Facts, Board Schools, and Sherlock Holmes's “Instructive” Moss Rose: Reading Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Naval Treaty” Against Genre

Using Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story “The Naval Treaty” as a test case, this essay argues that, although readers need to begin reading a text as an example of a particular kind of text in order to make sense of it — reading is always “reading as” — generic classification, especially in the case of what is widely assumed to be “genre fiction,” such as the Holmes stories, can lead readers to ignore those features of a text that violate their generic expectations, and hence can preclude alternative ways of reading, interpreting, and evaluating it. In those cases it may be necessary to read the text against its presumed genre.