Abstract
It is an elementary observation that today Sherlock Holmes is the name of an important asset in a British heritage industry that paradoxically privileges a mythic Englishness. The iconography of the great detective circulates via successful television serials, feature films, literary pastiches, graphic novels, video games, fanzines, journals, organised city tours, and kitsch memorabilia. All attest to the enduring power of this idea of England. The Baker Street residence, the deerstalker hat and pipe, Holmes’s cultivated eccentricity and the cultic locations of gentleman’s clubs, docklands, and Scotland Yard are amongst the narrative ingredients that present metropolitan London, south-east England, and the English amateur gentleman as pre-eminent elements in an imperial system that once held Wales and Scotland, as well as India and Africa, in its thrall.
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© 2013 Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
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Mukherjee, U.P. (2013). ‘Out-of-the-Way Asiatic Disease’: Contagion, Malingering, and Sherlock’s England. In: Westall, C., Gardiner, M. (eds) Literature of an Independent England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035240_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035240_6
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