Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle died at home on July 7–8, 1930. Five days later, almost 6,000 people crowded London’s Royal Albert Hall to hear him speak from beyond the grave. A medium, Mrs. Estelle Roberts, sat on stage with Lady Conan Doyle (Jean Leckie) and other family members, and the audience was electrified by Roberts’s shout: “He is here!” She then delivered a message to Lady Conan Doyle. Later Lady Conan Doyle told a reporter, “I am as sure of . . . the fact that he has been here, as I am that I am speaking to you.” Not all were convinced, however; a reporter from the Saturday Review wrote, “I should like to have heard Sherlock Holmes examining the medium at Albert Hall last Sunday, for the methods that were employed were hardly reminiscent of Baker Street. Indeed, far from satisfying Holmes, I doubt if the evidence would even have been good enough for Watson.”9
Christopher Roden, founder of the Arthur Conan Doyle Society, recently summed up Conan Doyle’s contribution to the literature of the English language as “immense.” While Conan Doyle was proudest of his major historical novels, The White Company, Sir Nigel, Micah Clarke, Uncle Bernac, The Refugees, and The Great Shadow, contemporary readers hardly know them. Instead, Conan Doyle is remembered best for his extraordinary production of short stories, chiefly for the popular magazines of his time: tales of sport, the outdoors, pirates, science fiction, horror and the supernatural—over 200 stories, published between 1879 and 1930. His records of the adventures of Professor George Challenger and the boisterous memoirs of Brigadier Etienne Gerard, soldier of the Napoleonic Wars, have loyal fans today. Professor Challenger’s adventures in The Lost World have inspired a book by Michael Crichton and a series of films (the Jurassic Park series) and numerous television productions. In sum, Conan Doyle was a successful playwright and poet, political journalist, war correspondent, historian, detective, scientist, visionary, prophet—a giant of the Victorian age.
Conan Doyle’s autobiography Memories and Adventures was published in 1924. While the work is seen by some as primarily another vehicle for Conan Doyle’s Spiritualist message, it is fascinating to examine Conan Doyle’s selection of the portions of his life that he sought to emphasize. For example, he suppresses entirely his terrible yet exemplary ordeal of suffering with Louise’s illness and his own love for Jean Leckie. The book was a great disappointment as well to readers of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle had little to say about Holmes, devoting only one chapter to the work that was to immortalize him. He termed Holmes “my most notorious character.” “I do not wish to be ungrateful to Holmes,” wrote Conan Doyle,
who has been a good friend to me in many ways. If I have sometimes been inclined to weary of him it is because his character admits of no light or shade. He is a calculating machine, and anything you add to that simply weakens the effect. Thus the variety of the stories must depend upon the romance and compact handling of the plots. I would say a word for Watson also, who in the course of seven volumes never shows one gleam of humour or makes one single joke. To make a real character one must sacrifice everything to consistency and remember Goldsmith’s criticism of Johnson that “he would make the little fishes talk like whales.”10
Arthur Conan Doyle.
Quite a remark from one whose lack of attention to detail in recounting the adventures of Holmes has led to one hundred years of correcting “errors” in the tales and a volume like this one!
THE RECORDED LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
THE study of the life of Sherlock Holmes begins with the records attributed to Conan Doyle,11 and from those sixty episodes, a biographical outline may be created. While no specific date is given in the stories, January 6 (the traditional Twelfth Night of Christmas), 1854, is traditionally celebrated as Holmes’s birthday, based on the flimsy evidence of a description of Holmes as “a man of 60” in 1914 (though Holmes is only in disguise at the time as a man of 60) and Holmes’s supposed fondness for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (because he twice quotes from the play). Nothing is known of his early years, and Holmes is remarkably reticent about his parents and his childhood. The only link to these years is his brother Mycroft, whom he concealed from Dr. Watson for many years.
Mycroft, seven years Sherlock’s senior, was ostensibly employed to audit the books in some of the government departments. In fact, in Sherlock’s words, Mycroft occasionally was the British government: “The same great powers which I have turned to the detection of crime he has used for this particular business. The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearing-house, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.”
Holmes insisted that his brother had even better powers of observation and deduction than he had himself, but that Mycroft had no ambition and no energy and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right. “Mycroft has his rails and he runs on them,” Sherlock remarked. “His Pall Mall lodgings, the Diogenes Club, Whitehall—that is his cycle.”12 Reported Watson:
Heavily built and massive, there was a suggestion of uncouth physical inertia in the figure, but above this unwieldy frame there was perched a head so masterful in its brow, so alert in its steel-gray, deep-set eyes, so firm in its lips, and so subtle in its play of expression, that after the first glance one forgot the gross body and remembered only the dominant mind.
Although scholars attempt to make much of the rôle of Mycroft in Sherlock’s life (and in the Victorian era), he had little apparent influence on Sherlock, except perhaps as a negative example. The earliest recollections that Sherlock Holmes shared with Dr. Watson were of the two years he spent at college. There, after astonishing Trevor Sr. with a series of deductions, he realized that “a profession might be made out of what had up to that time been the merest hobby.”13 Later, he recalled that “during my last years at the university there was a good deal of talk there about myself and my methods.”14
After two years of university, Holmes moved to London, where he took up rooms in Montague Street, near the British Museum. There he continued his unique study of the literature of crime, criminals, and related sciences, handling only occasional cases of which little or nothing is recorded. In 1881 he came to the momentous decision to seek other lodgings. He found a “most desirable residence” at 221 Baker Street, in the flat labelled “221B,” but concluded that his economic circumstances required that he share the rooms. Through the offices of his acquaintance Stamford, whom he met at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, he was introduced to John H. Watson, recently invalided out of the British Army, and the two became flat-mates. In March 1881, Holmes was brought in by Inspector Tobias Gregson of Scotland Yard to assist with a case, a mysterious murder near the Brixton Road. Holmes suggested that if Watson had nothing better to do, he might accompany him on the initial investigation. From this seed grew the first reported adventure of Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887, and the partnership of Holmes and Watson.
St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.
The Queen’s London (1897)
While his practice began slowly, by 1889 Holmes could claim to have investigated some five hundred cases “of capital importance” and a thousand in all by 1891. His clients ranged from humble typewritists to royalty, from the police to the crowned heads of Europe, while his cases took him across London and its suburbs, to the countryside and villages of England, even to the capitals of the Continent and the Vatican. While he pursued criminal investigation as a means of earning a living and asserted that he charged fees “on a fixed scale,” he added “or not at all,” for he often took up matters out of public interest or even to avoid boredom. Although Holmes protested that he “was not engaged by the police to supply their deficiencies,” in fact he often was brought in by the police to assist with a case, for he had learned early to deflect publicity and to allow the official police to claim credit for his successes. Whether Holmes actually charged police officials for his assistance is unknown, but he was well regarded by the regul
ar forces. “We’re not jealous of you at Scotland Yard,” Holmes was told by Inspector Lestrade. “No, sir, we are very proud of you, and if you come down to-morrow, there’s not a man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn’t be glad to shake you by the hand.” Sadly for the scholar, this lack of publicity has made it impossible to trace Holmes’s activities in the reports of the press.
From the end of the 1880s to April 1891, Holmes, in addition to handling numerous smaller matters, devoted himself to exposing and breaking up the criminal organisation of Professor James Moriarty. Moriarty was the “Napoleon of crime,” cried Holmes, “the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.” While Holmes expected these activities to lead to “the greatest criminal trial of the century, the clearing up of over forty mysteries, and the rope for all of [the gang],”15 instead it led to a ledge above the Reichenbach Falls, near Meiringen, Switzerland, and a face-to-face confrontation with the professor. Here the two wrestled on the brink of the falls, and here the professor died. Holmes vanished as well, presumed dead.
In 1894, however, the newspaper reports of the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair, which had “all London . . . interested and the fashionable world dismayed,” had an unanticipated benefit: Holmes returned to active practice. In the course of capturing the criminal, Colonel Sebastian Moran, the lieutenant of the Moriarty “gang,” the detective revealed to Watson that he had not fallen into the abyss with Professor Moriarty but had survived their hand-to-hand combat and intentionally gone into hiding. He travelled for two years in Tibet and amused himself by visiting Lhassa and spending some days with the head lama. He then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a “short but interesting visit” to the Khalifa at Khartoum, the results of which he communicated to the Foreign Office. Returning to France, he spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which he conducted in a laboratory at Montpellier, in the south of France. Or so he said, for numerous scholars contend that the “Great Hiatus,” as the period from 1891 to 1894 has become known, was spent in an entirely different fashion.16
Following Holmes’s return, from 1894 to 1901 he handled hundreds of cases. It was apparently during this period that Watson at last weaned him from the “drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career.” His services to England earned him a private audience with Queen Victoria in 1895 (the Royal Family reportedly were devoted readers of Dr. Watson’s stories), and though a devoted servant of the Crown, in June 1902, without explanation, he refused the offer of a knighthood (coincidentally Arthur Conan Doyle received his knighthood in 1902). He retired in 1903 or 1904 to the solitude of the Sussex coast, where he took up bee-keeping and began work on his monumental The Whole Art of Detection, a comprehensive work on criminology that has apparently never been completed. He also penned (sans Watson) two reports of old cases, “The Blanched Soldier,” published in 1903, and “The Lion’s Mane,” published in 1907, with the aid of Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1912, he put aside this work and took up his most dangerous assignment: building an identity as an Irish dissident and obtaining employment from German intelligence. In this capacity, he was able to communicate much false intelligence to the Germans and, in 1914, bring about the arrest of the Prussian spymaster Von Bork.
There is no credible record of any further activities of Holmes. His death, if it occurred at all—and there are those who claim that his mastery of chemistry and bee-keeping led him to an elixir of immortality derived from the royal jelly of the queen bee—has not been reported. Some attribute the ultimate triumph of reason and order over the madmen of the twentieth century—the downfall of Hitler, Stalin, and the Communist Party—to his continued undercover work, but present no evidence for this supposition. Others, such as Laurie King, author of a series of books about Mary Russell, record Holmes’s life post-1914, but these works are plainly fiction. While Holmes was a prolific writer of monographs on various aspects of criminology and other topics of idiosyncratic interest (such as the polyphonic motets of Lassus, early English charters), there are no extant copies of these publications.
THE RECORDED LIFE OF JOHN H. WATSON, M.D.
WITH the exception of two weak efforts by Holmes himself,17 only the records of his friend and partner John H. Watson preserve Holmes’s history. The eminent writer Christopher Morley subtitled his 1944 annotated collection of Holmes’s adventures, A Study in Friendship, and the remarkable relationship between the men is the connecting thread among virtually all of the published stories. “I am lost without my Boswell,” cries Holmes in one adventure, and Watson is absent from only two reported cases.18 Even in those cases, Watson’s literary skills are much on Holmes’s mind as he writes his own reports of the events, and it is through Watson’s eyes that we learn virtually everything known about Holmes. In the words of Monsignor Ronald Knox, “Any studies in Sherlock Holmes must be, first and foremost, studies in Dr. Watson.”
As in the case of Holmes, little is known of the young adulthood of John H. Watson.19 He took his doctor’s degree at the University of London in 1878, and scholars place his birthdate at 1851 or 1852, seven or eight years before Arthur Conan Doyle’s. There is some evidence that he spent a portion of his boyhood in Australia,20 and he attended public school in England. Watson’s mother apparently died shortly after the birth of young John, although his father (H. Watson) and his elder brother survived until the mid-1880s. In his youth, Watson played rugby for Blackheath, and his love of sport and physical activity may have led him, after his residency at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, to take up a military career. Whatever his motivations, Dr. Watson enrolled in the required course for army surgeons at Netley. Upon completion of his training, he was posted to the Northumberland Fusiliers as assistant surgeon.
The second Afghan war had broken out before Watson could join the Fusiliers. In spring 1880 he was sent to India. Upon arriving in Bombay, he received word that his corps “had advanced through the passes and was already deep in the enemy’s country.” At Kandahar (now famous as a former Taliban stronghold), which had been occupied by the British in July, he joined his regiment. His assignment to the regiment was brief; he was quickly attached to the Berkshires (the 66th Foot) and rushed into battle—in particular, the battle of Maiwand, where the Berkshires won glory for their heroic resistance. After seeing his comrades “hacked to pieces,” Watson was struck on the left shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery. His orderly, Murray, in a remarkable display of courage and devotion, saved Watson from falling into the hands of “the murderous Ghazis” and carried Watson to the British lines on a pack horse.
Watson convalesced at the base hospital at Peshawar, where he unfortunately developed a near-fatal case of enteric fever. Upon recovering, he was discharged from the army and returned to England, in late 1880 or early 1881. Here, with no “kith or kin,” he stayed in a hotel in the Strand, eking out existence on his wound pension of 11s. 6d. a day. When his former dresser, young Stamford, introduced him to a friend seeking a roommate, Watson’s life was changed forever:
“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes . . .”
“How are you?” said Holmes. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
“How on earth did you know that?” replied Watson.21
Watson took rooms with Sherlock Holmes, and in March 1881 accompanied him on an investigation. Upon its conclusion, Watson uttered fatal words to Holmes: “It is wonderful! . . . Your merits should be publicly recognized. You should publish an account of the case. If you won’t, I will for you.”
“You may do what you like,” he answered.
And Watson did, though not until 1887, when, evidently with the aid of his friend Arthur Conan D
oyle, he arranged for publication of “A Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., Late of the Army Medical Department,” under the shorter title of A Study in Scarlet.
From what source arose Watson’s urge to take up his pen? There is no direct evidence of any literary training or artistic bent in Watson’s own records. However, another branch of the family produced celebrated artists, most notably the Scottish painter John Watson, known as John Watson Gordon (1788–1864) and his brother George Watson, both noted portraitists. After the death of Sir Henry Raeburn in 1823, John Watson succeeded to much of his clientele; and as there were at that time in Edinburgh four artists of the name of Watson, all of them portrait painters, he assumed in 1826 the name of Gordon, by which he is best known. Watson Gordon was unmarried and childless. His fame was at its zenith in 1850, shortly before the birth of young John H., and therefore it is possible that the parents of John H. Watson named him after Watson Gordon, in a deliberate attempt at flattery, to win young John a patron.22
If John H. Watson had kin in Scotland, it seems unlikely that he would visit there without exposure to the public buildings and museums of Edinburgh housing his illustrious relative’s work. Indeed, he may have spent time in Watson Gordon’s studio, soaking up the artistic culture of Edinburgh. He might even have met a young Arthur Conan Doyle at this time, for Conan Doyle’s family were renowned artists. And he would have visited London with his family and viewed Watson Gordon’s work there in the galleries. Watson’s fascination with art is notable in his records of Holmes’s cases. The title of Watson’s first book, A Study in Scarlet, while suggested by Holmes, deliberately apes “art jargon.” In “The Copper Beeches,” Holmes contrasts his and Watson’s viewpoints: “You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.” In “The Crooked Man,” Holmes refers to Dr. Watson’s tales as “these little sketches of yours.”
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 4