Hounding Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle, Bloodhounds and Sleuthing in the Late-Victorian Imagination
Hounding Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle, Bloodhounds and Sleuthing in the Late-Victorian Imagination
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追捕福尔摩斯：阿瑟·柯南·道尔、维多利亚晚期想象中的猎犬和侦探
DOI：
10.1080/13555502.2012.737099
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发表时间：
2012
影响因子：
0.3
通讯作者：
Pemberton N
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Pemberton N
1898年10月4日，《每日电讯报》报道了前一天在拉文斯卡附近的北约克郡沼泽地举行的一次奇怪的会议。这位记者被邀请去观看那里正在发生的一个壮观的事件--用猎犬狩猎。在聚会上，这些猎犬在人类的带领下，在高沼地上追踪陌生人的气味。根据这份报告，这些精英绅士们正在“复兴”一系列被遗忘已久的中世纪传统，在这些传统中，侦探猎犬追踪偷猎的猎物，甚至追捕王室的政敌。然而，到了世纪，这种做法已经消失了，侦探犬被贬为犯罪小说的一部分。一位记者感谢犯罪小说作家亚瑟柯南道尔通过他的小说创作福尔摩斯为维持“对侦探犬超人力量的信仰”提供了主要工具。[2]拉文斯卡事件是第一次为测试嗅猎犬的追踪能力而设立的猎犬试验之一，也是维多利亚文化中狗的地位和功能更广泛转变的一部分。纯种狗的繁殖和展示的出现和性质--同时代被称为“狗的爱好”--已经被哈里特里特沃在她关于维多利亚时代非人类动物的开创性著作中巧妙地记录下来。[3]从19世纪60年代起，狗展开始激增，1873年成立了养犬俱乐部，1874年成立了种马书，城市中产阶级通过这些活动庆祝了操纵育种犬的原材料和制造新奇事物的权力。其目的是“发明”品种，其特征与纯粹的功利主义无关。然而，与贵族养犬者密切相关的品种--灰狗、猎狐犬或猎犬--不是在表演的人工环境中，而是根据它们在野外的表现来评判的。在19世纪60年代和70年代，英国猎犬主要出现在
On 4 October 1898, the Daily Telegraph reported a curious meeting that had occurred on the previous day on the North Yorkshire moors near Ravenscar. The reporter had been invited to view a spectacular event that was taking place there–man-hunting with bloodhounds. 1 At the gathering, these hounds, with their human handlers following close behind, tracked the scent of strangers across moorland. According to the report, these elite gentlemen were ‘resuscitating’a set of long-forgotten medieval traditions in which sleuthhounds tracked poached game or even hunted down political enemies of the Crown. Such practices, however, had vanished by the nineteenth century, relegating the bloodhound to the pages of crime fiction. One reporter thanked the crime writer Arthur Conan Doyle for providing the primary vehicle for maintaining ‘belief in the superhuman powers of the bloodhound’through his fictional creation, Sherlock Holmes. 2 The Ravenscar event was one of the first bloodhound trials set up to test the tracking abilities of scenting hounds and was part of a wider transformation in the status and function of dogs within Victorian culture. The emergence and nature of pedigree dog breeding and showing–contemporaneously known as the ‘dog fancy’–have been ably documented by Harriet Ritvo in her seminal work on Victorian nonhuman animals. 3 Through events such as the dog shows that proliferated from the 1860s onwards, leading to the establishment of the Kennel Club in 1873 and the Stud Book in 1874, the urban middle classes celebrated the power to manipulate the raw material of breeding dogs and manufacture something novel. The aim was to ‘invent’breeds, with characteristics divorced from the merely utilitarian. However, the breeds closely associated with gentry fanciers–greyhounds, foxhounds, or shooting dogs–were judged, not in the artificial environments of shows, but by their performance in the field. In the 1860s and 1870s, the English bloodhound primarily figured in