Last week in class I’d made the comment just after we had our break that may have sounded like the biggest “well, duh” moment of the semester.
“I think that part of the reason that Sherlock Holmes is more associated with English popular culture than with American popular culture is that it’s set in London.”
I’d be easy to write this off as the mad ramblings of a man who’s only half awake and only half aware of what exactly he’s saying, but I’m here to defend my rather innocuous statement.
What follows is an eight minute video from America’s first and only academic comedy website, Cracked, that I think explains what I mean fairly well.
(Fair warning, the video contains content that may not be considered suitable for work environments.)
Essentially, my argument that Sherlock Holmes is English because it is set in London is based on the premise presented in this video, rather than the more obvious connection that London is an English city.
By setting Sherlock Holmes in the city, the stories draw on the various subconscious cultural fears and concerns of the primary intended audience. The city didn’t need to be London, but London was the city most transformed by the Industrial Revolution, and thus the city that changed the most about England and the most about the minds of England’s citizens.
For comparison, modern American crime dramas also fall into the pattern noticed in this video, with a predominant focus on setting in more rural than urban environments. Although Law and Order, perhaps the archetypal American crime show, is absolutely and constantly set in the urban environment of New York City, its focus is on presenting a dramatic narrative about the investigative and legal processes involved in law enforcement. A marathon of Criminal Minds, a similar show that focuses instead on FBI Criminal Profilers and the mysteries of each case that they work on, predominantly sets its episodes in rural and suburban areas. The dramatic tension is primarily on trying to understand the mind of whoever is capable of committing that episode’s crime, and they almost always begin the same. To show the audience a glimpse of the crime that will be looked at, we see the victim or victims, who are usually isolated in some form in a wilderness type area. If not an actual forest or back road, a wide open space near suburbia like a park. Then, the crime happens. We cut to “civilization”, the FBI headquarters in Quantico, and the cast going over the details of the case. Then the game is afoot.
Like Holmes, the focus here is on the mystery, the mind, and an attempt to understand the actions of someone who is, by all accounts, human. The stories, however, are fundamentally American. Yes, they are set in America, much as Sherlock in England, which is why it’s difficult to discuss these details without sounding in some ways like an idiot. But the fact remains that the stories being told are influenced by their setting, and so too then are their characters, which in turn influences just what kind of story they really are.
Sherlock Holmes is English Popular Culture because London, which Sherlock’s adventures are primarily set in, represents so much more to England and its people than just a city.
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