In the context of Ledger and Luckhurst’s discussion of the 1870 Education Act and the issue of “massification,” Conan Doyle’s “The Red-headed League” displays anxieties about education and intelligence through the implicit hierarchy of intelligence visible in the characters’ interactions with one another. As Ledger and Luckhurst state, “The audience for… popular literature was perhaps the first generation to benefit from the 1870 Education Act” (xv). Anxieties about the “lowering” effect that this new expansion of the reading public had on the types of literature being produced were intimately connected to the issue of “massification,” which Ledger and Luckhurst link to the increasing population of the “London poor” (xv). Although Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories could be considered to be included in the newly developing genre of popular literature, they display an anxiety about the consequences of knowledge coming into the minds of the masses. By establishing a hierarchy of intelligence in stories including “The Red-headed League,” Conan Doyle presents a ordered vision of which classes of society should be knowledgeable, reserving true intelligence for the most privileged members of society. Naturally, Holmes resides at the highest level of the intelligence hierarchy, as Watson’s frequent testaments to his intelligence demonstrate, and it is Holmes’s judgement in “The Red-headed League” that deems Clay worthy of inclusion at the upper level: “He is, in my judgement, the fourth smartest man in London, and for daring I am not sure that he has not a claim to be third” (31). Holmes’s statement explicitly reveals the presence of the hierarchy of intelligence that Doyle creates in this story through the numerical rank that he awards Clay, which implies that Holmes holds the full list in his mind. The authority of his “judgement” is sufficient to secure Clay’s place at the top of the hierarchy, and Holmes’s wealth and privileged social position, implied through his ample leisure time, correspond with John Clay’s credentials: “His grandfather was a royal duke, and he himself has been to Eton and Oxford” (33). Through the credentials that he awards Holmes and Clay, Doyle implies that true intelligence is only accessible to the elite. He therefore moves true intelligence out of the hands of many of his readers, who, as the “masses” reading popular literature, will never reach the level of intelligence that Holmes and Clay represent– it is unattainable. Watson is also elevated above the level of the reader. Although he is consistently stymied by the inner workings of Holmes’s mind, he acts as an authority figure by allowing the readers access to Holmes’s mind, and his relationship with Holmes allows him to experience firsthand the power of Holmes’s mind: “I trust that I am not more dense than my neighbours, but I was always oppressed with a sense of my own stupidity in my dealings with Sherlock Holmes” (32). Here, Holmes confirms the implication that Holmes possesses an intelligence that even he, a physician knowledgeable in his own right, cannot hope to possess. However, his ability to relate the events of Holmes’s cases makes him more knowledgeable than the reader– again, privilege allows access to intelligence, even indirectly. By thinking about “The Red-headed League” through the lens of Ledger and Luckhurst’s discussion of the effects of the 1870 Education Act, it becomes evident that Conan Doyle was expressing his own anxieties about “massification” and the rise of popular literature at the end of the 19th century. By creating a hierarchy of intelligence in his Sherlock Holmes stories, in which Watson, the character that the reader is supposed to identify with, cannot fathom the intelligence of Sherlock, Doyle renders true intelligence inaccessible to all but the most privileged.
2 thoughts on “Hierarchy of Intelligence”
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This is a fascinating interpretation, and I think an accurate one. Another idea that struck me was that Watson also achieves his status because the reader knows Sherlock tolerates, or even appreciates, Watson’s presence. Since Doyle implies that Sherlock probably deems himself the second smartest man in London, the fact that the second smartest man in London appreciates Watson’s presence further establishes Watson’s rank in this hierarchy. Doyle continues to imply social order that does not even register on the reader’s radar.
In addition to correlating with the Education Act, your post makes me think of Marxism and how a reading through that lens would easily be applicable here. The Ledger and Luckhurst reading states on page xiv, “Equally, the fin de siècle has come to be identified as the moment of emergence, in their modern configuration, of the forms and definitions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.” Whether education was applied to those of a higher class specifically or education helped form the higher class, I think that the concepts are intertwined and related within this reading.