Sherlock Holmes and the Contemporary Victorian Mess

Millie Bobby Brown (center) as Enola Holmes, with Henry Cavill (left)
as Sherlock, and Sam Claflin as Mycroft

Enola Holmes, the latest confection rush-released from surprise content factory Netflix, is a surprisingly good Holmes movie. I say “surprisingly,” because amid the recent deluge of Holmesiana, it’s pretty difficult to say anything particularly new or innovative. Like King Arthur or Robin Hood, whose most recent onscreen adventures landed with a distinct thud, Sherlock Holmes has been significantly exposed recently. Yet somehow, he remains new and relevant.

Yet why is a Victorian character, whose usual narrative arc is so predictable that his own creator grew to despise him, so durable? Sherlock Holmes has appeared onscreen more, supposedly, than any other character: more than Dracula or Miss Marple, more by some estimates than Jesus. He evolves to suit the times; I question whether any, but the most dedicated fans, have actually read Conan Doyle’s notoriously turgid Holmes adventures.

Robert Downey, Jr., in Guy
Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes

When Guy Ritchie’s reinvention of the character, entitled simply Sherlock Holmes, dropped in 2009, I initially refused to watch it. I’d recently seen two attempts to create a more contemporary and relevant for 21st-Century audiences. This included a TV film, in which Vincent D’Onofrio got top billing for playing Moriarty, and the camera lingered over Holmes having drunken sex with prostitutes, while Watson performed an autopsy live onscreen. It was pretty bad.

For contemporary audiences, the Holmesian appeal lies partly in the distant setting. Victorian London seems well removed, and we’ve become suffused with the images of rococo splendor. Conan Doyle wrote, after all, during the decades when the British Empire enjoyed (if that’s the word) its greatest success, as measured by wealth and plunder. He couldn’t know that, within a generation, World War I would begin the empire’s undoing.

Yet despite the supposed Victorian wealth and comfort, that London was thoroughly rotten. Holmes often wandered into East End flophouses, opium dens, and other scenes of what Victorians would’ve considered moral degradation. Conan Doyle didn’t signpost this class struggle, mostly because he didn’t need to. Like his contemporary, Oscar Wilde, he used coded language that seems opaque to modern readers. But his Victorian audience knew exactly what he meant.

The first screen adaptation I remember dealing explicitly with class and poverty, was the legendary Granada TV version starring Jeremy Brett. Launching in 1984, it didn’t deal directly with Victorian poverty, but it included many street scenes with Holmes and Watson walking through mud, past street vendors selling live chickens and rabbits. I remember one scene where, before entering a building, Watson paused to pick carriage-horse shit off his brogues.

While the TV version with D’Onofrio that I hated attempted to shock the audience, it didn’t linger over the Victorian division between wealth and poverty, between White English middle-class values and the supposedly morally degraded immigrants and sailors living on the East End. It failed to acknowledge what Victorian London had in common with today. The moralistic justification of English imperial wealth in the 1880s sounds painfully familiar in 2020.

Recent successful Holmes adaptations have taken one of two tracks. Some have embraced the shocking poverty of Victorian England: Enola Holmes wanders into Limehouse pursuing clues, where a hired thug repeatedly pushes her into the dung-filled streets. Ritchie’s Sherlock flees from machine guns that prefigure the trauma of two world wars. Brett’s Sherlock never commented upon class divisions, but nevertheless visibly lived among them.

Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock

Other adaptations move Holmes into a dreamland. Both Moffat and Gatiss’ Sherlock, and its American contemporary, Elementary, are set in 2010s cities, London and Manhattan respectively. But both are ceremoniously scrubbed, tourist brochure-friendly versions of those cities, with sleek architecture, merrily jostling streets, and almost no filth. Sure, people get murdered, but not mugged or even much discomforted; the cities are remarkably anodyne.

These adaptations could also learn another lesson from Conan Doyle: learning when to stop. The author’s later Holmes stories, a crinkum-crankum mess of spiritless finger exercises, reflect how much Conan Doyle hated his cash cow. Similarly, the fifth season of Sherlock was jeered so badly that there’ll probably be no sixth, while the seventh and final season of Elementary ran as a summer replacement and disappeared quietly.

Basically, Holmes remains relevant because he provides succinct commentary upon today’s world, while remaining notably apart from it. The veneer of escapism lets us examine today’s injustices at enough of a remove that we don’t get emotionally agitated by them. Like Holmes himself, we’re able to keep our cool when confronted by manifest evil around us. As Victorian as he is, Holmes and his stories are ultimately still about us.