by Daniel Smith
The Legendary Langham
When work finished on the Langham Hotel in 1865, it was for a while the grandest hotel in London. Located in the heart of Holmes’s native Marylebone not far from Regent’s Park, it was opened by the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) and was the first building in England to be fitted with hydraulic lifts. The great and the good flocked there – among them the celebrated American man of letters, Mark Twain, and the French Emperor, Napoleon III. No wonder the hotel found its way into several of the Sherlock Holmes tales. It was here that the King of Bohemia stayed in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, as did the Hon. Philip Green in ‘The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax’. Captain Morstan also enjoyed a sojourn there in The Sign of the Four. This was most apt because the Langham had played a vital part in the emergence of The Sign of the Four, the second story to feature the great detective. Conan Doyle was commissioned to write the novel during a dinner at the hotel – a get-together that has achieved legendary status in the literary world. On the evening of 30 August 1889, Conan Doyle arrived at the hotel to meet a magazine editor called J. M. Stoddart and a fellow writer – a certain Oscar Wilde. It was the first time Doyle and Wilde had encountered each other. Stoddart, meanwhile, was a man with an eye for talent and realized that here were two writers he would be happy to see in his publication, the Philadelphia-based Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. As a result of that dinner, Stoddart commissioned not only The Sign of the Four from Doyle but also The Picture of Dorian Gray from Wilde. Doyle’s story (subtitled: ‘The Problem of the Sholtos’) appeared in February 1890, with Wilde’s masterpiece following six months later. Not a bad return for a night’s work by Stoddart. In his 1924 collection of memoirs, Memories and Adventures, Doyle would refer to the Langham dinner as ‘a golden evening for me’.
Get Me a Paget – Any Paget!
Many people – even Conan Doyle’s own father (see here) – turned their hand to illustrating the Sherlock Holmes stories, but one stands out from all the others. No one played a greater role in shaping the popular image of Baker Street’s finest than Sidney Paget, the man who illustrated Conan Doyle’s stories for The Strand Magazine. It was not the pen of Conan Doyle that depicted Holmes in a deerstalker and Inverness cape, but that of Paget. (That look, for the record, was first sketched to accompany ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, which appeared in The Strand in 1891.) However, had it not been for an apparent quirk of fate, Sherlock Holmes might have looked quite different. It is widely believed that Sidney Paget was commissioned to draw The Strand’s illustrations by accident. The job was instead intended to go to his elder brother, Walter. So how did the mix-up happen? Sidney was one of nine siblings, and three of them studied art at the Royal Academy Schools. After graduating, he started to make a name for himself as an illustrator for various magazines in both the UK and US, principally depicting war subjects in Egypt and the Sudan. However, Walter was the more famous artist by the time the first Sherlock Holmes short stories started to appear. He was particularly celebrated for his illustrations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and an edition of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. According to legend, The Strand hoped he would take on the task of illustrating the Holmes stories and so sent a job offer through the post. It was addressed to ‘Mr Paget, the Illustrator’ or words to that effect, and – with several brothers all fitting that description – fell into the hands of Sidney, who duly accepted the commission. He would go on to produce 356 drawings to accompany 38 Holmes stories. To begin with, Conan Doyle was unconvinced by Paget’s pictures, believing that he made Holmes more physically appealing than he had envisaged. Over time, though, he was won over. He even presented Paget with a wedding gift of a silver cigarette case, inscribed ‘From Sherlock Holmes, 1893’. As The Strand would say of Paget, ‘his delineations of the famous “Sherlock Holmes” stories had their share in the popularity of that wonderful detective’.
THE ORIGINAL MODEL?
Walter Paget may still have made a significant contribution to the public perception of Holmes. It is widely held that Sidney modelled his drawings of Holmes upon his older brother, a suggestion supported by Sidney’s own daughter. Meanwhile, Alfred Morris Butler, an architecture student from Sidney’s days at the Royal Academy, is thought to have served as the inspiration for his drawings of Dr Watson.
Becoming Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes is recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the most filmed fictional human character in history. Rarely does a year go by without some new screen adaptation emerging. Not a bad achievement for a character once described by his own creator as ‘not fitted for dramatic representation’. But, of course, Holmes predates the age of cinema and television, so it was on the stage that he was first dramatically recreated. The first man to star as the great detective was Charles Brookfield, who appeared in a short play called Under the Clock at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Conan Doyle was persuaded that Holmes might make a good subject for a play after all: he wrote a lengthy dramatic piece (some five acts in total) but was unable to find anyone of significant stature willing to back his project. He was, for example, rebuffed by two of the greatest actor-managers of the age, Sir Henry Irving and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. His play instead found its way to an emerging Broadway producer, Charles Frohman, who sent it on to William Gillette, a celebrated American actor-producer-playwright. Holmes and Gillette created a kind of alchemy. Gillette freely played around with the script having received Conan Doyle’s blessing: ‘You may marry or murder him or do what you like with him.’ Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes opened at New York’s Garrick Theatre on 6 November 1899 and was an instant hit, running for 235 performances. It then transferred to the Lyceum in London, where it ran for a further 216 shows and even spawned an immediate pastiche, Sheerluck Jones (or Why D’Gillette Him Off?), at Terry’s Theatre off The Strand. While Gillette’s performance was not to every critic’s taste, Conan Doyle heralded it as graced with the ‘genius of a great sympathetic artist’. Gillette recorded the play in 1916 but all copies were thought lost until a copy was found in a Paris archive in 2014. After restoration, the movie received its second world debut the following year.
DEBUT OF A TRAMP
William Gillette ended up playing the title role in Sherlock Holmes over 1,300 times, becoming the first actor – but by no means the last – to become an international star thanks to his depiction of the sage of Baker Street. Another global icon, Charlie Chaplin, got his big break when he appeared in the play in London in 1901 as Billy the Pageboy.
A Baffling Performance
If Holmes’s debut upon the stage was an almost unmitigated triumph, his first appearance on the silver screen was rather less confident. The first movie to feature the detective was a 30-second silent film entitled Sherlock Holmes Baffled. Made in 1900, it is considered to be the world’s first detective film, although it can hardly be considered a satisfying watch on that score. The narrative (if that is not too bold a description) centres around Holmes discovering that his drawing room is being burgled. But as he confronts the thief, the villain disappears, only to reappear again – but not before Holmes has lit up a cigar. Holmes fires at the criminal with a pistol that he had in his dressing gown, but again the burglar vanishes. Holmes at least retrieves the swag bag containing his property – only for that to suddenly disappear and then reappear in the thief’s hand. The thief then makes good his escape through a window, rendering Holmes utterly baffled. The film was made by Arthur Marvin, a cinematographer with several hundred credits to his name including some early productions directed by the legendary W. D. Griffiths. The names of the stars of Sherlock Holmes Baffled are, however, lost to history. A similar fate almost befell the film itself, before a paper print was found stored in the US Library of Congress in 1968. For a character who has become a staple of film and television, Holmes’s screen debut gave little hint of the long career that lay ahead.
What Have You Done with Mrs Hudson?
Mrs Hu
dson appears in fourteen of the canonical Holmes stories, third only behind Watson and Holmes himself. The landlady of 221b Baker Street famously provided her tenants with regular sustenance, yet (in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’), Conan Doyle replaced her with a mystery woman going by the name of Mrs Turner. Despite Holmes being seemingly unfazed by her sudden appearance with a tray, we know nothing of her real identity. Had she briefly taken over from Mrs Hudson as landlady or was she perhaps an old friend covering Mrs Hudson’s duties while she was otherwise occupied? We shall never know. Intriguingly, though, Mrs Turner almost made it into another story, having initially been inserted by Conan Doyle into the narrative of ‘The Empty House’, although it was Mrs Hudson who was restored for the final edit. In truth, Mrs Hudson is herself something of an enigma. Despite her many appearances, most are the briefest of cameos. We never find out her first name, nor do we receive a physical description of her. She has, we are told, a ‘stately tread’ but that is the only clue as to her demeanour. Holmes, meanwhile, considers her primarily in terms of her domestic talents – and he is not always particularly impressed. He describes her cuisine as ‘a little limited’ while admitting that ‘she has as good an idea of breakfast as a Scotchwoman’. At least she fares well in comparison to the unnamed ‘new cook’ who appears in ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’ proffering two underwhelming hard-boiled eggs, apparently as a result of the cook having been distracted while reading a romance in a popular magazine. Mrs Hudson in turn was remarkably tolerant of her frankly testing tenant. Indeed, according to Watson, he was ‘the very worst tenant in London’, being at once untidy, liable to play music at all hours of the night, prone to discharging firearms indoors and carrying out malodorous scientific experiments, not to mention being a magnet for violence and danger.
A TRUE GENTLEMAN?
But, in spite of Holmes’s many flaws, dear Mrs Hudson was in awe of him and came to appreciate his ‘remarkable gentleness and courtesy in his dealings with women’ (‘The Dying Detective’). Such was her warmth towards him that when he reappeared after his apparent death in ‘The Empty House’, she ‘beamed upon us both as we entered’. Somehow, despite only a few enigmatic glimpses of her, we know instinctively that Mrs Hudson is a vital component of the Holmesian world. But as for this Mrs Turner . . . the jury remains out!
Lazy Parenting
Professor Moriarty was Holmes’s arch nemesis – he was, after all, nothing less than the ‘Napoleon of Crime’. Curiously, the canonical stories suggest that the Professor shared the same first name as his brother. Despite being the ‘organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected’ in London, Moriarty only actually appeared in two stories, ‘The Final Problem’ and The Valley of Fear, and received mentions in just five others. In ‘The Final Problem’, his first name is not given but that of his brother – Colonel James Moriarty – is. However, in ‘The Empty House’, Holmes refers to his foe as ‘Professor James Moriarty’. Two brothers, same name. The Professor was by common consent a mathematics genius, celebrated for his work on the academic paper The Dynamics of an Asteroid. In Holmes’s estimation, he was also a masterful philosopher and abstract thinker. Picture then the tall, thin professor with his domed forehead, sunken grey eyes and a face that was ‘forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion’, pacing as he tried to fathom how this naming fiasco had come about. He could only have concluded that his parents’ failure to give their sons a name of their own pointed to their singular lack of interest in their progeny. Even calling them One and Two would have suggested at least an attempt at differentiation. But to simply employ ‘James’ as a catch-all Christian name . . . So was Moriarty’s extreme criminality a desperate bid for attention? Was this nefarious Napoleon simply trying to make the world take notice of him after his parents had failed to show much interest? It is a tempting hypothesis.
Wild at Heart
In The Valley of Fear, Holmes suggests a real-life counterpart for Professor Moriarty – the villainous Jonathan Wild. Wild lived an incredible double life in early-eighteenth-century London. With the city lacking an established official police force, he headed up a gang of ‘thief-takers’. It was their job, in theory at least, to pursue criminals and bring them to justice, for which there would customarily be some kind of financial reward. They were, in other words, bounty-hunters. Wild, though, realized that he could become richer by running the thieves, too. It was reputed that almost every London thief of any note was under his command, stealing to order so that he could pick up a reward for the return of the stolen property. He also thought nothing of handing over to the authorities those thieves who were no longer of use to him, picking up further rewards in the process. One of the miscreants he captured was Jack Shepherd, a thief who had achieved folk hero status for his reputation for derring-do. Wild’s part in Shepherd’s downfall in 1724 saw public opinion decisively swing against the notorious thief-taker. Wild’s wickedness now caught up with him and he himself suffered the hangman’s noose a year later. The man who had claimed to be on the side of law and order, while secretly working to fatally undermine it, was derided by the public as the personification of corruptibility and hypocrisy. In Holmes’s estimation: ‘Everything comes in circles – even Professor Moriarty. Jonathan Wild was the hidden force of the London criminals, to whom he sold his brains and his organization on a fifteen per cent commission. The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up.’
For What It’s Worth
While Wild is a contender for ‘the original Moriarty’, another possibility is a man nicknamed ‘the Napoleon of the criminal world’ long before Holmes conferred the title on his nemesis. Adam Worth was born in Germany in 1844 but relocated to the United States of America while still a child. His criminality soon escalated from petty theft to more serious robberies and, with the US authorities closing in on him, he fled to Europe. Setting himself up first in France and then England, he oversaw a criminal empire that practised robbery, fraud and illegal gaming – although he demanded minimal use of violence from his network of robbers.
THE GAINSBOROUGH AFFAIR
One of Worth’s most infamous exploits was the theft in 1876 of a valuable portrait by Thomas Gainsborough of the Duchess of Devonshire from Agnew & Sons, a London gallery. William Agnew had paid 10,000 guineas for it just three weeks before – at the time, the record amount for a painting sold at auction. It is thought Worth stole it with a view to selling it on and using the funds to bail his brother out of custody. However, when his brother was released without bail, Worth held on to the picture to cash in at a later date.
It was Robert Anderson, an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard most famously involved in the Jack the Ripper investigation, who first referred to Adam Worth as the criminal Napoleon, at least in part because of Worth’s diminutive stature. In The Valley of Fear, Moriarty is described as owning a painting, ‘ La Jeune Fille à l’agneau’ by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (a picture that in real life was bought for a million francs in 1865). Some Holmes scholars suggest that this work was chosen by Conan Doyle because the ‘agneau’ element of the title served as an oblique nod to the ‘Agnew’ theft, cementing the connection between Moriarty and Worth. Worth was at last chased down by the forces of law in Belgium in 1891 – his capture following a bodged robbery in Brussels – and he was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. He was, however, released early for good behaviour and, in 1901, in a particularly audacious act, he sold the Gainsborough picture back to the gallery from which it had disappeared for a princely $25,000 – more than enough to bankroll a few months of the high life before his death in 1902.
Stranded
While A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four were modest successes for Beeton’s Christmas Annual and Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, respectively, it was at The Strand Magazine that the Holmes phenomenon really took off. Founded in 1890 by George Newnes, it was edited by Herbert Greenhough Smith from its first edition in January 1891 all the
way up to 1930. The magazine was proudly mass-market and hoped to appeal across the ages, not least with its offer of a picture on every page and its half-shilling price tag (about half that of its chief rivals). Initial sales of 300,000 soon rose to half a million copies per month. Moreover, Greenhough Smith was a wily operator and a supreme talent spotter. He quickly recognized the potential of Conan Doyle’s short stories, with the detective blooming in shorter-format narratives. The Strand published every one of the Holmes short stories, not to mention serializations of The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear. Conan Doyle also used it as a platform for several of his non-Holmes literary efforts – among them Rodney Stone and The Exploits and Adventures of the Brigadier Gerard – many of which were highly successful in their own right. But nothing came close to the popularity of Holmes, with his appearances customarily guaranteeing a hundred-thousand-plus spike in circulation.