Merrick Burrow

Academic researcher (Head of English & History, University of Huddersfield)

Merrick Burrow is an academic and literary scholar, mainly focusing on 19th and early 20th Century literature and culture. He has a long-standing interest in Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction (adventure stories, detective fiction, gothic, scientific romance, spy thrillers, etc.) and especially the ways that these cultural forms show societies adapting to the emergence of new technologies. More recently, this has developed into an examination of the theme of deception culture since the early 19th century. Important to Merrick’s research is the idea that modernity is driven by a desire for enlightenment, which supports scientific discovery and the production of new technologies. But these technologies, he argues, have always been haunted by the possibility that they may become tools of deception. Merrick is writing a book at present, which explores the excitement and anxieties that accompanies these developments, from newspaper hoaxes, mechanical automatons and spirit photography, through the popularity of detectives and scientists as heroes in fiction, to current debates about fake news and Artificial Intelligence. At the centre of all this, the unwitting involvement of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—creator of Sherlock Holmes—in the greatest photographic hoax of all time has a special significance. Doyle’s example highlights the troubling possibility that even a champion of rationalism may become complicit in deception. And it points to the problem of trust as perhaps the most fundamental one of all.