Every hero needs an updating now and then, no matter the hero’s portfolio. But transplanting a hero equipped only with his power of deduction and an array of outdated information tools in a highly digitized metropolis is not a solution per se. Paradoxically, despite the time-lapse which has presumably changed the ‘mores’ of the Victorian metropolis and blown away its mystifying secretive ‘fog’, in post-industrial skyscrapered London crimes are still solved in the reassuring rooms of 221B Baker Street. 221B Baker Street has ever since become the centre of Apollonian catharsis where fastidious observation, unbiased analytical judgement, inductive/abductive reasoning and logical synthesis are employed to bring atonement to a hubristic decadent world. Watson, have made their quarters at the very ‘heart’ of the mother-city. Luckily enough, two quasi-Oedipal characters, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Introduced as “the great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained” (A Study in Scarlet) nineteenth-century London has been pinned a Dionysian identity tag bespeaking cosmopolitan promiscuity and pseudo-Bohemian tastes. In an age of crime dominated by the elusive figure of Jack the Ripper, late Victorian London was teemed with riddles which required an exceptional interpretative effort to reason them through. New scientific (or pseudo-scientific) theorizations escalated, rather than rationalized, this profound unease, offering perhaps the greatest shock to Victorian psyche. At the same time, they also rendered the "motherland" permeable to centripetal forces forever altering its sense of wholeness and unblem-ished isolation. Innovative means of communication consolidated Britain's position as head of an empire, immensely speeding the trading of goods and people with the most remote outskirts of its dominions and the exchange of information both at a domestic and at an international level. Among the many disturbances that rippled through the purportedly smooth surface of Victorian and Edwardian life, scientific advancement and the consequential development of a scientistic mindset were two of the most pervasive and uncanny. Yet in so doing, he also reveals the contradictions and disruptions of the society he is trying to protect, effectively disclosing the very items it wishes to repress. The detective, armed with the tools that rationality and the scientific method itself offer, is tasked with the almost impossible duty of fighting Nature with its own means: his taxonomical organization of London is the ultimate attempt at normalising what eschews categorisation. Introduced by deviant individuals or polluting substances, the atavistic or degenerative threat invades the metropolis, materializing the anxieties underlying the late Victorian psyche: the persistence of the past in the present, and the possibility of reversion. The city, seen in its double capacity of capital of the Empire and positivistic rational environment, is internally disrupted in many of its facets, from the microcosm of the house, to the urban fabric, to the composition of its social body.
An analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmesian Canon in the light of the scientific theorizations of his time is here proposed, aimed at highlighting how they shape the use of Gothic spatial tropes in the representation of London.
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