While the annotated Sherlock Holmes volumes from Leslie Klinger are the definitive word on the daily minutiae of Victorian London, this collection is more readily perused. A nice companion to have when reading the canon.

Thanks to LibraryThing's Early Reviewers for access to a copy.

The original stories of Sherlock Holmes included many references that are not a part of our modern life. This collection of twenty-four short essays helps readers understand these references. Each one takes an aspect of Victorian life and explains briefly the history, why it was in the Holmes story, and how it holds up today.

This was an informative and entertaining read. While I’ve read several of this author’s fictional books, this was the first time I’ve read any of her essays. I enjoyed each one, and found myself bookmarking sections so I could refer back to it later on. The brief history of yellow Paperbacks was especially interesting. Each section includes references for further research.

I would definitely recommend this to those interested in learning more about the world of Sherlock Holmes and those who enjoy Victorian history. I was given an advance copy (my sincerest apologies to the author for my late review) and all opinions expressed are my own. ( )

I received this as an e-book as an Early Reviewer. For anyone interested in the Holmes "canon" this is a very useful collection of information about details which are not familiar to today's readers. The author has extensively researched and included footnotes for the reader to follow up. I enjoyed the book excerpt at the end. Next time I read my sherlock Holmes book I will look for the other books in this series. ( )

This is volume 4 of a series and is subtitled "Essays on Victorian England". It is an intereting if odd collection of essays concerning topics that appear in the Sherlock Holmes series. Most of the essays are only a few pages long followed by another page or so of hyperlinks to supporting material. The topics range from detective agencies to voodoo to whist. Each essay gives a summary of the relevance of the topic to Victorian England as well as the stories in which the topic makes an appearance. The author has clearly spent a lot of time (way too much time?) analysing the Holmes stories and has made something of interest to the Holmes completist out of it. ( )

I was disappointed by this book. I think that the title is somewhat misleading, as most of the essays are not primarily about the person or cases of Holmes, or even about Victoriana, but rather take items or aspects mentioned in the "Canon" and spin out their histories across time: beginning a topic with the 12,000-year-old origins of tattoos, for example, or ending another with the demise of the men's handkerchief at the hands (?) of Kleenex in the 20th century. Not a bad idea for a book, perhaps, but not what I'd expected. Too, most of the essays are quite brief and offer only a perfunctory or superficial treatment of their subject matter.

Unfortunately, this perfunctoriness extends to the references cited for the essays -- and this is where the book really runs into trouble. Most of the references are derived from a wide assortment of websites -- some academic sites or respectable journals, but also "About this site" pages, blogs, and a motley assortment of other sites that resemble the results of simple Google searches on each topic. I spot-checked a few of the references against the author's text. In some cases, she skirts uncomfortably near to the edge of legitimate paraphrase by adhering closely to the original text without quoting it directly. In another instance, she repeats without qualification a probably spurious etymology for the term "private eye." That, although it seems like misinformation, could be considered a matter of opinion. But in two citations, I found that Sherwood-Fabre had simply misread what the original articles said and given her readers factually incorrect information as a result. (Example: In the first essay, on the Pinkerton Agencies, she states that "By 1853, Pinkerton Agencies existed in all the major Union cities." But her reference actually says that the *first* agency was established in 1853, and they had spread to all the major cities by "now" -- i.e., 1884, when the article was written.) Since I found all these issues by examining only a dozen or so references, I have to assume that there are other errors lurking in the text as well.

I'll end on a positive note. Although I found myself disappointed by the brevity and breadth of most of the essays, there were two exceptions. One was on the topic of the gasogene, a fascinating and very Victorian device that I knew nothing about. The other was the final essay in the book, on the topic of scandal in Victorian society. This one stood out from the rest because it is *not* brief and *not* superficial, but is instead a considerably longer article that analyzes all the instances of scandal found in the Holmes adventures. This is really what I was expecting from this book to begin with; and if the other topics discussed had been given a similar treatment, I'd probably have enjoyed them a lot more. ( )