2008/06/12 by Kate Thomas · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Decadence, Literature, and Society #Culinary Culture and Tourism #Crime and Detective Fiction Studies #Publishing #Demise #Limelight #Art #Art history #History #Feeling #Literature #Philosophy #Law #Political science
paper · doi:10.1017/s1060150308080248
openalex publication_date 2008/06/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
In 1893, overwhelmed by readers' insatiability for Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle killed his detective off at the height of his popularity. Writing to a friend in 1896, Doyle described how literally sick he was of the figure he had created: “I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras , of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day” (Chabon 17). Holmes's (first) literary demise was marked by his creator with a culinary simile, one which recalls that his literary debut was made under the name that, above all others, stood for the culinary in late nineteenth-century Britain: Isabella Beeton. The first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” appeared in the 1887 edition of Beeton's Christmas Annual . Three other editors had rejected the story before the Beeton Annual accepted it. This Doyle-Beeton publishing encounter was an instance of one publishing phenomenon recognizing another one and ushering it into the limelight. When Doyle's reflections on his huge publishing success turn to a gustatory memory of overindulgence in a purposefully overdeveloped organ, it raises the following question: what were the relationships between the mass market, the culinary, and the production and adjudication of judgment and refinement in the nineteenth century?