SOURCE: Thomas, Ronald R. “Minding the Body Politic: the Romance of Science and the Revision of History in Victorian Detective Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture 19 (1991): 233-54.

In the following essay, Thomas suggests that Victorian society's desperate need to distance itself from the world of crime reflects a feeling of collective guilt caused by Britain's imperialist policies.

Once we happened to speak of Conan Doyle and his creation, Sherlock Holmes. I had thought that Freud would have no use for this type of light reading matter, and was surprised to find that this was not at all the case and that Freud had read this author attentively.

(The Wolf-Man, My Recollections of Sigmund Freud)

As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state...