Sherlock’s Slums: Mapping Dangerous Spaces in Conan Doyle and The Strand Magazine

The use of an approach derived from literary criticism to deconstruct the geographical constituents and meanings of literary texts is questionable. Despite Franco Moretti’s quixotic attempt to map the cartographic implications of various works in The Atlas of the European Novel, there remains a lingering doubt over how in touch critics are with what Jacques Derrida termed “ontopology”: “an axiomatic linking indissociably the ontological value of present-being (on) to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of a territory” (Derrida, 1994, p.82). By employing ontopological thinking as a theoretical frame-work, a new perspective can be cast on the geographical threads that unite Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and the enormous success of the platform in which they first appeared, George Newnes’ The Strand Magazine.