The recent Sherlock Holmes feature films may as well be deliberately designed to suit my tastes. Set in fin de siècle Britain, they mix small-scale action and combat with large scale political and diplomatic intrigue, the latter of which is my area of study. They feature Robert Downey Jr. and are directed by Guy Ritchie, two gentlemen whose other work I enjoy immensely. They’re also quite funny, and I like a good chuckle with my cinematic adventures. I am not a great adherent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, at least not as much as I should be given my proclivities, but I have enjoyed the odd Hound of the Baskervilles in my time. I viewed A Game of Shadows, the second installment of Ritchie’s Holmes adaptations, twice over the festive period. Naturally, I was interested in the historical context of the film, and thought I would do a brief discussion of some of this material for those interested.

Note: It’s worth reiterating that I’m commenting on the film in its own right here. The interwebs tell me it’s based loosely on Doyle’s Holmes installment The Final Problem, but I haven’t read that so I can’t speak to the literary integrity of the film or the historicity of the text. I’ll break up my discussion into a few categories, moving from technology to weapons to politics.

Technology

These films fetishize technology, to their credit. It might be subtle pandering to the “steampunk” subculture, but it gives an interesting depth to the settings in the film and provides lots of opportunities for understanding the historical context of the events of the film. It would not be inaccurate to suggest that Holmes’ historical contemporaries fetishized technology themselves – the stock piece of evidence for this occurs as early as 1851 with The Great Exhibition of the Works and Industry of All Nations, commonly known as the “Crystal Palace.” This and other exhibitions were designed to show off manufacturing and industrial progress on a grand scale. By 1900 attitudes toward technology were peaking – many had high expectations that tech development would deliver a complete understanding of the workings of the universe, and ever-climbing standards of living for humankind. All the same, critiques of technology and especially industrialization (from Karl Marx to William Blake) were already a century old by this point, at least in Britain. However, it wasn’t until the First World War that most of the world realized the downside of tech was not simply smog and social alienation, but the possible annihilation of the human race.

It’s clear that Mr. Holmes has no such anxieties. His technological exploits range from the merely ingenious (“urban camouflage”) to the bombastic (an automobile). As for the auto, which Sherlock and Watson tool around in to and fro the latter’s bachelor party and wedding, it would need to be a German import. The film is set in 1891, just a couple years after Karl Benz’s successful invention of a gas-powered internal combustion engine. The first domestically-produced British version would not emerge until 1895, when Frederick William Lanchester started Lanchester Motor Company.

Perhaps my largest quarrel with the film’s motoring, though, is its effect on the extras in the driving scene. Even if Holmes had managed to make his own auto, or import one from Herr Benz in Germany (of which there would have been only a handful in production at the time), his 2.5 mile journey from Baker Street to Trafalgar Square (the location of Watson’s bachelor party eludes me) would have freaked people out. I mapped out the route here. The people in London’s streets are unlikely to have seen a “horseless carriage” at this time, and Guy Ritchie may have missed an opportunity to get some comedic value out of this. Even more perplexing is how Mycroft’s butler found petrol to top it up for the trip to the church after the night’s drinking/fighting had concluded.

To carry on the theme of motive technology, the protagonists putter past an under-construction London Underground on their journey as well. I don’t have as many clues as to which it is, though Baker Street Station is a likely candidate. It, and the original London Underground, were completed some 30 years prior to the movie. In fact, Holmes and Watson could have taken an underground train to their party instead of their motorcar, though it seems Ritchie calculated that would get WTFs from his viewers. Perhaps the intent was to portray a renovation of the station, as the process of electrifying London’s railway lines was beginning around the time of the film. In any case, the present-day Baker Street Station features an homage to Holmes:

As an aside, a notable tidbit in the film is Watson’s choice of Brighton as his honeymoon location. The late nineteenth century saw a development of mass leisure in Britain (that is, the ability of middle and even working-class people to take holidays), and Brighton as an epicenter for this development, along with Blackpool. Brighton was linked to London by rail in 1840, making it readily accessible for day trips. It’s also worth noting from an infrastructural standpoint that the first of Ritchie’s Holmes films heavily featured an under-construction Tower Bridge:

Weapons and War

And then there’s the weapons technology. Midway through the film, when the major characters head for Germany, persistent references are made to a sort of military-industrial complex, the extent of which Holmes and Watson gradually discover. In the warehouse/factory at Heilbronn, Holmes and Moran briefly chat in a room full of artillery shells before Holmes gets meat-hooked. Moran appears to show him an “automatic pistol.” I don’t recall whether the gun was described very deeply, but fully-automatic mobile assault weapons were not developed until WWI. In the early 1890s, machine guns were still fixed, defensive weapons. Hiram Maxim’s famous machine gun was only 8 years old. One way of fitting the weapon in the movie into history would be if it was meant to be a semi-automatic pistol, which was just beginning mass production around the time of the film.

The Borchart was developed in Germany, so that seems to fit. What made it unique is the motion of the action, which was harnessed to eject spent magazines and load fresh ones. This is called “blowback.” Automatic loading was already in action with larger weapons, such as the rotary style of Gatling guns, but this brought it to a hand-held weapon. In any case, the pistol in the movie didn’t look much like the Borchart, and appeared to have some kind of extended clip in it, a bit like the Mauser C-96 which came about a few years later.

Holmes also stumbles upon a laboratory for producing chemical weapons in the Heilbronn factory. The dubious honor of developing a delivery method like the one in the film belongs to Fritz Haber, a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning German who oversaw the making of chemical weapons during WWI (which, by the way, violated an international treaty banning them in 1900). Though Haber was patriotic and proud of his contribution, his wife and son both committed suicide in shame over Haber’s role in chemical warfare.

The artillery shells depicted in the film look fairly legit – gas weapons were loaded in the ordinance as liquid and dispersed as gas upon impact, as seen in the little vial of yellow liquid inside the shell. However, it’s a bit much to believe the Germans would be using this design in the early 1890s. Although chemical weapons existed before WWI, delivering them effectively via artillery did not emerge until mid-war. Early efforts often involved simply releasing cylinders of chlorine gas and using the wind direction to send it towards the enemy.

Finally, various extremely large guns are used during the German portion of the film. Set in the city of Heilbronn, near the border with France, the environment looks more like that of Essen, the company-town of the Krupp Ironworks. Krupp in the 1890s would have been the largest company in Europe and largely responsible for the rise of Germany as an industrial power. Essen’s massive factory complex and railyard resembled the setting in the film when the protagonists discover the weapons factory and then flee into the forest, where they are rather ridiculously shelled by a variety of field artillery.

The giant gun affectionately dubbed “Little Hansel” by Moriarty’s German lackeys that is brought to bear on the fleeing heroes appears to be styled as a sort of Big Bertha howitzer. Notwithstanding that such a weapon is probably the worst possible method of killing a small group of people who are fleeing into the forest, it makes for an interesting reference to some of the massive weapons that were being made at the time, almost all by the Krupp weapons factory.

While we’re on that topic, it’s also worth pointing out that there were even bigger options available to hyperbolically gigantic artillery enthusiasts, such as the Paris Geschütz or Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz (“Paris Gun” or “Kaiser Wilhelm Gun”) which the Germans designed in order to shell Paris from within their own territory. When put into use during WWI the Parisians believed they were being bombed by unseen/camouflaged zeppelins. Seriously. The barrel was friggin’ 91 feet long and was assembled 75 miles from the city in Crépy. When the Germans did targeting calculations for it, they had to take into account THE ROTATION OF THE EARTH.

Politics and Diplomacy

Scholars of the First World War will be pleased to learn from Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows that the real cause of the war was a conspiracy by evil professor-cum-plutocrat(s). We’ve been agonizing over precisely why it happened for years. Not to mention how it may have happened some twenty years earlier.

In seriousness, this implication in the film is mixed with some useful bits: the aggressive industrialization of military materiel, the climate of diplomatic suspicion, and the anarchist bombings, to name a few. The decades around the turn of the century were one wherein the society, culture, and diplomatic system of the West was beginning to break down. The film does a good job of conveying this sense: the late-Victorian splendor of Stephen Fry’s hilariously-executed Mycroft Holmes stands in contrast with the soot, bombings, and chemical weapons of the scenes in Germany, giving the viewer a taste of the tension and transitional nature of the historical moment.

Diplomatically, the story is much the same. By this time, Europe was still dealing with an essentially post-Napoleonic system of international relations in which major powers engaged in bi- or multi-lateral negotiations to tackle issues (such as the 1884 Berlin Conference on colonialism in Africa or the 1900 conference that attempted to ban chemical weapons). Balance of power was the order of the day. However, this system began to work less and less effectively down to 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. “Secret” diplomacy and treatymaking, the full extent of which was not discernible to the broader international community (exemplified by Germany’s “blank check” to Austria at the beginning of WWI), undermined it from within. We get a taste of this in the film with the largely farcical diplomatic summit at Reichenbach, at which most of the characters believe the real action is going on in secret and the official proceedings are inconsequential. By the way, Reichenbach is a real and quite lovely waterfall, and while it apparently features in Conan Doyle’s writing as the place where [SPOILER] Holmes and Moriarty plummet to their supposed deaths, it does not feature a badass castle-fortress as seen in the film. Sorry.

If that diplomatic system was collapsing, the film may also foreshadow the one that would replace it much later. The subplot of bombings undermining the dialog between France and Germany at the early and middle parts of the film seemed to be subtle nods to the European Union for me. When the German official (?) is holding the meeting in Paris (before being assassinated/bombed), he makes a comment to the effect of “business binding us together.” I couldn’t help but think of “Merkozy” and the contemporary salvage-attempts at keeping Europe together, spearheaded by France and Germany. Insert joke about a rogue British assassin wrecking all of it.

As a final aside, I was intrigued by the repeated mentions that the evil Professor Moriarty was a close friend of the Prime Minister. In 1891, the premiership was held by Lord Robert Cecil, the Marquess of Salisbury. Salisbury is a criminally underrated Prime Minister, and is usually unfairly overshadowed in Victorian politics by his Tory counterpart Benjamin Disraeli. Anyway, the coding here is not so subtle. We get it, Mr. Ritchie. Evil professor-cum-plutocrat mastermind is a Tory.

In any case, this film is manifestly worth seeing, especially if you liked Ritchie’s first adaptation. It’s obviously not a 100% accurate historical representation of its time, but it does give viewers interested in history a taste of some trends in technology, weapons, politics, and so forth, if seemingly 15 years ahead of their proper time. Not to mention the excellent costuming. If you like a chuckle and some historical action-mystery, go check it out.