Sherlock Holmes & Victorian London
28 January 2025
Sherlock Holmes & the Two Cities of Victorian London: Crime, Class and Forensics Hooves clatter across cobblestones. Whip-smart Whitechapel street
Hooves clatter across cobblestones. Whip-smart Whitechapel street urchins pickpocket revellers spilling from music halls. The salty aroma of street vendors’ fried fish drifts down gaslit alleys, while sewage stench wafts from the River Thames. A gold-and-green omnibus judders to a halt outside the Royal Opera House, where a crossing sweeper shovels horse poo from the paths of the rich.
On Baker Street, a gentleman by the name of Sherlock Holmes looks out from his townhouse. The yellow fog is so thick he can’t see the building opposite. Holmes’ companion, a moustachioed man named Dr Watson, swipes away swirls of pipe smoke. He turns to Holmes and says, ‘I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.’
While ‘cesspool’ might sound like a rude way to describe England’s capital, as Dr Watson does in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet, it’s true that London life in Holmes’ day wasn’t exactly paradise – not for everyone, at least.
Between 1801 and 1891 the city’s population exploded from just over 1 million to a whopping 5.5 million! With this came a surge in poverty. For the wealthy, London continued to be a playground of pleasure and prospects. You could buy yourself a big house on a beautiful new square. You could take trips to fancy theatres like The Lyceum, as Holmes and Watson do in The Sign of Four. You could also take advantage of booming business opportunities presented by the era’s sweeping technological changes.
Meanwhile, for the poor, life was a very different kettle of (foul-smelling) fish. Had you been born a pauper, you’d most likely live in a damp and dirty rookery (a Victorian word for slum). While your rich peers were being schooled by private tutors or sent to boarding schools to breathe the clean country air, you’d be making matchboxes, cleaning chimneys, or shovelling manure from the streets. You might even feel forced into committing crime.
With poverty running rampant, it’s no wonder London’s crime rate rose too. In Holmes’ day, the city was riddled with specialist thieves, like female skinners who tricked well-dressed children into handing over their clothes, and snoozers, who robbed hotel rooms while guests got their beauty sleep.
London was also plagued by gangs. Among them were the fearsome Forty Elephants, an all-female crime collective who raided high-class shops. While gang members were occasionally caught, many crimes went undetected. If only Sherlock Holmes had been real. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s forward-thinking fictional detective pioneered some truly ingenious crime-cracking techniques.
‘It is my business to know what other people do not know.’ So Sherlock states in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle. This meant using science to analyse evidence and solve crimes. In other words, Holmes blazed a trail for forensics.
Scotland Yard didn’t use fingerprinting until 1901, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was aware of its uses 11 years earlier. In The Sign of Four Holmes uses finger and footprints to crack the case of a missing captain, while in other stories he examines fingerprints, shoe prints, horseshoe prints and wheel tracks to unravel seemingly unsolvable crimes with elementary ease. It’s fair to say Holmes left an indelible imprint on police procedures.
Sherlock also cleverly used cryptography – the science of writing and deciphering coded messages – to solve crimes. In The Adventure of the Dancing Men, he figures out that someone is in danger by decoding the stick men figures featured in a series of mysterious messages.
From studying human body parts in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, to analysing cigar butts in The Adventure of the Resident Patient, Sherlock’s hawk-eyed scrutiny of scraps resulted in some dumbfounding detections.
All things considered, Sherlock’s London was two cities in one – a place where poverty rubbed shoulders with progress – and Sherlock shifted between both worlds, solving grimy crimes of his time using the most sophisticated of techniques.
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Written by Joanne Owen. Illustration by Robbie Cathro
Sherlock Holmes & the Two Cities of Victorian London: Crime, Class and Forensics Hooves clatter across cobblestones. Whip-smart Whitechapel street
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