Recently, I’ve been watching both the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes as well as the David Suchet Hercule Poirot series and it was really born in upon me what an enormous leap in technology there was from the 1890s to the 1920s. These hit more in the TV shows than in the stories, I think, because the TV shows add in all of the clothing and set decoration which is visually necessary but which prose does not need to describe. But of course the differences in the prose description are immense, too.

Perhaps the biggest difference is the ubiquity of the telephone in Poirot. People do pay calls on each other, of course, but they also call each other on the telephone quite frequently. There were, in Holmes’ day, telegrams, and the mail was picked up and delivered several times a day such that in some cases a letter written in the morning might, under favorable circumstances, find its way to its recipient by the evening, but quite often by the morning of the following day. But as fast as these things were, the telephone is enormously faster. This speed shrinks the world—which is to say that Sherlock Holmes lived in a bigger world than did Hercule Poirot.

You can also see this in the ordinary manner of transportation: Sherlock Holmes took horse-drawn cabs within London and trains to everywhere else. Hercule Poirot mostly took cars and only occasionally took trains. But Poirot also flew on airplanes and took steam ships.

That last part probably needs a little elaboration, since ships have sailed since before the birth of Christ and in Sherlock Holmes’ time there were plenty of passenger ships sailing and sometimes steaming around. But the thing is, you very rarely see Holmes take any of these, for the excellent reason that ships were, at that time, still dangerous. By Poirot’s time, the quality of ships and of navigation had improved significantly; taking a vacation on a ship was a much more reasonable thing for a gentleman to do in the 1920s and 1930s than in the 1890s.

Steam ships are a bit of an oddity among these methods of transportation, as they are somewhat analogous to moving islands. But cars and aeroplanes also shrink the world.

Consider this bit from The Copper Beeches:

By eleven o’clock the next day we were well upon our way to the old English capital. Holmes had been buried in the morning papers all the way down, but after we had passed the Hampshire border he threw them down and began to admire the scenery. It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man’s energy. All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.

“Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.

But Holmes shook his head gravely.

“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?”

“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

“You horrify me!”

“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser. Had this lady who appeals to us for help gone to live in Winchester, I should never have had a fear for her. It is the five miles of country which makes the danger.

The flaw in the argument is that people in cities are, for the most part, indifferent to the sufferings of their neighbors. People rarely call the police and do not want to get involved. And cities attract people who want to find participants in their favorite vices, while no one goes out to the country to find people with whom to take their favorite recreational drugs and engage in sexual practices with strangers. This is all quite beside the point, though. Holmes is quite right that, in his day, the houses in the country were quite isolated. But this ceases to be true in the age of the telephone. Hercule Poirot lives in a smaller world than does Sherlock Holmes.

These are very half-formed thoughts and I have no strong conclusion. But this interests me greatly, and I think it’s worth paying attention to.