Is Sherlock Holmes About to be Cancelled?
Jose Nino
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Will Sherlock Holmes be the next victim of the woke purges?
According to a report from Express, certain literary experts believe that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote “crass racist descriptions” in his novels about Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle was the author of the world famous Sherlock Holmes novel.
Doyle had a statue built in Edinburgh built in Edinburgh across the house Doyle was born in.
In one of Doyle’s short stories, The Adventure of the Three Gables, he wrote about an occasion in which Holmes stared at the “hideous mouth” of a “huge negro” and informed the “savage”: “I don’t like the smell of you.”
Similarly, in The Sign of the Four, the second novel which featured Sherlock Holmes in 1890, Doyle describes the indigenous people of the Andaman Islands off the coast of India as “naturally hideous, having large, misshapen heads.”
Dr. Merrick Burrow, a professor of English at the University of Huddersfield said to The Times of Scotland: “Especially in the early Sherlock Holmes stories, there are crass racist descriptions.”
“There is no question that the language used to describe people of various ethnicities is inflammatory, offensive and insensitive by any contemporary standards. The stories are almost all narrated by Dr Watson and there is a racist framework of descriptions of immigrants in negative terms,” Burrow remarked.
Burrow asserted that the author should not be judged by contemporary standards. She emphasized that Doyle’s “crass characterizations were fairly typical of his time [The Victorian Era].
He continued: “There is a massive difference between someone who was a slave trader or waged military campaigns and someone who wrote books.”
Jonathan McCafferty, the president of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, said there was “lamentable instances of language” in Doyle’s works.
Such concerns over Doyle’s alleged racism come in a time when Black Lives Matter protests have flared up in American and all over the world.
Such uproar has given the radical iconoclasts the opportunity to call for the destruction of Western history.
Doyle’s works are among the many pieces of European history that are fair game for destruction.
What we’re witnessing across the West is what happens when political correctness is allowed to run rampant.
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