For example, in ‘A Study in Scarlet’, Holmes recreates the crime scene through the inferences he takes from the ‘stump of a red wax candle’. In the Sherlock Holmes stories the liminality between oppositional concepts is vital to the movement of the narrative, and artificial light became a tool of both Holmes’s deductions and in Doyle’s creation of atmosphere and place. Artificial light in the nineteenth century, bridged the very natural divide between day and night, or light and dark, and so consequently it started to be used in a literary sense as something that could embody much more complex ideas than just one side of a metaphoric archetype. It is easy to envisage the dichotomous echoes between such binary concepts of light/dark and known/unknown, but it is important to emphasise the liminality of artificial light within these binaries. Johnston’s analysis suggests the binary dialectic of detection – it is a journey from unknown to known, or to quote Franklin Betteredge’s description of the detective process in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, it is ‘the slow and toilsome journey from darkness to light’. Detection embraces the practices of discovering, uncovering, noticing, investigating’. Judith Johnston asserts that ‘Perception is a key concept in considering detection. More crucially though, ‘The Abominable Bride’ recreates the way artificial light functions symbolically in Doyle’s original Holmes stories, as it becomes a signifier of the liminality between concepts of known and unknown, as well as truth and falsehood, that are essential to the progression of a detective narrative. The historical accuracy of the forms of illumination used is mostly excellent. More successful however is something that probably goes unnoticed by many: the use of artificial illumination and the lighting design of certain scenes. This is partially due to an awkward resolution to the mystery that attempts to be both a socio-political statement and the denouement of a snaking detective story, while also tying it to the ‘current’ Sherlock narrative. Although there are inestimable positives to be drawn from the episode – Victorian London looks fantastic, and there is, as always, excellent performances from the whole cast – the intention of bringing the intelligent modern adaptation together with Holmesian heritage does not work as well as it should. ![]() ![]() ‘The Abominable Bride’ delivers a story that seems at first a diversion from the ongoing narrative creators Mark Gatiss and Stephen Moffat are keen to predicate. The BBC’s Sherlock, after spending its first two series masterfully updating classic Holmes tales, moved on in the subsequent third series and 2016 special to approach the aftermath of his apparent suicide, and deal with the realities of a man who is very much entrapped within his own stories. Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock in ‘The Abominable Bride’.
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