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At the outset of The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle worries that Holmes, like “one of those popular tenors who . . . are still tempted to make . . . farewell bows to their indulgent audiences,” may have overstayed his welcome. To console himself for the inevitability that Holmes “must go the way of all flesh, material or imaginary,” Doyle muses that “one likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place where the beaux of Fielding may still make love to the belles of Richardson, where Scott’s heroes may still strut, Dickens’s delightful Cockneys still raise a laugh, and Thackeray’s worldlings continue to carry on their reprehensible careers. Perhaps in some humble corner of such a Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for a time find a place, while some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill the stage which they have vacated.”1 As Doyle’s little fantasia should suggest, the invention of further adventures for literary characters was hardly a practice confined to the eighteenth century. Yet there are important differences in kind between the practices with which we have been concerned and those characteristic of more recent centuries, differences which justify my terminus ad quem of  (the year in which Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of the Crusaders first appeared). Indeed, Doyle’s very language underscores the most significant of these departures: namely, the sheer prominence and authority accorded to originary authors. Doyle writes of the “beaux of Fielding,” rather than Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones;“Thackeray’s worldlings,” rather than Becky Sharp or Beatrix Castlewood. In Doyle’s version of “fancy’s pimlico,” characters are linked to their authors by a proprietary language which signals a quite remarkable shift in readerly presumptions . Far from being largely irrelevant figures to be effaced through visualization and character migration, authors are here represented as the font of authority regarding those characters, including their lives off-page (after all, nowhere in the published work of either writer do “the beaux of Fielding . . . make love to the belles of Richardson”). So long as figures like Scott’s Parental Interest, an Afterword “Sherlock and his Watson” persist, it would seem, so too will their creators’ proprietary control. But Doyle was hardly the first nineteenth-century author to suggest that this “fantastic limbo” was best left to the trained professionals who had created its inhabitants in the first place. In this brief afterword, we will survey the formation in the early nineteenth century of many of the presumptions which underpin Doyle’s “fantastic limbo” and so mark the end of the sort of imaginative expansion with which we have been concerned. In so doing, we can begin to understand why nonauthorial imaginative expansion should now seem so eccentric and marginal, even as the genres and concepts it helped to invent—series fiction, the social canon, the very notion of virtual community—have become such obvious, self-sustaining, perhaps even seemingly inevitable features of our cultural landscape. * * * How did Doyle’s “fantastic limbo” of proprietary authorship come to supplant Kenrick’s vision of the textual commons? What can have brought this transformation about? Obviously, identifying causality in literary history is an extraordinarily difficult endeavor, but surely one of the principal factors undercutting the sustainability of imaginative expansion in its eighteenthcentury forms was the collapse of the comparative domestic political stability which had enabled British readers to imagine themselves as part of a virtual community of readers not always already divided by politics and class. Such stability had always involved a certain willful blindness, of course, but prior to the s and s it had been relatively easy for most readers to imagine what Carol Kay has termed “a stable, nonpolitical realm, . . . a leisure space for reading and writing which could never be troubled by questions of power” and thus “made differences of opinion fun.”2 With the American War, and even more with the wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France and the passionate agitation for reform which followed in their wake, fierce divisions opened up in the polity, open wounds which gave the lie to the putative liberty and suspension of difference afforded by the eighteenthcentury public and so “forced [readers] to negotiate” the often considerable distance between their own political and class positions and their ideal of a broad virtual community of readers.3 Many readers found it necessary to acknowledge that “the republic of letters,” hitherto an...

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