ABSTRACT

George Newnes's Strand Magazine was the first and most successful of the sixpenny illustrated monthlies that dominated the late nineteenth-century trade. This chapter explores the Strand and demonstrates how, despite the much-proclaimed pedestrian nature of its content, the genre it exemplifies actually compassed a wide range of material that was designed to seduce a middle-class readership. Doyle's stories capture the textual instability of the Strand in microcosm and his narrative techniques portray a figure who sets about to resolve the boundaries between fact and fiction using the science of detection. Doyle's stories do more than elaborate a technology of surveillance that can render the body legible. The Holmes stories in the Strand function as archetypes for a form of reading that is conservative, reaffirming and identified as scientific. Rather than simply mirror the world of its readers, the Strand, like all periodicals, is predicated on the distance, the space, between representational space and the space-time of reading.