by Michael Sims
Not surprisingly, Watson is preoccupied with a simple question: What does Holmes do for a living? There is no hint of inherited money paying his bills. He spends many hours away from Baker Street, in chemical laboratories and dissection rooms and on unexplained adventures, yet he confirms Stamford’s statement that he is not a medical student. He does not seem to be reading for a degree in any of the sciences.
“Yet his zeal for certain studies was remarkable,” observes Watson, “and within eccentric limits his knowledge was so extraordinarily ample and minute that his observations have fairly astounded me.” Why, Watson keeps asking himself, would a man pursue such obscure knowledge? “No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.”
Arthur assigned Holmes an intriguing trait that seems to have been based upon his own character: “Nothing could exceed his energy when the working fit was upon him; but now and again a reaction would seize him, and for days on end he would lie upon the sofa in the sitting-room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night.” At times Watson suspects that Holmes may be addicted to some kind of drug, which in the second Holmes novel would prove to be the case: He takes cocaine when he feels benumbed by the routine of everyday life—that is, when no criminal puzzle presents itself. But no drug shows up in A Study in Scarlet.
By unconsciously pouring into Holmes some of his creator’s personal inconsistencies and inchoate rebellion, Arthur painted him as a hero who was larger-than-life but believably complex. Like protagonists such as d’Artagnan, Holmes is both intelligent and fearless. Many thriller writers had created their protagonist as a kind of heroic alter ego. Physical courage came so naturally to Arthur, however, that he did not have to imagine a contempt for danger and bestow it upon Sherlock Holmes. He merely drew upon his own casual bravery in the face of poison overdoses, thrashing whales, boxing sailors, and circling sharks.
From the first, however, Arthur envisioned his detective as outside the predictable loyalties of earlier heroes, naturally above bourgeois morality. In mocking the functionaries of law and order, Holmes can even sound like Robin Hood or other laughing rogues. Disdain for the established police force—and especially for detectives who strode through society without an identifying uniform—had alternated, since its founding, with optimistic respect for the new kind of policing.
Not one to fall into slavish hero worship himself, Arthur gave Watson a skeptical eye for his new friend’s arrogance, vanity, and other foibles. This narrative ploy permitted him to round out the relationship and raise it above the worshipful acolyte role played by Poe’s narrator. Watson misses, however, what the reader perceives, which is that sometimes Holmes is pulling his roommate’s leg. He claims, for example, to have no idea who Thomas Carlyle may be. He absurdly pretends ignorance of the heliocentric cosmos of Copernicus—and gullible Watson swallows the bait, at least at first.
“You appear to be astonished,” remarks Holmes about Watson’s response to his claimed ignorance of astronomy. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!” exclaims Watson.
“You see, I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.. . . It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!”
“What the deuce is it to me?” Holmes exclaims; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
But Holmes, playing his game, does not describe what his work may be.
Sometimes the inconsistencies in Holmes’s character resulted from Arthur’s own slapdash, devil-may-care approach to writing. He didn’t worry about details and apparently considered internal consistency a minor virtue in fiction—not one on which he was going to lavish much attention. Soon Holmes reveals that, like his creator, he is quite knowledgeable about history and science. As the novel unfolds, Watson discovers that Holmes can casually cite obscure passages in the scientific writings of Darwin, such as the great scientist’s idea that human beings’ appreciation for the rhythms of music may have predated spoken language. A walking encyclopedia of the history of crime and detection, Holmes maintains an extensive scrapbook/catalogue of criminal references. Arthur may have recalled a scene from the 1871 novel A Terrible Temptation, by one of his favorite writers, Charles Reade. In it a character maintains a vast personal filing system:
Underneath the table was a formidable array of note-books, standing upright, and labelled on their backs. There were about twenty large folios, of classified facts, ideas, and pictures; for the very wood-cuts were all indexed and classified on the plan of a tradesman’s ledger; there was also the receipt-book of the year, treated on the same plan.. . . Then there was a collection of solid quartos, and of smaller folio guard-books called Indexes.. . . By the side of the table were six or seven thick pasteboard cards, each about the size of a large portfolio, and on these the author’s notes and extracts were collected from all his repertories into something like a focus, for a present purpose.
Despite his patriotism and fierce ambition and commitment to a medical career, despite his preoccupation with money and his devotion to family, Arthur liked to think of himself as bohemian. The term derived not from inhabitants of the actual Kingdom of Bohemia—which, in 1867, had become part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—but from bohémien, originally the French term for Romany people often described in English with the word Gypsy. A decade before Arthur’s birth, in the satirical novel Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray—who later dandled Arthur on his knee in Edinburgh—expressed the bourgeois view when he wrote of Becky Sharp as she wandered Europe, “She became a perfect Bohemian ere long, herding with people whom it would make your hair stand on end to meet.”
In 1863, an anonymous essayist in The Westminster Review had written,
As the phrase “Egyptian” was once generally used in our own country to describe a vagrant of any clime or tribe, so the term “Bohemian” has come to be very commonly accepted in our day as the description of a certain kind of literary gipsy, no matter in what language he speaks, or what city he inhabits . . . A Bohemian is simply an artist or littérateur who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life or in art. In its essence, Bohemia is, or was, a protest against the subjection of human life to money-making, and of human intellect to conventional rule.
Looking back later, Arthur thought that at sixteen, in 1874, he had been too Bohemian for his relatives in London. In A Study in Scarlet, in a scene of almost marital domesticity, he even had Watson smoke his pipe and keep awake for Holmes’s return from a late-night jaunt by reading Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, the semi-autobiographical story cycle about starving artists in Paris that had created the current international image of bohemianism. Such themes suited Arthur’s title, with its echoes of the decadent Aesthetic movement.
But Holmes, not Watson, best demonstrated Arthur’s own resistance to conventionality. Working for himself, bragging about his genius, at times sleeping all day and tracking miscreants by night, disdaining money, snubbing Scotland Yard detectives and other representatives of authority and convention, mapping a world without the supernatural, demonstrating the potential of sheer intellect—Holmes was a revolutionary combination of attributes. Arthur had merged the characters he met in real life and in fiction, embodied his own reckless bravery and burgeoning passion for justice, and married a Romantic vision of science to the myth of the heroic adventurer. At the age of twenty-seven, he had conjured a new kind of hero.
CHAPTER 20
A Little Too Scientific
The fatal mistake which the ordinary policeman makes is this, that he gets his theory first, and then makes the facts fit it, instead of getting his facts first of all and making all his little observations and deductions until
he is driven irresistibly by them into an elucidation in a direction he may never have originally anticipated.
—JOSEPH BELL
Arthur’s admiration for Edgar Allan Poe and Émile Gaboriau, which had begun in his boyhood, flowered into his own incarnation of a smug, brilliant detective. Thus he imagined Dr. Watson comparing his new roommate’s talents to those of both Monsieur Lecoq and Auguste Dupin—only to meet with a dismissive response. In his early notes for A Study in Scarlet, Arthur wrote down snatches of dialogue as if taking dictation: “Lecoq was a bungler—Dupin was better. Dupin was decidedly smart. His trick of following a train of thought was more sensational than clever but still he had analytical genius.”
Despite his amateur status, Dupin is known to the gendarmerie. He undertakes the case in “The Purloined Letter” at the behest of his acquaintance “Monsieur G——, the Prefect of the Parisian Police.” Neither Dupin nor his companion is impressed with G——’s intelligence. “We gave him a hearty welcome,” says the narrator; “for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man, and we had not seen him for several years.” G—— “had a fashion of calling everything odd that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of oddities.”
Arthur gave his detective a similar contempt for the official police force in A Study in Scarlet: “There is no crime to detect, or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it.” Of the two official detectives in Scarlet, Holmes remarks, “Gregson is the smartest of the Scotland Yarders; he and Lestrade are the pick of a bad lot.”
Dupin was an amateur with a talent for logic. Holmes, in contrast, while not a policeman, was also not a layman. By dint of burning the midnight oil in library and laboratory, as well as extensive experience in the real world, he had turned his passion for observation and minutiae into a position as consulting detective. While it was unlikely that any actual police detectives had ever begged a private inquiry agent to assist them, as Gregson beseeched Watson’s new roommate, at least Holmes was a young professional with a growing reputation.
Holmes often echoes Dupin and Gaboriau in other ways. “Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show,” says Dupin in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” “that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.” And Monsieur Lecoq remarks, “This is one of those vulgar details whose very insignificance makes them terrible, when they are attended by certain circumstances.” In a later Holmes story, the detective remarks to Watson about a clue, “It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles.”
Arthur was not one to deny his influences—and perhaps he foresaw that readers could not miss his debts. In the published book, Watson remarks to Holmes, “You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.”
But Arthur had no intention of making his fictional detective speak generously of forebears. Just as Poe placed a critique of the criminal-turned-detective Vidocq into the mouth of Dupin, so did Arthur have Holmes mock Dupin. “Now, in my opinion,” scoffs Holmes, puffing at his pipe, “Dupin was a very inferior fellow . . . He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.”
Watson asks about Lecoq.
“Lecoq was a miserable bungler,” fumes Holmes in reply; “he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so.” Clearly Holmes is referring to Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq. “It might be made a text-book for detectives to teach them what to avoid.”
* * *
One notable contrast between Arthur’s detective duo and Poe’s is exemplified by how they meet. Dupin and his narrator bump into each other while seeking “the same very rare and very remarkable volume” in “an obscure library in the Rue Montmartre.” The two men are barely in and of the world. Despite Dupin’s emphasis on reason and evidence, they exist in a murky, candlelit landscape familiar to readers of Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
In contrast, Arthur opened Chapter 1 of A Study in Scarlet with Dr. Watson seeking affordable lodgings. Young, wounded, exhausted, and of a naturally modest disposition, he seems to stride out of the real world in a way that Poe characters never manage.
Poe was born in 1809 and died at the age of forty, a decade before Arthur’s birth. His natural bent was Romantic and Gothic. In Edinburgh half a century down the literary road, Arthur grew up reading Mayne Reid melodramas of the American western frontier—and reading Edgar Allan Poe. Later, as he sat at his Southsea desk in the mid-1880s and conjured Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, his imagination naturally returned to the work of one of his favorite writers, and to the analytical detective who had intrigued him since boyhood. By this time, however, Arthur was influenced by plainspoken, more realistic adventure writers who eschewed Poe’s cobwebs. He admired, for example, his fellow Scot Robert Louis Stevenson and the American Bret Harte. And his admiration showed in his work; in 1884 at least one Cornhill reader had attributed Arthur’s own “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” to Stevenson, and Arthur had written stories such as “The American’s Tale” in imitation of Harte’s tales of gold rush mining towns on the American frontier.
In creating his own detective, Arthur would naturally recast Dupin’s influence in his own later, less Romantic era. He also drew from the real-world inspiration of Dr. Bell, who strode among suffering patients, noting their occupational scars and mud-splashed boots—and weaving from such seemingly unrelated clues a narrative of their lives. Poe was knowledgeable about the natural and theoretical sciences, as his wide-ranging essay “Eureka” and other works demonstrate, but he did not endow his detective with a scientific approach to crime-solving. Borrowing from Voltaire, he gave Dupin a playful kind of observant genius that lends itself to the logical deciphering of puzzles.
Poe had not had the good fortune to study with Joseph Bell. He could assign Dupin a theory of observation, and he could detonate verbal fireworks about logic. But apparently Poe himself did not have the trained observational skills to bestow upon his brainchild. Arthur did. He was no detective himself, but he had witnessed such talents at work. Years of training with one of the most acclaimed diagnosticians of his time had left Arthur aware that such insight was not only possible but an art and science that one could cultivate.
Sherlock Holmes, in contrast to Dupin, embodies Arthur’s faith in science as both an instrument of progress and an intellectual adventure. In A Study in Scarlet, Watson runs into his old friend Stamford, who had been a surgeon’s assistant under him at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College—the oldest continuously operating hospital in Britain, dating back to the twelfth century. Like so many others, this link may have been inspired by Arthur’s real life. Sir Thomas Watson, the Dr. Watson whose death received so much attention a few years before Arthur wrote his first detective novel, was involved with the hospital popularly known as Bart’s.
Young Stamford mentions that an acquaintance named Sherlock Holmes is also seeking a roommate. “He is a little queer in his ideas,” warns Stamford, “—an enthusiast in some branches of science.”
“A medical student, I suppose?” asks Watson.
“No—I have no idea what he intends to go in for. I believe he is well up in anatomy, and he is a first-class chemist; but, as far as I know, he has never taken out any systematic medical classes. His studies are very desultory and eccentric, but he has amassed a lot of out-of-the-way knowledge which would astonish his professors.”
Stamford hesitates about explaining further until Watson worries that this Holmes character may have some terrible flaw. “Is this fellow’s temper so formidable, or what is it?” he demands.
“It’s not easy to express the inexpres
sible,” protests Stamford. “Holmes is a little too scientific for my taste—it approaches to cold-bloodedness.”
Arthur saw himself as brave and indomitable, and he wanted to convey the same traits in Holmes—before Dr. Watson even meets him. In Stamford’s ensuing description of young Holmes’s character, Arthur drew from his own experience, including his dangerous experimentation with overdoses of gelseminum seven years earlier. “I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid,” Stamford says cheerily of Holmes, “not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects.”
Many plants naturally produce alkaloids, including hyacinth, ragwort, periwinkle, and hemlock. Morphine was the first to be isolated by scientists, from the opium poppy, in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Other alkaloid toxins include strychnine, cocaine, nicotine, and even caffeine. Thanks in part to his heavily underlined copy of Alfred Baring Garrod’s textbook from medical school, Arthur knew his materia medica. He must have smiled as he put in Stamford’s mouth further words about Holmes’s commitment to science: “To do him justice, I think he would take it himself with the same readiness.”
“Very right, too,” says Watson.
“Yes, but it may be pushed to excess.” Then Arthur brought in memories of the reputation of figures such as Robert Christison at medical school: “When it comes to beating the subjects in the dissecting-rooms with a stick, it is certainly taking rather a bizarre shape.”