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ALL MANNER OF MYSTERIES arrived daily at Sherlock Holmes's door on Baker Street. Not only did these materialize in the form of desperate clients-mud-splattered gentlemen incognito and near-sighted ladies in dire straits-but also in the form of the personal advertisement columns in the major London newspapers that Holmes studied religiously, scanning for stimulating cases worthy of his extraordinary powers of deduction. The columns created a marketplace for everything from soaps to coffins, as well as for miscellaneous mysteries of human drama. The content colloquially known by the 1860s as the "agony column," so named because of its heterogeneous assemblage of vignettes of distress, was a common feature of major Victorian dailies as well as smaller local papers, including the Globe, the Star, the Pall Mall Gazette, the St. James's Gazette, the Evening Standard, and the Echo- to name only the titles listed in Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" (1892). By the second half of the nineteenth century, the agony column typically occupied several rows of prime real estate on the front page of the period's major media source under the heading of "PERSONAL, fcc."1
While the agony column serves as a mystery microgenre unto itself that is pivotal in several Holmes adventures, not to mention in canonical literary precursors, it remains unexplored as media artifact in scholarship on Conan Doyle's trademark stories.2 The Sherlockian use of and obsession with the agony column illustrates that "many of the questions asked by today's media studies were first asked by the Victorians," including what counts as "news," how to reach and sustain a mass audience, and how the format of the news impacts its content.3 The cultural phenomenon of the agony column is an analogue media enactment integral to Baker Street, as constructed by Conan Doyle and reconstructed in contemporary remediations of the Holmes tales. As a social forum that parallels and precedes elements of later media platforms, the columns are a trenchant example of what Henry Jenkins calls "convergence culture," the point at which "old and new media collide ... where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways."4 We see how previous structures of mediation inform future information technics, and in retrospect we...