In December 1893, a man in London opened his copy of The Strand Magazine, read the last two pages, and threw it across the room.
He was not alone. Twenty thousand other readers canceled their subscriptions that month. Letters flooded into the magazine's offices in volumes that overwhelmed the staff. Some were pleas. Some were accusations. A few were what you might generously describe as threats. Arthur Conan Doyle, who had just published a story in which Sherlock Holmes fell off a waterfall, later wrote that he was "amazed at the concern expressed by the public." He was being polite.
What happened in 1893 was not a readership being disappointed. It was a fandom losing its mind. And it was, by most accounts, the first time in recorded history that had happened over a fictional character.
How You Build a Fandom
The Strand Magazine launched in 1891 as a general-interest monthly, offering adventures for men, romances for women, fairy tales for children, all under one cover. Sherlock Holmes arrived in its pages that same year, and something unusual happened almost immediately. Readers didn't just enjoy the stories. They became convinced, in some functional way, that Sherlock Holmes was real.
This was partly Doyle's fault, and partly his genius. Holmes's world was dense with specific, verifiable-feeling detail: the address at 221B Baker Street, the precise chemical experiments, the careful notation of dates and London neighborhoods. The stories read less like fiction and more like case files. Watson, nominally, was the author. Doyle was just the literary agent.
Readers took all of this completely seriously. Letters began arriving at 221B Baker Street, an address that at the time didn't technically exist because Baker Street numbers didn't go that high. Women wrote to propose marriage. Researchers wrote to dispute his methods. People who had been wrongly accused of crimes wrote asking for his help. The fictional detective was receiving real mail from real people with real problems. This was the most successful world-building in literary history to date.
The Man Who Wanted to Kill His Own Character
Doyle, for his part, was watching all of this with growing alarm. He had not set out to write a detective series. He had set out to write serious historical fiction, the kind that would earn him a place in the canon. Holmes kept getting in the way. "I believe that if I had never touched Holmes," he wrote in his memoirs, "who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would be a more commanding one."
By 1893, he had had enough. He wrote "The Final Problem," sent Holmes to Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, and had him go over the edge with Professor Moriarty. He later called it "justifiable homicide in self-defence, since if I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me."
The public did not receive this framing charitably.
The First Fan Backlash
The Strand lost twenty thousand subscribers in the weeks after "The Final Problem" was published. This was not abstract displeasure. This was readers taking the cancellation to the post office, putting it in writing, and paying for the stamp; a very motivated level of anger in 1893.
The letters to Doyle himself were, by most accounts, extraordinary. They ranged from heartfelt grief to full accusations of literary murder. Readers were not upset that a story had ended badly. They were upset as though someone had died. The line between fiction and reality, the one fans had been quietly erasing since 1891 by writing to 221B Baker Street and playing what Sherlockians would later call the Great Game, had been rubbed away entirely.
The Great Game was the practice of analyzing the Holmes stories as if they were actual historical documents: finding continuity errors, proposing explanations for the inconsistencies, debating which year a case had actually taken place in. Fans weren't reading stories. They were doing scholarship on a person who had never existed. They were writing what we would now call fan fiction. Unauthorized Holmes stories started appearing in print almost immediately after the death, the first notable one written by J.M. Barrie, who would later go on to create Peter Pan and apparently had strong feelings about dead fictional detectives.
Doyle held out for ten years. He brought Holmes back in 1903, in a story called "The Adventure of the Empty House," which explained that Holmes had survived Reichenbach Falls after all. The fans had won. The first fandom had outlasted the creator's attempt to end it.
What The Fans Did
Here is what Victorian Sherlock Holmes fandom looked like in practice, stripped of any romanticism.
People wrote letters to a fictional address on the sincere hope of receiving a reply. They wrote stories featuring someone else's character and circulated them among friends. They formed reading groups that functioned less like book clubs and more like research departments, arguing about internal consistency with the intensity of people who believed the stakes were real. They pressured an author, relentlessly, through every communication channel available to them, until he reversed a creative decision he had made about his own work.
Every single one of those behaviors has a direct modern equivalent. The tools are different. The scale is different. The underlying impulse, to find the other people who are as invested in this fictional world as you are, to produce things about it, to take it seriously enough to fight for it, has not changed at all since 1891.
The Tradition Continues
The Baker Street Irregulars, the actual fan club rather than the fictional street kids from the stories, were founded in New York in 1934 by a writer named Christopher Morley. They are still meeting. When the block at 219-229 Baker Street was renumbered in the 1930s and 221B became a real postal address, a building society moved in and immediately started receiving Holmes's mail. They hired a dedicated secretary whose entire job was to respond to fan letters in character. When that building society vacated in 2002, the Sherlock Holmes Museum took over the address. And the mail.
The tradition the Holmes fandom started got picked up everywhere. In 1930, science fiction readers in Chicago published a handmade magazine called The Comet because they wanted to talk about the stories between issues. In 1939, the first World Science Fiction Convention drew fans to New York City. In January 1972, a small group of Star Trek fans, largely organized by women operating under the name "The Committee," rented a hotel ballroom in Manhattan and expected around five hundred people. Three thousand showed up. They hadn't advertised beyond their own community. Three thousand people found them anyway.
The tradition didn't stop with conventions. The SCP Foundation, for anyone not yet in that particular corner of the internet, is a collaborative fiction project that presents itself as the classified case files of a secret organization tasked with containing anomalous objects and entities. The files read like government documents. Contributors write in bureaucratic procedural language. Readers debate internal consistency, propose explanations for contradictions, and build out the world together in exactly the same way Sherlockians played the Great Game in the 1890s. The fiction is the point. Treating it as real is the game. There are thousands of contributors and millions of readers, all playing it at once.
We made a shirt for that. It says "There Is No Antimemetics Division" on the front, which is an SCP in-joke, which means it is fully legible only to people who have already gone deep enough down this particular rabbit hole to know what an antimemetic is. The man writing letters to 221B Baker Street in 1892 would have understood immediately.
None of this is new. None of it started with the internet. The impulse to find the other people who are as interested in this fictional world as you are, to produce things about it, to take it seriously enough to fight for it when the creator tries to take it away, has been around since at least 1891.
The man who threw his Strand Magazine across the room in December 1893 would recognize every bit of it. He was the first, but he was not the last.
