Converging Precincts: Sociology and Sherlock Holmes

The article using literary texts attempts to draw similarities in the trajectories of emergences and concerns of the 19th-century sociology and crime/detection fiction represented in particular by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. It attempts to contextualise the conditions of emergences, common intellectual moorings and their negotiations with similar themes in the domain of modern rational science discourse and tenet, where everything was to be open to query and testing. The article proposes that the shared intellectual inspirations in science and reason, the engagements with positivism-empiricism and redressal of the disorder and anxiety that European society experienced at the time show that there are multi-level connections between the detective stories and science of society