The voice of science: Ideology, Sherlock Holmes, and the Strand Magazine

This thesis uses The Strand Magazine and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories to examine the different ways in which science and ideology interacted in popular culture between 1891 and 1930. It is interested in the relationship between high and low cultures and the different experiences of the fin-de-siecle and modernity that they betray. It attempts to reconstruct an epistemology of scientific knowledge from 'the artefacts of low culture' and challenges prevailing critical attitudes in periodical criticism and Holmesian criticism. The methodology is derived from a mixture of Marxist literary criticism, ideology theory and the history of science in the belief that attitudes from all three critical traditions are necessary to properly unpack the culturally-embedded nature of periodicals. It plots the relationship between scientific and popular discourses and examines the different ways in which fiction was able to ideologically commodify scientific knowledge and incorporate it into everyday representations of the real world. The thesis is split into four main sections that analyse, respectively, class relations in the 1890s, scientific articles after the turn of the century, depictions of the male body in the aftermath of the Second Boer War and the effect of the onset of a knowledge economy of traditional genre fiction between 1913 and 1930.