Throughout the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes stories, there is quite a bit of commentary concerning the social classes of the Victorian era. Whether Doyle was depicting Holmes as “upholding the status quo” of the time is a topic that is frequently debated because class inequality was a frighteningly real thing at the time. Women were often thought of as less intelligent than their male counterparts and there was a growing tension between the upper class and the middle and lower classes. Doyle also spends a good amount of time talking about a “criminal class” who are predisposed to take to a life of crime and often composed of people of the lower and working classes. This, by itself, would suggest that Doyle believed that poor people were destined to a life of crime, but I believe it’s a little more complicated than that. There are…