battle of Plataea (September 22, B.C. 479).’)55 The
frontispiece of She is a photograph – another contemporary indicia of truth56 – of
a ‘ Facsimile of the Sherd of Amenartas ’, Haggard’s invented potsherd that
provides the protagonists with key information for their rather incredible quest
in search of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. Haggard had an artist friend create the
sherd, and had three separate scholars insure that the ancient Greek, Latin, and
Old English inscriptions on it were correct ; these were also presented in the three
languages within the text itself.57 One reviewer called She ‘a marvelously realistic
tale of fantastic adventures ’, and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine praised Haggard
as ‘ the avatar of the old story-teller, with a flavour of the nineteenth century
and scientific explanation ’.58 In these ways, the New Romance facilitated the
exercise of animistic reason, in which imaginative explorations were grounded
in rationalist tropes, as well as the ironic imagination, which delighted in the
sober presentation of the extravagant. But the knowing admixture of realism and

52
Anonymous [Andrew Lang], He (London, 1887), n.p.
53
Peter Beresford Ellis, H. Rider Haggard: a voice from the infinite (London, 1978), p. 119.
54
Neil Harris, ‘Iconography and intellectual history: the halftone effect ’, in Neil Harris, Cultural
excursions: marketing appetites and cultural tastes in modern America (Chicago, 1990), pp. 304–17.
55
H. Rider Haggard, She (London, 1887), p. 10.
56
For a discussion on how photography was used as evidence by the Victorians, see Jennifer
Tucker, ‘Photography as witness, detective, and imposter: visual representation in Victorian science’,
in Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian science in context (Chicago, 1997), pp. 378–408.
57
Ellis, H. Rider Haggard, p. 108.
58
Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard: his life and works (London, 1960), pp. 102–16.
 ‘C L A P I F Y O U B E L I E V E’ 613
romanticism could also make it more difficult for naı̈ve readers to distinguish fact
from fiction.
This befuddlement was exacerbated when Doyle became a celebrity alongside
his celebrated creation. He was featured in many of the gossipy interviews then
being pioneered by the New Journalists, in which he and his interlocutor casually
referred to Holmes as a real person. Holmes returned the favour, granting his
first interview to the National Observer in 1892 and then to other publications. As
celebrities Doyle and Holmes were thus linked, and often confused, in the public
mind, especially as Doyle himself attempted to solve several highly publicized
crimes. He recalled one unnerving lecture engagement when the audience seemed
visibly disappointed at his appearance at the lectern : ‘ they all expected to see in
me a cadaverous looking person with marks of cocaine injections all over him ’.59
When Holmes received obituary notices in 1893, many thought that Doyle had
died ;60 when Doyle ran for parliament in 1904, a newspaper ran a story headlined
‘ How Holmes Tried Politics.’61 When Doyle announced his belief in fairies,
one headline read ‘ Poor Sherlock Holmes, Hopelessly Crazy ? ’62 At a time when
celebrity culture itself was beginning to efface distinctions between reality and
appearance, naı̈ve readers might be forgiven for mistaking Doyle for Holmes, or
Holmes for a real person.
The second type of believer was the ‘ ironic believer ’, who pretended that
Holmes was real – but for whom this pretence was so earnest that the uninitiated
might not recognize it as pretence. Like the naı̈ve believers, the ironic believers
appeared in the early 1890s. But the tenor of the ironists’ writings changed over
time, from outright parodies to more solemn, quasi-scholarly investigations.
Initially, the ironists published parodies and pastiches of the stories in college
magazines, Punch, and Tit-Bits. A famous example was Ronald Knox’s ‘ Studies
in the literature of Sherlock Holmes ’, first published in 1912. In this piece Knox
parodied the German Higher Criticism of the Bible by applying similar methods
to the numerous discrepancies in the stories. Questions about whether Watson’s
name was John or James, whether he was shot in the shoulder or the leg, ad
infinitum, were resolved by reference to the multiple authors of the canon : the
Deutero-Watson, the Proto-Watson, and so on.63
Knox’s essay was not only funny; it used Holmes’s own methods to solve the
mysteries of Holmes’s history, enabling the ironist to play at being his favourite
character while reading his exploits. When Knox’s essay was republished in 1928,
a year after the final Sherlock Holmes story had been published, it inspired a host
of more solemn studies of the series that have continued ever since. These works
usually maintained that Holmes and Watson were real, and simply ignore Doyle.
Such studies were not entirely serious, but they usually were not spoofs either :
most often they were quite scholarly and sober, epitomizing rational scholarship.

59 60
Orel, ed., Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, p. 80. Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, p. 80.
61 62
Ibid., p. 28. Stashower, Teller of tales, p. 351.
63
Ronald A. Knox, Essays in satire (London, 1928).
614 MICHAEL SALER

The writers were some of the most prominent figures in Britain and America,
including journalists like Desmond MacCarthy and Christopher Morley, novelists
like Dorothy Sayers and Vincent Starrett, academics like Jacques Barzun, broad-
casters like Elmer Davis, and businessmen like Edgar Smith, the vice-chairman
of General Motors. In 1934 Sherlock Holmes Societies were formed on both sides
of the Atlantic, to pursue these studies and to celebrate the memory of the greatest
detective who ever ‘ lived ’. Morley, during his tenure as an editor at the Saturday
Review, used the weekly journal to promote this conceit to a wide audience.
The aspect of Holmes that made him into a modern icon for all those who
professed belief in him, to whatever degree, was that he re-enchanted modernity
without compromising the central tenets of modernity: rationalism, secularism,
urbanism, mass consumerism. He made reason magical, the prosaic poetic. He
believed that every detail of modern life, ranging from the footprints of a giant
hound to advertisements in mass circulation newspapers, was charged with
meaning.64 By 1920, Doyle no longer believed that ; only the existence of the
supernatural could imbue modernity with enchantment. But Holmes, and the
conventions of the mystery genre he stood for, could assuage the modern craving
for the magical without ever reverting to the supernatural. In a 1942 interview
Jacques Barzun stated, ‘ We believe in Holmes because he believes in science and
we do too. ’65
But Holmes’s science of observation was not the same as positivistic science.
It re-enchanted the world by imbuing everything with hidden import. Holmes
demonstrated that profane reality could be no less mysterious or alluring than the
supernatural realm ; the material world was laden with occult significance, which
could be revealed to those with an observant eye and logical outlook. When
Watson remarks that Holmes has made deductions based on clues ‘ quite invisible
to me ’, Holmes replies in exasperation, ‘not invisible but unnoticed, Watson. You
did not know where to look, and so you missed all that was important. I can never
bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails,
or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace. ’66 While Holmes is obviously
gifted in his powers of observation, the implication of the tales is that such skills
can be practised by anyone. In ‘The red-headed league ’, this democratic message
is made explicit. The client of this tale is initially dumbfounded when Holmes
scrutinizes him and determines that the man has engaged in manual labour,
takes snuff, is a Freemason, has visited China, and has recently done a great deal
of writing. Holmes then explains how he deduced each point from the man’s
appearance, and the client is pleasantly surprised at the apparent simplicity of the
detective’s methods : ‘ I thought at first that you had done something clever, but
I see that there was nothing in it, after all. ’ The client reveals his ignorance, of

64
Franco Moretti suggests that Doyle’s detective stories may have become canonical, unlike those
of his rivals, because of Doyle’s novel emphasis on the use of clues in the narrative. Franco Moretti,
‘The slaughterhouse of literature’, Modern Language Quarterly, 61 (2000), pp. 207–27.
65 66
Shreffler, ed., Baker Street, p. 26. Doyle, The complete Sherlock Holmes, p. 196.
 ‘C L A P I F Y O U B E L I E V E’ 615
course, since Holmes is supremely clever, but readers could nevertheless share
his delight that the method is accessible to the common individual. Watson’s
occasional successes in its practice are further confirmations of this enchanting
notion.
G. K. Chesterton readily perceived both this reinscription of supernatural
glamour into the profane world, and the democratic implications of the mystery
genre Doyle helped establish. A fan of the great detective, Chesterton argued in
1901 that mysteries were the modern equivalent of fairy-tales that encouraged
ordinary readers to perceive marvels in the commonplace :
No one can have failed to notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses
London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland, that in
the course of that incalculable journey the casual omnibus assumes the primary colours of
a fairy ship … It is a good thing that the average man shall fall into the habit of looking
imaginatively at ten men in the street even if it is only on the chance that the eleventh
might be a notorious thief.67
Contemporaries agreed with Chesterton, arguing that the Holmes tales should
not be considered mere escapism, because they encouraged readers to emulate
Holmes’s rational scrutiny of everyday life. Writing to Tit-Bits in 1894, one
physician said that the stories ‘make many a fellow who has before felt very
little interest in his life and daily surroundings, think that after all there may be
much more in life, if he keeps his eyes open, than he has ever dreamed of in his
philosophy ’.68 Tit-Bits reported on readers like F.W.B. who ‘ has been applying
the principles of this great detective in various matters connected with actual
private life ’.69
Holmes’s method thus provided an alternative to the purely means-ends
rationality that Weber and other cultural pessimists believed characterized
modernity and had rendered it sterile. Rather than practising this instrumental
rationality, Holmes brought reason and imagination together into an animistic
rationality, one that was congruent with intuition. While Holmes may have been
a thinking-machine, he was also a fin-de-siècle aesthete who arose late in the
morning, cogitated best when he was smoking tobacco (stored in a pair of Persian
slippers) or playing his violin, and of course had his occasional recourse to co-
caine. In one of the first ‘biographies ’ of Holmes, T. S. Blakeney noted that ‘ this
[combination of reason and imagination] was one of Holmes’s strongest assets as
a detective – he called it the scientific use of the imagination ’.70 Animistic reason
of the sort practised by Holmes clearly was important to the ironic believers ; it
was precisely this union of reason and fancy that enabled them to maintain that
he existed.

67
G. K. Chesterton, ‘ A defence of detective stories’, in G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (London,
1901), pp. 119–21. For a comparison of mysteries with myths and fairy tales, see David Lehman, The
perfect murder: a study in detection (Ann Arbor, 2000), pp. 23–36.
68
Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, p. 79.
69 70
Tit-Bits, 28 (1895). Blakeney, Sherlock Holmes, p. 120.
616 MICHAEL SALER

Readers also appreciated that Holmes’s animistic reason restored a holistic

import to the world. Cultural pessimists feared modernity was fragmented, and
looked back to the premodern period as a time of organic unity they believed
might be forever lost ; Doyle’s spiritualism and belief in fairies was an attempt to
restore such unity through restoring premodern beliefs.71 But Holmes’s form of
reason revealed subtle links to modern existence that did not require supernatural
intervention. He always managed to establish logical, but not necessarily obvious,
connections among all the empirical facts that he observed. Through careful
scrutiny, analytical reasoning, and imaginative insight, Holmes demonstrated
that modern experience could be holistic and legible – but also wonderfully
variable. Writing in 1894 to Tit-Bits, a reader praised the Holmes stories for
highlighting an underlying ‘chain of causation ’. He stated,
The glory of all ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ is that in them a due proportion is
preserved for every link in the chain. In Holmes’ examination of [a] room, every action
and every deduction appears, not as an isolated phenomenon, but as one of a series of
events, and the gradual evolution is … the greatest charm of all to me.72
Decades later the same point was made by Marshall McLuhan, who likened
Holmes’s use of reason to the organic holism of Coleridge and Flaubert, and
contrasted it to the narrow instrumental reason of bureaucrats, whose ‘ technique
is serial, segmented, and circumstantial. They conclude effect immediately from
preceding cause in lineal and chronological order. They do not dream of totalities
or of the major relevance of details.’ While cultural pessimists like Max Weber
or Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno sought but were unable to find an
alternative to the instrumental reason practised by the growth of the modern
bureaucratic state, Sherlock Holmes was practising one : and McLuhan found
that ‘the ordinary man finds a hero in Holmes … because the bureaucrat is
always putting the finger on each of us in a way which makes us feel like Kafka’s
characters – guilty but mystified ’.73 Holmes’s use of animistic reason implied that
the world was resonant with wider meanings and capable of endless surprises.

III
Thus Holmes became an icon of modernity precisely because he served as an
example of, and provided the means to, re-enchant the modern world. By com-
bining reason and imagination in a tight synthesis he was able to vivify inert facts
and reveal underlying correspondences ; his readers could apply this example of
animistic reason to their own lives, and many – the ironic believers – certainly
applied it to the Holmes canon itself. In so doing, they helped to legitimate the

71
David Frisby, Fragments of modernity: theories of modernity in the work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin
(Cambridge, MA, 1990). For a response to this fear by German scientists who turned to biological
holism in the interwar period as a way to reconcile modernity and enchantment, see Ann Harrington,
Reenchanted science: holism in German culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (New Jersey, 1996).
72 73
Green, ed., The Sherlock Holmes letters, pp. 78–79. Shreffler, ed., Baker Street, p. 39.
 ‘C L A P I F Y O U B E L I E V E’ 617
idea that Western adults could indulge their imaginations without losing their
reason – indeed, by engaging in such imaginative play they could bring the two
together, as Holmes himself did.
There were those who were not amused by the spectacle of respectable,
rational, and seemingly responsible adults devoting their leisure to the fiction that
Holmes was not a fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Denis, trustee of the Doyle
Estate, indicated his ‘ grave disapproval ’ when he attended a Baker Street Irreg-
ulars (BSI) dinner in 1940. According to one account, he listened with perplexity
to the numerous toasts to Holmes, and to the short papers explicating aspects
of Holmes’s life. Turning to a BSI member, he whispered, ‘I don’t understand
this ! My father’s name has not been mentioned. ’ The member explained that
this was the highest compliment an author could obtain: not even Shakespeare
created characters that were seen as more real than their creator. When Doyle
asked the member what exactly the BSI saw as his father’s role, he was told
that his father was usually referred to as Watson’s literary agent.74 By the end of
the decade Denis and his brother Adrian were sending messages to the BSI to
‘ Cease, Desist, and Disband.’75
While Doyle’s sons had a certain proprietary interest in establishing that
Holmes was fictional and their father factual, there were others who felt that the
spectacle of adults pretending to believe in a fictional character was unbecoming.
Edmund Wilson bluntly called the phenomenon ‘ infantile’,76 and S. C. Roberts
recalled that when news of his election as president of the Sherlock Holmes
Society was published in The Times of London, he received a chiding letter from
an old friend : ‘ I could hardly believe the evidence of my eyes when I read about
[your election]. Sherlock Homes and Watson were two ficti[t]ious characters
invented by Conan Doyle. All there is about these two invented people is what
Conan Doyle wrote. There is nothing more to it and very little at that ! ’77
But this was a residual Victorian understanding of how responsible adults
should behave. By the early twentieth century there was an increasing recognition
by artists and intellectuals of the constitutive role of the imagination in percep-
tions of reality : a new, ‘ aestheticist’ episemology that gave adults greater latitude
to indulge their imaginations than had been the case in the early to mid-nineteenth
century. Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Stéphane Mallarmé, and William
James extolled the fictive aspects of existence ; emblematic of this turn of thought
was the 1911 publication of The philosophy of ‘as if ’, a manifesto of ‘ Fictionalism ’ by
the philosopher Hans Vaihinger, in which he discussed the prevalence and utility
of fictions in science and in everyday life.78 We are accustomed to think of this
‘ aesthetic turn ’ at the turn of the century in terms of elite culture, but it is also

74
Jon L. Lellenberg, ed., Irregular memories of the thirties: an archival history of the Baker Street Irregulars’ first
75
decade, 1930–1940 (New York, 1990), p. 228. Ibid., p. 253.
76 77
Shreffler, ed., Baker Street, p. 5. Roberts, Adventures, p. 231.
78
Hans Vaihinger, The philosophy of ‘ as if ’, a system of the theoretical, practical and religious fictions of
mankind, trans. C. K. Ogden (1911; London, 1924 edn).
618 MICHAEL SALER

found in the popular literature of the period. While aesthetes were turning to
formalist works of art as a way to escape a disenchanted world, mass culture was
providing ordinary readers with equally autonomous worlds of the imagination
that gratified the sense of wonder without denying modernity. Using terms similar
to those used by contemporary aesthetes, Robert Louis Stevenson described
how reading popular fiction can transport readers into a separate sphere of con-
sciousness :
The process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous ; we should gloat over a book, be
wrapt clear out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest,
kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if
the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, or
the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye. It was
for this last pleasure that we read so closely and loved our books so dearly in the bright
troubled period of our boyhood.79

Stevenson’s recollection of his childhood reading reminds us that the auton-

omous worlds of the imagination created by both modernist and popular writers
during the fin-de-siècle were indebted to the genesis of children’s literature as a
genre beginning in the 1860s – the new genre itself marking the decline of earlier
Victorian evangelical and utilitarian strictures against the indulgence of the
imagination.80 Works by Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll,
and others absorbed their young readers in autotelic worlds of fantasy, and the
generation that came of age in the 1880s was anxious to recapture the enchanted
spheres they had inhabited in their youth.81 Many of the authors of the New
Romance of the 1880s and 1890s, such as Doyle, Stevenson, Haggard, and
Kipling, intended their fiction to restore the enchantments of their own childhood
reading ; and their novels, replete with maps, photographs, and footnotes, com-
bined realism and romance in a knowing, ironic manner acceptable to rational,
responsible adults no less than children. (Doyle famously dedicated The lost world
(1912) ‘ To the boy who’s half a man/Or the man who’s half a boy. ’) Such works
appealed to a fin-de-siècle readership that had been acclimated in childhood to
inhabiting imaginative worlds as well as mundane reality, just as their forebears
had lived in worlds at once sacred and profane.
The illusions created by this attention to realist detail did more than heighten
the ‘ reality effect ’ and induce the willing suspension of disbelief : they allowed
rational readers to become immersed in these fantastic worlds, while at the same
time maintaining an ironic distance – to remain rational and enchanted simul-
taneously. The influence and practice of these writers continued through the next
century. J. R. R. Tolkien, for example, created in his The lord of the rings a fictional

79
Edward Salmon, Juvenile literature as it is (London, 1888), p. 105.
80
For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concerns about the moral and spiritual effects of reading
fiction, see Brantlinger, The reading lesson; Vincent, Literacy; Richard D. Altick, The English common reader:
a social history of the mass reading public, 1800–1900 (Chicago, 1957).
81
Humphrey Carpenter, Secret gardens: the golden age of children’s literature (Boston, 1985).
 ‘C L A P I F Y O U B E L I E V E’ 619
universe that rivals in popularity that of the Holmes canon. In his 1938 discussion
of fantastic literature, Tolkien argued that modern readers would accept autotelic
‘ Secondary Worlds ’ of ‘arresting strangeness ’, provided that these worlds were
also logically and internally consistent. Like the writers of the New Romance,
Tolkien’s works exemplified a form of animistic reason, combining rationalist
and aestheticist outlooks. (He also outdid his predecessors when it came to the
incorporation of maps, glossaries, and other paratextual apparatus.) He insisted
that ‘ fantasy is a rational not an irrational activity ’; that ‘ it does not either blunt
the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary.
The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. ’ While
rational, the modern enchantments found in fantastic literature are also allied to
aesthetic formalism : ‘ Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both
designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are
inside ; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose. ’82
Another interwar author who has attracted a wide and devoted following,
the American writer of ‘cosmic fiction ’ H. P. Lovecraft, echoed this definition.
Lovecraft was an agnostic and materialist, and stated that he wrote his tales of
cosmic wonders and terrors in order to re-enchant modernity without denying its
secular and rational foundations. While an adherent of modern scientific thought,
he also thought of himself as a symbolist whose fictions were intended to evoke
sensations of wonder, fear, and astonishment, so as to re-enchant a world that
instrumental reason had stripped of its marvels. His autonomous fictional uni-
verse, which became known after his death as the ‘ Cthulhu Mythos’, consisted of
plausibly invented New England towns and the extraterrestrial entities that
menace them ; this universe was brought to life through a wealth of realist detail
and intertextual references among the stories themselves. (Indeed, one of the
‘ dread ’ tomes he invented, the Necronomicon, has taken on a virtual life of its
own – although the text is only mentioned briefly in his stories, in recent years
there have appeared at least two full-length paperback editions, purporting to be
the ‘ real ’ thing.) Lovecraft claimed he got a
big kick … from taking reality just as it is – accepting all the limitations of the most orthodox
science – and then permitting my symbolizing faculty to build outward from the existing
facts ; rearing a structure of indefinite promise and possibility … But the whole secret of the
kick is that I know damn well it isn’t so … I’m probably trying to have my cake and eat it at
the same time – to get the intoxication of a sense of cosmic contact and significance as
the theists do, and yet to avoid the ignorant and ignominious ostrich-act whereby they
cripple their vision and secure the desiderate results.83

Thus, beginning with the genre of children’s literature in the 1860s, gaining mo-
mentum with the New Romance of the fin-de-siècle, and continuing into the next
century, realistically conceived, autonomous worlds of wonder provided readers

82
J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and leaf (Boston, 1989), pp. 45–51.
83
H. P. Lovecraft, Selected letters, 1911–1924 (Sauk City, WI, 1965), III, p. 140.
620 MICHAEL SALER

with the enchantments that the discourse of modernity claimed to have super-
seded. The double-consciousness of the ironic imagination enabled adults to
immerse themselves in these worlds while simultaneously remaining grounded
in the real.
In addition to the influence of children’s literature and aestheticist epistemo-
logies, the concomitant spectacularization of everyday life resulting from the new
mass media during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made such
imaginary worlds an almost inescapable aspect of everyday existence for many.84
The ubiquity of the fictive worlds of mass literature, film, and radio rendered the
conscious engagement in pretence common and even habitual among adults, far
more so than had been the case in the early to mid-nineteenth century, when
there were fewer venues and the exercise of the imagination had been circum-
scribed by a more puritanical outlook. The sheer onslaught of images, represen-
tations, and symbols fostered by a spectacularized commodity culture cultivated
the ironic imagination, which had already been nurtured by the prevailing climate
of scientific scepticism. As Michael North has argued,
even by the turn of the century, irony had become less a defense against commercialized
modernity and more a way of participating in it … As society becomes progressively
aestheticized, … as audiences begin to consume imaginative and symbolic materials as
they had previously consumed material goods, then everyday life acquires an inherent
ironic distance from itself.85
Many postmodern theorists have simply asserted that the public remained pass-
ively in thrall to these images, but more recent research indicates that the public
on both sides of the Atlantic enjoyed playing with these ‘artful deceptions ’, even
when they knew or suspected fakery. This was recognized by P. T. Barnum when
he stated in his autobiography ‘ The public appears to be disposed to be amused
even when they are conscious of being deceived. ’86 Similarly, Jonathan Rose’s
study of British working-class readers affirmed that in the nineteenth century
there were ‘naı̈ve ’ readers who mistook fiction as fact, partly because they did
not have access to a range of texts that would expose them to different represen-
tational strategies. But ‘by 1900, thanks to compulsory education and cheap
reading matter, even relatively unsophisticated readers knew not to believe
everything they saw in print ’.87 Thus, in the last third of the nineteenth century,
‘ naı̈ve ’ and ‘ironic ’ believers may have formed the extremes of a wider spectrum
of readership, but by the early decades of the twentieth century it appears likely
that numerous ‘common readers ’ had moved to the ironist camp.
Many of these fictive worlds were presented by multiple media over a period of
time, resulting in a synergistic effect that imbued these worlds with a heightened
verisimilitude, arguably an early form of virtual reality. Elaine Scarry has analysed

84
Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular realities: early mass culture in fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998).
85
Michael North, Reading 1922: a return to the scene of the modern (New York, 1999), pp. 206–8.
86
James Cook, The arts of deception (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
87
Rose, The intellectual life, p. 99.
 ‘C L A P I F Y O U B E L I E V E’ 621
how poems and novels provide subtle instructions for the reader’s mind to
recreate the images that the author attempted to capture in words ;88 when other
media – pictorial and audio – are enlisted for this purpose the fictions can appear
even more familiar and believable. Earlier nineteenth-century fiction may have
attained some synergistic effects when texts were simultaneously adapted for
the stage and represented pictorially,89 but the number, type, and circulation of
images increased dramatically by the end of the century. Holmes’s continued life
as a serial character, for example, was extended and made more durable by his
appearances not only in illustrated, mass circulation magazines and on the stage,
but also on the screen and through radio, just as the fictional personae known as
‘ movie stars ’ (as opposed to the real-life actors they represent) owed their ‘ virtual
life ’ to the concerted efforts of Hollywood publicists, newspaper columnists, radio
broadcasters, newsreel compilers, and fan magazines. The synergistic effect of
the new media emerging at the turn of the century was qualitatively and quan-
titatively different from all that went before, and is one of the factors that dis-
tinguishes Holmes’s reception and continued longevity from that of Pamela and
other popular characters that preceded him.
Fictive creations became even more ‘alive’ when individuals joined together
in groups to share in a communal fantasy, as was also the case with both the
Sherlock Holmes societies and (to take but one example) the movie-star fan clubs
that originated in the interwar period. The fact that so many adults united to
share these imaginary worlds over a protracted period of time indicates how
acceptable and alluring – indeed, enchanting – these virtual worlds had become
by the early decades of the twentieth century. By the end of the century such
virtual realities of the imagination had become substantially augmented by in-
formation technologies, but arguably there is a direct line of descent from the
Baker Street Irregulars to the denizens of online computer gaming worlds and
the enthusiasts of fantasy role-playing games.90 And the fashion for publishing
biographies of fictional characters has continued since those of Holmes : even the
Dictionary of National Biography, in the new edition scheduled to be published in
2004, will contain entries for John Bull, Springheel Jack, and Robin Hood.91
The ironic imagination has thus become ubiquitous, re-enchanting a secular,
rational, and commodified world without rejecting these central components of
modernity. Modernist self-reflexivity was as much a part of mass culture as it was
of the so-called fine arts from the turn of the century onwards. Naı̈ve believers
might have been misled by the footnotes in Haggard’s She to think it an historical

88
Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the book (New Jersey, 2001).
89
Martin Meisel, Realizations: narrative, pictorial, and theatrical arts in nineteenth century England (New
Jersey, 1983).
90
There are several interesting overlaps between the Sherlock Holmes societies and gatherings of
those who play fantasy role-playing games such as ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’ For a sociological
analysis of the phenomenon of these games, see Gary Alan Fine, Shared fantasy: role-playing games as social
worlds (Chicago, 1983).
91
Anon., ‘Welcome faces in the family album’, Sunday Times, 15 July 2001, p. 9.
622 MICHAEL SALER

account, but readers attuned to irony would have recognized the citations to be
almost as extravagant in their mock sobriety as the events of the novel. (Indeed,
when Haggard’s friend Andrew Lang read She in proof, he cautioned the jocular
Haggard against being too facetious : ‘I’m sure the note about a monograph on
Ayesha’s Greek pronunciation for the use of public schools, will show the Public
you are laughing – a thing I can never help doing, and the B[ritish] P[ublic] hate
it. ’)92 Examples of ironic self-reflexivity from mass culture easily could be multi-
plied, but one seems particularly apt here in light of earlier references to the
fictional yet ‘living ’ personae of movie stars. In an early scene from the wonderful
Ernst Lubitsch comedy ‘To be or not to be ’ (1942), Carole Lombard plays a
famous actress, Maria Tura, who is visited by an ardent male fan who starts to
recount all sorts of fanciful events from her life that he has read in gossip columns.
Tura is puzzled, until she realizes that the fan is a naı̈ve believer in her movie-star
persona, which, thanks to the creative imagination of her publicists, carries on a
romantic existence quite different from that of the genuine Maria Tura. So she
politely goes along with the naı̈ve believer and becomes an ironic believer in
the fictitious life she is supposed to have led. The scene elicits a laugh even from
those who continue to follow the exploits of movie stars, just as many of the
activities of the Sherlock Holmes societies contain deliberate notes of self-parody.
The self-reflexivity of the ironic imagination is not incompatible with provisional
belief, and permits a wide range of enchantments to be enjoyed without necess-
arily incurring the dangers often imputed to modern entertainment : from aimless
‘ escapism ’ to insidious ‘ false consciousness ’.
Cultural pessimists of the fin-de-siècle promoted a concept of instrumental
rationality that distinguished reason and the imagination, rendering modernity
as disenchanted. But at the same moment a countervailing trend was emerging
within elite and popular cultures, one that has become commonplace today. We
now acknowledge that what we call ‘real ’ is also a provisional and contingent
construct ; that so-called ‘ objectivity ’ is always tinged with our imagination.
Holmes was the first fictional character to embody this synthesis overtly, through
his animistic reason. His way of combating modern ennui has become our way
(setting aside the cocaine use). In so doing he replaced our need for fairies to
enchant the world, and became one of the many fictive enchantments purveyed
by the mass media to be enjoyed with the ironic imagination. While there were
those, like Arthur Conan Doyle, who found modernity disenchanting and turned
to the security of premodern beliefs, others were content to relegate those pre-
modern beliefs to imaginary fancies, and then to embrace imaginative fancy as
a distinctly modern form of enchantment. As Dorothy Sayers asked in a deadpan
manner in 1934, ‘ Why, if mere creatures of the imagination, like Peter Pan, are to
be commemorated with statues, this honour should be withheld from national
figures such as Sherlock Holmes ’?93

92
Ellis, H. Rider Haggard, p. 109.
93
R. Ivar Gunn, ‘The Sherlock Holmes Society’, British Medical Journal, 11 Aug. 1934.