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WHEN A CHARACTER from popular fiction becomes so associ- ated with his own archetype that his very name becomes a suitable entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, one may safely assume that the character has, quite literally, played a notable role in how English culture views and defines itself. And while E. W. Hornung's infamous antihero lacks the present-day familiarity of a philandering Don Juan or an overly romantic Romeo, there was a time when allusions made to A. J. Raffles-first-class amateur cricketer by day, first-class profes- sional burglar by night-were as identifiable as any other fictional character of his day. From 1898 to 1909, few works of English fiction could claim to be as popular, nor could many other characters claim to have had as much of an impact on the nation's reassessment of the English masculine ideal, particularly the once seemingly infallible gen- tleman model.1 Relying heavily on allusions and references to cricket, Hornung spoke to late-Victorians in a language they could understand and appreciate, making Raffles one the era's most prominent icons of male decadency.
The stories featuring A. J. Raffles deserve to be a part of any at- tempt to fully understand the fall of the gentleman ideal in English lit- erature. Part Oscar Wilde, part W. G. Grace, Raffles became one of the fin-de-siècle's most improbable models of English masculinity. By es- sentially turning a self-professed antihero into one of the nation's most fashionable archetypes of the English gentleman, Hornung played a significant role in shifting the literary standards of what it truly meant to be "cricket" and-even more importantly-what rightfully ought to be categorized as "not cricket," the more commonly used construction of the "cricket/not cricket" idiom. While Raffles was certainly not the first fictional gentleman in English literature to fall short of his expected social role, he was by far the most popular gentleman-rogue of the era, an accomplishment made all the more remarkable given the fact that Raffles was quite possibly the most ungentlemanly gentleman of early- twentieth-century popular fiction.
Conan Doyle & Hornung
Throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, as the public demand for Raffles stories increased, readers were faced with an in- triguing dilemma: how could one earnestly root for a protagonist who...