Fine Physiques

How did the reluctant creator of Sherlock Holmes, an English radical socialist and a muscle-bound Prussian bodybuilder help to shepherd a vast popular readership out of the Victorian era and into the twentieth century? Despite sounding like a rather unpromising pub joke, this question is crucial to understanding the ways in which Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells and Eugen Sandow combined to combat the first great challenges to the Strand after a decade of extraordinary success.

During the period 1899–1903, four epochal events conspired to revolutionise the work of Conan Doyle and the Strand : the Second Boer War, the Exposition Universelle in Paris, the ‘turn’ of the nineteenth century and, finally, the death of Queen Victoria. Literature scholars and students are now frequently taught to deprecate the taxonomical limitations of ‘epochal’ changes. Such boundaries, we are told, are the arbitrary, post facto impositions of subsequent ages. Nevertheless, close observation of Doyle's work within the broader context of the magazine's output across this period demonstrates that a series of fundamental shifts took place. In many cases, readers of the Strand were addressed directly as transitional subjects, a collection of people facing unprecedented change. This chapter will examine the ways in which these events were reported, discussed, fictionalised, theorised and rationalised across the magazine.

The war in South Africa changed from a minor colonial conflict into a full-blown national crisis. A profusion of non-fiction articles and short stories are testament to this and Doyle's contributions were particularly influential among them. However, this initial phase merely set the stage for a sustained period between November 1900 and April 1902 (the ‘long’ 1901) when the Strand would broaden these implications into every area of public life and revolutionise hitherto stable aspects of its worldview. Its depiction of science, intra-European relationships, domestic politics and the balance of imperial power revealed unmistakable signs of sudden and radical change. This period marked the Strand 's commercial peak and saw the serialisation of both The First Men in the Moon and The Hound of the Basker-villes. Readers following both of these works began as nineteenth-century Victorians and ended as twentieth-century Edwardians facing a very different and uncertain future.