Sherlock Challenge

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most beloved characters in English literature and whether you've read the stories or not, you certainly know his name. I read some of the short stories as a child and young adult and enjoyed them immensely. I had read the usual and most popular of the Sherlock Holmes canon, i.e. The Hound of the Baskervilles, but never got beyond that. Since I've had so much, um, "free time" in my job this past year I decided to try to read the entire canon. What the canon is exactly is slightly debatable but I'm making the call and saying it's the following.

1. A Study in Scarlet (1887)
2. The Sign of the Four (1890)
3. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891-1892)
4. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1892-1893)
5. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902)
6. The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1903-1904)
7. The Valley of Fear (1914-1915)
8. His Last Bow (1908-1913, 1917)
9. The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1921-1927)

I can check numbers one through four off my list and I've been pleasantly surprised with what I've found within. Doyle's first Holmes novel was written when he was twenty-seven and was written in the space of three weeks. The man was a machine. A very interesting machine. I was blown away by the subject matter in some of Holmes cases, especially concerning the time period. One of the most surprising aspects was the overtly anti-racist messages in multiple works. Cases featuring honest, upstanding Jewish bankers and interracial marriages weren't exactly common in 19th century literature. Yet, only thirty years after the Emancipation Proclamation Doyle was writing of white women marrying former slaves in America and of interracial children as ... well, being normal children. Plus, he didn't portray Americans as a bunch of hicks, so I thought that was sweet of him. And surprisingly, A Study in Scarlet actually took place almost entirely in the U.S. It's nice to read 19th century British authors who didn't disdain Americans. At the same time Doyle wrote depictions of civilized Americans (both white and black) Oscar Wilde wrote A Woman of No Importance in which the U.S. is bashed multiple times. For example, this conversation between aristocratic ladies.

Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.
Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?
Lord Illingworth: Oh, they go to America. 

And this short quip from Lord Illingworth, "The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years." Ha ha, very funny Oscar. (Don't worry I still love you.)

Word cloud for A Study in Scarlet