At least a rudimentary understanding of Victorian history is necessary to appreciate the social milieu of Sherlock Holmes. It is important to know that by the beginning of Victoria’s reign in 1837, Great Britain had not only helped to create the Industrial Revolution but had become the greatest industrialized nation in Europe. During the Victorian era, the acquisition of overseas territories and complex motives of commerce and charity propelled an exponential burst of industrial growth. Benjamin Disraeli, after he became prime minister in 1868, loudly and frequently advocated expansion, which reached its zenith with the coronation of Victoria, at his instigation, as Empress of India in 1876. Disraeli’s “imperialist” foreign policies were justified by invoking generalizations partly derived from Darwin’s theory of evolution, arguing that “imperialism” was a manifestation of what Kipling would refer to as “the white man’s burden.” The empire existed, argued its supporters, not for the benefit—economic, strategic, or otherwise—of Great Britain itself, but so that primitive peoples, incapable of self-government, could, with British guidance, eventually become civilized and Christianized. The doctrine served to legitimise Britain’s acquisition of portions of central Africa and her domination, with other European powers, of China.
In the Victorian age, the study of “natural philosophy” and “natural history” became “science,” and students, who had once been exclusively gentlemen and clerical naturalists, now were professional “scientists.” In the general population, belief in natural laws and continuous progress began to grow, and there was frequent interaction among science, government, and industry. Science education was expanded and formalised, and perhaps as a result, a fundamental transformation occurred in beliefs about nature and the place of humans in the universe. A revival of religious activity, largely unmatched since the days of the Puritans, swept England. This religious revival shaped that code of moral behaviour, or rather that infusion of all behaviour with moralism, which became known as “Victorianism.” Above all, religion occupied a place in the public consciousness, a centrality in the intellectual life of the age, that it had not had a century before and did not retain in the twentieth century.
This was the world into which Sherlock Holmes was born. While his sphere of influence was global, his spiritual and intellectual home was indubitably London, that “great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire [were] irresistibly drained,” in short, the greatest city in the world. Although the city itself initially consisted of only its ancient centre (called “The City”) together with the boroughs of Westminster and Mayfair, the industrialisation movement expanded London’s physical size almost eightfold between 1810 and 1900. In less than a century, it included diverse neighbourhoods such as Chelsea, Battersea, Belgravia, Brompton, Kensington, Hampstead, and Southwark. The population rose from about 850,000 citizens in 1810 to almost 5 million by the turn of the century.
With the growth of the city came an explosion of building. Railroad terminals, museums, theatres, public buildings, parks, colleges, grand hotels and stores, churches, and row upon row of connected private houses sprang up and, with them, a welter of disease and poverty. The air, water, and ground became fouled from the soot of soft coal burned for heat as well as from the leavings of humans and the horses that drew their vehicles. Inevitably, the urban sprawl of London also bred crime: In 1880, in the Metropolitan police district, encompassing most of London, 23,920 felonies were reported, and 13,336 persons were apprehended for felonies.
Police going to work.
The Queen’s London (1897)
Sherlock Holmes’s London was home not only to criminals but also to the greatest celebrities of the era. No more dominating figure, of course, lived in the nineteenth century than Queen Victoria, the icon of the age, who, along with her husband, Prince Albert, and their son, Edward, Prince of Wales, provides a powerful but almost invisible backdrop to the world of Sherlock Holmes. Other prominent London residents included economist John Stuart Mill, philosopher-historian Thomas Carlyle, writers Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde, statesman William Gladstone, singer Jenny Lind, actress Ellen Terry, artist and designer William Morris, and painters James McNeill Whistler, J. M. W. Turner, and John Singer Sargent. London’s cosmopolitanism drew in large part from the diversity of its citizenry. It was estimated that in 1880 one-third of the population of London had been born outside its limits, and its largest “foreign” groups were, in order of size, the Irish, Scots, Asiatics, Africans, Americans, Germans, French, Dutch, Poles, Italians, Swiss, and Jews. Among this milieu were economist Karl Marx, composer Richard Wagner, writers Henry James and George Bernard Shaw, and painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rosetti. The shadows of many of these prominent Londoners fall across the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
THE LIFE OF SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
A SCOT named Arthur Conan Doyle, credited with authorship of every tale of Sherlock Holmes, is one of the most famous men associated with the literary history of London, even though he lived there only briefly. Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh on May 22, 1859, the second of nine children, seven of whom survived to maturity. His early family life was difficult. His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was the youngest son of John Doyle, the popular political caricaturist “H.B.” Charles’s brothers were all prominent: James authored The Chronicles of England; Henry managed the National Gallery in Dublin; and Richard was well known for his cover design for Punch and for his illustrations of fairies. Charles, however, pursued an unambitious post as a civil servant, a post that he eventually lost, and then descended into alcoholism. Suffering severely from epilepsy, he was eventually institutionalised, dying in 1893. Because the family was poor, Conan Doyle’s early education took place at home, administered by his beloved mother, Mary. “The Ma’am” was of Irish extraction and traced her ancestry back to the famous Percy family of Northumberland and from there to the Plantagenet line. She told young Arthur, her eldest son, tales of his illustrious ancestors.
At the age of nine, Conan Doyle was sent to the Jesuit preparatory school of Hodder in Lancashire. Hodder was attached to the Jesuit secondary school of Stonyhurst, and it was to the latter that Conan Doyle moved two years later. His time at Stonyhurst was not a particularly happy one. Here, his agnosticism developed, and at the end of his time at Stonyhurst, by 1875, Conan Doyle no longer considered himself a Catholic. After leaving Stonyhurst, he spent a further year with the Jesuits in Feldkirch, Austria, before returning to Edinburgh to study medicine at the university from 1876 to 1881.
At Edinburgh, Conan Doyle met Dr. Joseph Bell, whose medical observations and deductions amazed Bell’s colleagues and impressed the young students. Bell was thirty-nine years old when Conan Doyle first attended one of his lectures. By the end of Conan Doyle’s second year Bell had selected him to serve as an assistant in his ward. This gave Conan Doyle the opportunity to view Dr. Bell’s remarkable ability to quickly deduce a great deal about a patient. Conan Doyle wrote about it in 1892, in a letter to Bell:
Joseph Bell.
It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes, and though in the stories I have the advantage of being able to place [the detective] in all sorts of dramatic positions, I do not think that his analytical work is in the least an exaggeration of some effects which I have seen you produce in the out-patient ward. Round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate, I have tried to build up a man who pushed the thing as far as it would go—further occasionally . . .
In his autobiography, Memories and Adventures, published in 1924, Conan Doyle expanded:
I felt now that I was capable of something fresher and crisper and more workmanlike. Gaboriau had rather attracted me by a neat dovetailing of his plots, and Poe’s masterful detective, M. Dupin, had from boyhood been one of my heroes. But could I bring an addition of my own? I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, and his eerie trick of spotting details. If he were a detective he would sur
ely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer an exact science. I would try if I could get this effect. It was surely possible in real life, so why should I not make it plausible in fiction? It is all very well to say that a man is clever, but the reader wants to see examples of it—such examples as Bell gave us every day in the wards.
Reflecting on Doyle’s days as a medical student, Dr. Bell wrote for the Strand Magazine and its loyal Sherlock Holmes fans,
You asked me about the kind of teaching to which Mr. Conan Doyle has so kindly referred, when speaking of . . . Sherlock Holmes. Dr. Conan Doyle has, by his imaginative genius, made a great deal out of very little, and his warm remembrance of one of his old teachers has coloured the picture. In teaching the treatment of disease and accident, all careful teachers have first to show the student how to recognize accurately the case. The recognition depends in great measure on the accurate and rapid appreciation of small points in which the diseased differs from the healthy state. In fact, the student must be taught to observe carefully. To interest him in this kind of work we teachers find it useful to show the student how much a trained use of the observation can discover in ordinary matters such as the previous history, nationality and occupation of a patient.
During his term as a medical student at Edinburgh, Conan Doyle took various jobs to assist with the family’s upkeep, including service as a ship’s doctor aboard a Greenland whaler. When a friend remarked to him that his letters were vivid and that surely he could write for pay, Conan Doyle, ever anxious to find new sources of money, tried his hand at a story. “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,” a treasure-hunt yarn set in South Africa, drew heavily from Poe and Bret Harte, two of his favourite writers at the time. To Conan Doyle’s delight, it was accepted by a prominent Edinburgh magazine called Chambers’s Journal, and the story appeared anonymously there in 1879.
Conan Doyle’s initial interest in writing was as a means of making money, but the dozens of stories that he wrote at this stage had little success. Upon publication of his second story, “An American’s Tale,” in 1880, the publisher advised him to give up medicine for writing, but Conan Doyle was too uncertain of his economic future to heed the advice. Graduating in 1881, he accepted an appointment as a ship’s doctor on a voyage to the West African coast. When he returned, he visited London to confer with his prominent family relations about establishing a practice there. Problems arose, however, with the Catholic Doyles, for Conan Doyle refused to compromise his agnostic stand. Returning to Edinburgh, he continued to seek opportunities.
Louise Hawkins.
In 1882, a fellow student at Edinburgh, Dr. George Turnavine Budd, invited Conan Doyle to join him in a medical practice in Plymouth. After their stormy partnership broke up, Conan Doyle moved to Southsea and established his own practice. In 1885 Conan Doyle moved a patient named Jack Hawkins into his house so as to supervise his treatment. The treatment failed, and Hawkins died (without any blame ascribed to Conan Doyle). Conan Doyle subsequently looked after the welfare of the patient’s mother and sister, who also resided in Southsea, and within a few months, he courted and married Louise Hawkins (“Touie”), Jack’s sister. By all accounts Touie was a sweet-natured young woman with a pleasant, open face and captivating blue-green eyes. Conan Doyle described her as “gentle and amiable.” They remained married until Louise’s death of tuberculosis in 1906 and produced two children, Mary Louise and Kingsley.
In 1886, apparently inspired by meetings he attended in Southsea, Conan Doyle became interested in psychic studies. In later years, such studies, or “Spiritualism,” would become the entire focus of his life, and he often pointed to these early interests as evidence of the long and careful study he had made of the field. Legend has it that Conan Doyle’s Southsea medical practise was a failure; in truth, it was increasingly successful. In his spare moments, Conan Doyle kept at his avocation of story writing, publishing thirty stories between 1879 and 1887.
Conan Doyle at his desk in Southsea.
While the famous meeting of Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson, m.d., is well documented (in A Study in Scarlet), the meeting of Conan Doyle and Dr. Watson remains in the imagination. Perhaps these two young writers met in Edinburgh; perhaps they attended some literary society meeting together; or perhaps their similar medical backgrounds led them to the same lecture. But they must have met, for in 1887, a portion of Dr. Watson’s reminiscences were published under the byline of Arthur Conan Doyle, with the title A Study in Scarlet.3 Conan Doyle had struggled to find a publisher for this modest book. After rejection by three publishers, Ward, Lock and Company of London accepted the manuscript in September 1886, printing it the following year in their Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. This publication was a collection of fiction and short occasionals that had been founded in 1867 by Samuel Orchart Beeton, publisher and husband of the renowned Mrs. Beeton of cookbook fame. Priced at one shilling, the annual had a red, white, and yellow cover that apparently featured the villain of A Study in Scarlet, warming a syringe by the flame of a hanging lamp. The annual sold out rapidly, although this owed more to the Beeton reputation than to the contents. The story was published in a separate edition in 1888 illustrated by Conan Doyle’s father, Charles Doyle.
Following the acceptance of A Study in Scarlet—for which Conan Doyle received only £254 for all rights to the tale (undoubtedly to be shared with Dr. Watson)—Conan Doyle wrote The Mystery of Cloomber, his first published novel. It was first serialised in the Pall Mall Budget and the Pall Mall Gazette, a format that had been wildly popularised by Charles Dickens. Published in 1888, Cloomber, which Conan Doyle considered immature, was not among his favourite works. It drew heavily on Conan Doyle’s Edinburgh experiences and used Wilkie Collins’s “thrillers” as models. After completion, Conan Doyle turned his hand to an historical novel, Micah Clarke, which appeared in book form in 1889. It was successful commercially, and Conan Doyle regarded it as the “first solid corner-stone laid for some sort of literary reputation.” As a result, he was able to arrange publication of several collections of his previously published short stories.
A Study in Scarlet.
Conan Doyle also found time in 1890 to prepare for publication The Firm of Girdlestone, a novel he had begun in 1884, and to respond to a commission from J. M. Stoddart, agent for Lippincott’s Magazine of Philadelphia, with a short book. In a letter in 1890, Conan Doyle described it to Stoddart: “My story will either be called ‘The Sign of the Six’ or ‘The Problem of the Sholtos.’ You said you wanted a spicy title. . . . I shall give Sherlock Holmes of ‘A Study in Scarlet’ something else to unravel.” Because of the limited publication of A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, as it was finally called in its initial appearance, was America’s introduction to Sherlock Holmes, and the work had some success. It was published in book form later that year, and after the appearance of the first series of Holmes stories in the Strand Magazine in 1891, it became a best-seller.
By late 1890, however, Conan Doyle concluded that he had reached a professional and domestic plateau, and, compelled by the announcement of Robert Koch’s new treatment for tuberculosis (ironically, the disease that would strike his wife in these years), he acted on impulse and travelled to Berlin to witness the demonstrations of the treatment. On the trip, he met a medical specialist—a dermatologist—who urged him to develop his own speciality. Two days later, he announced the closing of his Southsea practice and hurried off to Vienna to study the eye. The Viennese trip was a failure, for Conan Doyle found himself unable to understand sufficient portions of the German lectures to make use of the information. Leaving after two months, he and Louise took an extended vacation, returning in the spring of 1891 to London. There, they rented rooms in Montague Place, while Conan Doyle sought a suitable medical office. He eventually located one at 2 Upper Wimpole Street but, to the delight of future readers everywhere, found that he had no patients. Conversely, literary planets were moving into alignment. In January 1891, a pub
lisher named George Newnes conceived the idea of the Strand Magazine. Newnes, who had had remarkable success with a weekly paper entitled Tit-Bits, hoped to create a publication in the style of the American magazines Harper’s and Scribner’s. He wanted a British magazine with a picture on every page but soon modified his plan to allow for a picture every other page. Further, he resolved that the magazine should be complete in itself each month, “like a book.” This meant that the Strand would not feature the serial stories other magazines preferred, instead publishing short stories. Newnes’s idea caught hold immediately, and the first issue sold 300,000 copies, which no other magazine, British or American, approached. Conan Doyle had a story, “The Voice of Science,” in one of the first issues.
In the late spring of 1891, Greenhough Smith, the newly appointed literary editor of the Strand, received a submission of two handwritten manuscripts. Forty years later he described how he reacted on that day:
The Strand Magazine (February 1893).
I at once realised that here was the greatest short story writer since Edgar Allan Poe. I remember rushing into Mr. Newnes’s room and thrusting the stories before his eyes. . . . Here was a new and gifted story-writer; there was no mistaking the ingenuity of the plot, the limpid clearness of the style, the perfect art of telling a story.
The two stories that excited Smith’s interest were “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Red-Headed League.” Conan Doyle received thirty guineas each for the first set of stories, titled the Adventures, and fifty guineas each for the Memoirs.5
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 1) (The Annotated Books) Page 2