The first was the obsession with how clearly character and emotion are expressed in faces and gestures. This has something to do with race, but it goes far beyond that. Coarse people have coarse faces, and refined people have refined, sensitive faces. Decisive people have decisive faces, weak people have weak faces. Criminals always have "hideous, contorted" facial expressions. Here Watson describes his future bride, Miss Morestan, In The Sign of the Four:
Her face had neither regularity of feature nor beauty of complexion, but her expression was sweet and amiable, and her large blue eyes were singularly spiritual and sympathetic. In an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents, I have never looked upon a face which gave a clearer promise of a refined and sensitive nature. I could not but observe that as she took the seat which Sherlock Holmes placed for her, her lip trembled, her hand quivered, and she showed every sign of intense inward agitation.
These agitations can still be read after death; of Sir Charles Baskerville, who died of fright, we read that:
Sir Charles lay on his face, his arms out, his fingers dug into the ground, and his features convulsed with some strong emotion to such an extent that I could hardly have sworn to his identity.
And they show in portraits; considering the portrait of the sinister Baskerville ancestor whose crimes lie behind their family curse, Holmes says "he seems a quiet, meek-mannered man enough, but I dare say that there was a lurking devil in his eyes."
Character can also be read from handwriting; decisive people write bold, decisive letters, weak people write weak, frightened letters. Clothes, of course, are deeply revealing, not just from their general cut but the names of the tailors on their tags. This obsession with visual clues is part of what makes Holmes' detecting possible. He can tell at a glance the social class, profession, and character of everyone he meets, because these things are all visible.
More deeply, it must be related to the Victorian obsession with the details of dress and behavior. If you believe that your character is revealed by your clothes, your manners, and your choice of words, you will be extremely careful about those things. If the smallest tremble of your lip is noted by every man around you, you will train yourself to control all those little signs. It you think you are always being judged on everything from your watch to your shoes to your handshake to your diction, you will strive to make all these things conform to the norm. It is a remarkable side-light on a world in which appearances very much mattered, and everyone acted accordingly.
Related is the obsession with scandal, which I have already noted here in the context of Dickens. Holmes is often called in when people want to avoid any scandal; bad things happen, but one can overcome that so long as they are discretely covered up, and a private detective like Holmes is perfect for that.
The second thing that struck me was that Conan Doyle's London was a global city. Half the people they meet have some kind of international connection; they have served in the Indian army, or gone to the California gold fields, or gotten rich in South African diamonds. Holmes' first trick, of course, is deducing that Watson served in Afghanistan. Holmes himself has read up on crime from across the globe and constantly references cases from Europe, America, and India. Some British writers, such as Jane Austen, went out of their way to avoid mentioning the rest of the world. But Conan Doyle reveled in his knowledge of the world and brought it into his stories whenever he could.
A third observation has to do with the history of the detective story. The early Holmes stories (1887-1892) were pioneers of the genre. Not in any absolute sense – there is a sort of detective story in the Arabian Nights, and Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue dates to 1841 – but in the sense that the rules of the classic English detective story had not yet been worked out. But by the time of The Valley of Fear (1914) we find Conan Doyle constructing a sort of locked house mystery with a defined roster of suspects and a solution that the clever reader can work out from the clues presented. I personally find this to be a loss, but I guess that is what readers of the time expected.
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More deeply, it must be related to the Victorian obsession with the details of dress and behavior.
It may well be this, along with a general favor for Empiricism in the time period, but I think there's also simply supposed to be an element of exceptional ability in Holmes, and that his powers of perception are exaggerated to the point of quasi-magicality, which helps make him stand out as special and make his character more exciting. I will not this is also the era that gave us The Count of Monte Cristo, in which an uneducated sailor being taught by a mere priest learns how to become not only an expert swordsman, but also transforms into a genius level gentleman intellectual who is able to seamlessly integrate himself into noble society, somehow. The work and the reader both understand this isn't remotely realistic, but these kinds of far-fetched scenarios make for interesting stories.
Arguably, what we're talking about in the Victorian era are proto-superhero stories, with protagonists who combine the best qualities of both rationalism and romanticism / spiritualism / mysticism. Consider a modern character like Batman, and then trace the lineage backwards through time - The Shadow in the 1930s, Judex and Fantômas in the 1910s, Arsène Lupin in the 1900s, all ultimately tying back to Rocambole in the 1850s, (with other less well known examples scattered between).
Conan Doyle himself had a connection to character in the vein of the ones mentioned above - Arthur's brother-in-law E. W. Hornung wrote a successful series of novels about "A. J. Raffles", a gentleman thief type character who is a master of disguise like Holmes, but also an expert burglar, inventor, linguist, can disguise his voice perfectly to any English accent, and is a top level athlete who is a genius player of cricket.
The Victorians loved their exceptional individuals who defy the restrictions of ordinary life, and so do we. Appearance and class are factors, for sure, but don't read too much into things.
Some British writers, such as Jane Austen, went out of their way to avoid mentioning the rest of the world. But Conan Doyle reveled in his knowledge of the world and brought it into his stories whenever he could.
I think this somewhat also ties into the same underlying drive to make stories more interesting by making them more outlandish (literally).
Austen, in addition to writing a full century earlier, was also focusing entirely on the culture of the landed gentry, and was writing to critique them, with an intended audience which would have necessarily been much more selective given the much lower literacy rates of the time (which would have necessarily skewed toward the higher and middle classes).
But a century later Conan Doyle was writing for the masses, almost all of whom could read by that point, and his goal was to entertain. Sprinkling in elements from exotic, far-off lands only makes sense if your goal is to write a work of adventure. Of course he's going to mention somewhere like India - it was seen as a place of danger and adventure, full of savage beasts (both animal and otherwise), but also great riches and opportunity. The colonial spirit of the age was that proud patriots would serve crown and country by going around the world to "primitive" places, imposing "civilization", extracting wealth, and then coming how to lovely old England to enjoy their profits and tell fantastical tales about it all.
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