Neil McCaw: "Sherlock Holmes and a Politics of Adaptation"

From the day Sherlock Holmes, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the 19th century and first published in 1887, came into the world, there have been numerous and diverse adaptations of the original canon which underlied two major determinants, namely the conditions within the film and TV industry as well as the predominant cultural and social climate. In general, Holmes adaptations are palimpsestuous (scraped off and rediscribed) that means the original story or former adaptations are altered and interpreted partly new. The interaction with socio-cultural contexts often appears in multiple layers as well and is thus multi-textured.

In the 1980s and 1990s there was the "Thatcherite" political rhetoric and ideology, named after the only female Prime Minister the United Kingdom has ever had, Margaret Thatcher, also called the "Iron Lady", which had a great influence to adaptive works made during her term of office. Thatcher's ideology supported themes such as "authority, law and order, patriotism, national unity, [and] the family". In particular, it celebrated the supposed moral as well as the political and economic order of the Victorian era (1837-1901) as a historical model which was also embodied in Holmes adaptations at that time. The 19th century was to be imitated, an "idealised paradigm of harmonious, commerce-focused, respectful social interaction amidst a mythologising quasi-hagiography of the Victorians themselves". Those points formed the basis that ought to evoke a regeneration of a contemporary British consciousness and Englishness since the UK suffered from a decline in national self-esteem caused by statewide exhaustion after World War II and years of turbulence in the 1970s. The "Thatcherite" ideology was often accompanied by the so-called Tory vision that implies the UK in which the present conditions are underpinned by tradition, consequently, a return to a national essence. Holmes adaptations were meant to be a "pleasurable fantasy", an escape for everyone from everyday-life. Those adaptive works were a romanticised, throuroughly ordered and detectable Victorian portrayal of what it used to be, hence, the audience is comforted by "the restoration of the law". The adaptations draw on Doyle's stories in great detail and trace back to Holmes's origins by faithfully recreating the Victorian surroundings and its milieu, simply a seemingly secure haven of order the audience of troubled times longs for. However, the familiar detective narratives were more "ritual acts of expiation which isolate and project cultural guilt upon some scapegoat rather than offer any social analysis or critique", be it critique to contemporary or bygone times and circumstances. Hence, viewers regarded those works as "amazingly faithful adaptations of the original stories", showing literary quality in exactly applying original features to a cinematic genre and fitting to the existing Holmesian canon, which Granada's adaptations (1984-1994) embodied. The fidelity to the canon was regarded as cultural value one has to loyally transfer in order to fulfill a duty towards the original. The whole setting and screenplay in films and TV series ought to be authentic and represent the 'original' Victorian style, at least what was believed to be original back then. Nonetheless, the image of Victorian times that was shown in the Granada incarnations of Sherlock Holmes is an idealised one and does not necessarily depict the true circumstances Victorian people lived in. It is more, as previously mentioned, a "desirably attractive escape from the present", a wishful image of what society of the late 20th century should be like in unstable times.

All those ideologies changed, however, in the 1990s when Britain had to deal with a more and more dynamic and quickly altering present, supported by the widely spreading development in technologies. Competition and profitability became more predominant in the film and TV industry than quality and fidelity to the canon of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Individuality was the status quo in order to draw the attention of the audience, thus, a great need for 'quality' television and an authentic Holmes developed. So his upcoming incarnations had to become more individual and additional material that was less canonical and differed from the classic Holmes image to a great extent was added. Critics said that "Holmes had, by this stage, lapsed into operatic, signalling what was widely seen as a relentless decline into cliché and caricature'. As an aftermath, the Granada adaptation's success declined in the early 1990s and found an end in 1994. Afterwards, doing a 'right' or 'correct' adaptation of the original Holmes stories became a desperate and almost hopeless aim to achieve which is why that task was abandoned completely.

McCaw, Neil: Sherlock Holmes and a Politics of Adaptation. In: Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle, edited by Sabine Vanacker and Catherine Wynne. PalgraveConnect, 2012.