The Discreetly Shadowed Corners
The Discreetly Shadowed Corners
In a famous passage at the beginning of ‘A Case of Identity’, Holmes imagines surveying the inner workings of the households of London from the air: If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. (Adventures, 30) Besides the clear reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this passage alludes to a French reinterpretation of an ancient myth which, as Anthea Trodd and others have shown, fascinated Victorian writers: Alain-René Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux (1707) takes the figure of Asmodeus from Hebrew myth and turns him into a satirical figure who leads ‘a favoured human companion on a roof-top excursion of Madrid, and lifts the roofs of the houses to expose the secret crimes habitually being enacted beneath’.
Keywords: London, Victorian, Kidnapping, Aristocratic, Rucastle
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
