Mormonism in A Study in Scarlet: Colonization on the Frontiers (of Sherlockian Logic)

A Study in Scarlet recounts Jefferson Hope's murder of Enoch Drebber and Joseph Stangerson. Although it occurs in London, the homicide is precipitated by events in Utah Territory, which introduced a British audience to a vast frontier both untamed and beautiful. The land, which functions in the text as the quintessence of American alterity, is inextricably related to John Ferrier, Jefferson Hope, and Lucy Ferrier, Arthur Conan Doyle's independent and beautiful young woman whose capture by Brigham Young's band mirrors the settlement and colonization of the landscape. In this essay, I argue that Conan Doyle's exotic depiction of the land and its inhabitants complicates the precarious relationship between the Mormon adherents and Conan Doyle's idealized American West. Like seventeenth-and eighteenth-century settlers, Brigham Young and his devotees strike off on their own with the stated goal of religious freedom, but in doing so they impose a colonial order on what Conan Doyle describes as an uncultivated environment. Furthermore, this particular representation of colonization and the American West occupies an anomalous place in the Holmes canon. What has become known as the "Mormon segment" in Conan Doyle criticism is never actually reported to Holmes or Watson in A Study in Scarlet; they solve the case with none of the backstory that was provided to the reader. I argue that the seemingly disparate Mormon episode functions as a formal frontier of Sherlock Holmes's system of logical deduction. The exoticized Utah desert and project of colonization circumvents Holmes's usual methods of analysis, which attests to the complexities of colonialism and displacement in the nineteenth-century American West.

A Critical History of A Study in Scarlet

Any analysis of Conan Doyle's first Holmes novel must consider two issues that have preoccupied critical responses to A Study in Scarlet since it first appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887: Conan Doyle's portrayal of Mormonism and the American West and Study's so-called "divided" narrative. In telling one story, A Study in Scarlet relates two narratives, one detailing the celebrated meeting of Holmes and Watson and the resolution of their first case together and the other a suspenseful and expeditious recounting of religious despotism, murder, and polygamy in the deserts of Utah. The two sections operate almost autonomously as evidenced by the shift in narrative styles, the combination of genres, and the transition from Victorian London to the American West.

Unlike most contemporary critics, many of A Study in Scarlet's early reviewers praised the novel's unorthodox construction. "The tale is thoughtfully worked out," muses a reviewer from the Portsmouth Chat (qtd. in Pollack and Lellenberg 2). Similarly, The Graphic's review lauds the "daringly constructed" plot wherein "the crime is cleared in the middle of the volume, [with] the remainder being given to its preliminary history" and remarks that "this unconventional departure is justified by success, and by the complete renewal and maintenance of fresh interest to the close" (4). The Hampshire Post also marks the excitement of the "Mormon segment" but criticizes Conan Doyle's "inartistic introduction" of the novel's second half (4). This reference to the novel's "clumsy" structure predicts the common reaction of many twentieth-century Holmesian critics to A Study in Scarlet's "divided" narrative.¹

Contemporary responses to the structure of A Study in Scarlet essentially fall into three categories: unfavorable, defensive, and explanatory. I shall first outline the unfavorable reaction because it has been the dominant one. In his psychoanalytic reading of the rift in the narrative, Michael Atkinson acknowledges that many readers have found fault with "the oft-remarked and occasionally lamented seam between the first and second halves of the novel":

Part I is established as a reprint from Watson's reminiscences, and conforms to the conventions it establishes by having Watson narrate the sequence of events of the London crime, from the moment it first comes to his and Holmes's attention through the arrest of the perpetrator. But Part II, on the other hand, begins with an account of the events...