The first appearance of Sherlock Holmes in 1887 (in A Study in Scarlet) is particularly interesting in historical terms. For the first time, European cities had proliferated to the point where it was impossible to know more than a small percentage of their inhabitants. Yet the London that features in these stories manages to resist the idea that the city is sublime, that it is too large for any one person to be able to comprehend. Holmes and Watson represent Conan Doyle's bourgeois remedy to the terrifying and seemingly endless late 19th-century expansion of urban and industrial civilization.