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THE CESSPOOL OF EMPIRE: SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2006

Yumna Siddiqi
Yumna Siddiqi
Affiliation:
Middlebury College
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Extract

A STRIKING NUMBER OF CHARACTERS in Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories who return to England after a sojourn in the colonies have an outlandish aspect. One, a contorted and bilious ex-soldier, owns a pet Indian mongoose. Another has lost a leg to a crocodile in the Ganges and has a poison-toting Andaman Islander in tow. A third keeps a fiendish hound and passes his South American wife off as his sister. A fourth returns from South Africa with a “blanched” face and a furtive manner. Many of these returned colonials are portrayed as menacing, and their presence in England precipitates a crisis, either a crime or a mysterious tragedy. In actual fact, return from the colonies to the metropole was a routine phenomenon, and returned colonials were familiar figures on the metropolitan landscape. Why does Doyle depict the phenomenon of return from Empire as so problematic if it was in fact quite commonplace?

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , March 2006 , pp. 233 - 247
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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