Holmes and Watson

by June Thomson

* Watson gives the year as 1888, clearly a mistake as he was not married at this date.

  * Sherry Rose-Bond has pointed out that a list of the present Archduke von Hapsburg’s inherited titles, numbering over forty, which was printed in an artide in Vanity Fair for July 1993, included among them that of King of Bohemia. However, although Watson hints that his King of Bohemia had Hapsburg connections, this may well be part of his ploy to hade his client’s real identity.

  * The Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) led to the defeat of France and the subsequent domination of Europe by a Prussian-controlled German empire. It marked the beginning of a period of instability in European politics which led eventually to the outbreak of the First World War.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MARRIAGE AND FRIENDSHIP

  20th March 1889–24th April 1891

  ‘I am glad to have a friend with whom I can discuss my results.’

  Holmes to Watson: ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’

  Once Watson had re-established contact with Holmes through the Scandal in Bohemia case, their relationship resumed on almost the same footing as before; almost, for there were, of course, significant changes. Watson was now a married man and a busy GP, living in Paddington, about a mile from his former lodgings in Baker Street. This renewal of their old association was a gradual process which took time to build up a momentum, reaching its climax in the summer of 1889 before tapering off during the years 1890 and 1891, as may be seen from the suggested chronology for the period.

  Readers are again referred to Appendix One for a detailed explanation of the dating of some of these cases and for an analysis of the crimes involved.

  Date Case First Publication

  20th March 1889* Scandal in Bohemia July 1891

  April 1889? Case of Identity September 1891

  June 1889* Stockbroker’s Clerk March 1893

  June 1889* Man with the Twisted Lip December 1891

  July 1889* Naval Treaty Oct/Nov 1893

  Summer 1889* Crooked Man July 1893

  Summer 1889* Engineer’s Thumb March 1892

  September 1889? Five Orange Pips November 1891

  27th December 1889* Blue Carbuncle January 1892

  (Unrecorded cases for the year 1889: the Paradol Chamber; the Amateur Mendicant Society; the loss of the British barque, Sophy Anderson; the case of the Grice Pattersons on the island of Uffa;* the Camberwell poisoning. As Watson ‘kept notes’ on these inquiries, he clearly took part in them.)

  June 1890? Boscombe Valley Mystery October 1891

  October 1890? Red-Headed League August 1891

  November 1890* Dying Detective December 1913

  24th April 1891* Final Problem December 1893

  As the chronology shows, there was a gap of about a month between the Scandal in Bohemia case and the Mary Sutherland inquiry (‘A Case of Identity’). Holmes himself remarks that he had not seen Watson for several weeks, which would accord with this suggested dating scheme. In the meantime, Holmes had received two magnificent gifts from his former royal clients in token of his services: a gold snuff box with a huge amethyst on its lid from the flamboyant King of Bohemia, and a splendid ring containing a stone of remarkable brilliance, possibly a diamond, from the Dutch royal family.

  At the time of the Case of Identity inquiry, Holmes had twelve other cases on hand, including an ‘intricate matter’ which had been referred to him from Marseilles as well as the Dundas separation case, the latter the only recorded instance of Holmes’ association in a matrimonial dispute. It was a squalid affair in which the wife complained of her husband’s habit of taking out his false teeth and hurling them at her at the end of every evening meal, perhaps in protest at her lack of culinary skills. As Holmes was engaged in clearing up only some small points in connection with it, he was presumably not deeply involved in the case. One hopes not.

  As in the Scandal in Bohemia investigation, it was Watson who initiated the contact with Holmes in the Case of Identity inquiry, having called on him one evening at Baker Street. It was during this visit that Mary Sutherland arrived with her extraordinary story of the disappearance of her husband-to-be on their wedding day, and once again Watson was drawn ineluctably but also very willingly into the affair. In fact, out of the nine recorded cases for 1889, it was Watson who made the initial approach to Holmes in five of them. In the case of the Engineer’s Thumb, Watson actually involved Holmes directly in the inquiry by rushing Mr Hatherley, one of his patients, round to Baker Street to tell his story. It was one of the two investigations which, Watson states, he was able to introduce to Holmes, the other being the inquiry into Colonel Warburton’s madness, an account of which Watson failed to publish. However, the Naval Treaty inquiry* should also be included in this list, for it was through a letter sent to Watson by his old school chum Percy ‘Tadpole’ Phelps, appealing for help in finding the missing document, that Holmes became associated with the inquiry. In this case, too, Watson immediately hurried off to Baker Street to lay the facts before Holmes, a measure of his eagerness to maintain contact with his old friend.

  In fact, at the time of the Five Orange Pips inquiry, Watson had actually moved back temporarily into Baker Street while his wife was visiting her aunt, possibly the same relative who, as suggested in Chapter Eight, may have lived in Edinburgh and with whom Mary Morstan, as she then was, spent her school holidays. It should, however, be pointed out that, although based at Baker Street, Watson continued to run his practice, attending patients and presumably returning to his Paddington practice during the day. Watson’s association with the Blue Carbuncle case rose out of another call he made on Holmes on 27th December in order to wish him the compliments of the season.

  It was not until June 1889 that Holmes paid his first visit to the Watsons, as is evident in ‘The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk’ in which Holmes, in asking after Mrs Watson’s health, makes it clear he has not seen her since the Sign of Four case in September 1888, over nine months earlier.

  This bears out Watson’s own comment that, while he ‘continually visited’ Holmes, he only occasionally persuaded him to call on himself and his wife. Admittedly, Holmes was not in the habit of paying social visits on anyone, but one has the impression that Holmes hung back from such direct contact with Mrs Watson, preferring to confine his relationship exclusively to Watson, as it had been in the old Baker Street days. It is almost as if he wished to ignore the fact of Watson’s marriage and the very existence of his wife, an attitude which was to take an even more extreme form when, as will be seen later in the book, Watson married for a second time. Nevertheless, after that first visit to the Watsons, Holmes relented to the extent of staying the night with them at the beginning of the Crooked Man inquiry.

  Some commentators have criticised Watson for neglecting his practice and leaving his patients in the care of two colleagues, Jackson, who owned the practice next door to his in Paddington, and Anstruther, a Kensington neighbour,* while he went gallivanting off with Holmes. Some have even questioned his medical competence, assuming that, as a doctor, he was lacking in responsibility and that therefore his patients suffered. The evidence, however, does not support such strictures. Watson states quite clearly that the arrangement with Jackson, and presumably also with Anstruther, was mutual and that he, in turn, reciprocated by looking after their patients when the need arose. After all, like anybody else, doctors are entitled to some leisure time.

  And when the cases are analysed and the actual number of working days lost by Watson is calculated, the total is, in fact, quite small. Leaving aside, temporarily, the case of the Final Problem and taking only those recorded inquiries which took place between 20th March 1889 (‘A Scandal in Bohemia’) and November 1890 (‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’), a period of one year and eight months, Watson spent only eleven days away from his practice. Three of these investigations, the Case of Identity, the Five Orange Pips and the Blue Carbuncle inquiries, took place in the evenings and therefore out of normal worki
ng hours, except in emergencies, when presumably Jackson would have acted as locum. Three more inquiries, the Stockbroker’s Clerk, the Man with the Twisted Lip and the Red-Headed League, occurred at weekends, when again one assumes that, although Watson’s consulting room was probably open on Saturdays, it was almost certainly closed on Sundays and he therefore lost only three working days. Moreover, in the Red-Headed League case, Watson states that, although the main events took place on Saturday, he had no patients to visit that day.

  The Crooked Man, the Engineer’s Thumb and the Dying Detective cases each took up one whole day, Jackson taking care of Watson’s practice in the Crooked Man inquiry as he may have done with the other two investigations. Although Watson spent the night with Holmes in Kent during the Man with the Twisted Lip case, he was back in Baker Street by breakfast time and had presumably returned to Paddington before his first patient arrived.

  Apart from the Final Problem, only two cases involved longer periods of absence, the Naval Treaty and the Boscombe Valley inquiries, both of which occupied two whole days. The Naval Treaty inquiry, however, occurred, as Watson states, at ‘the slackest time of the year’ while, although the Boscombe Valley mystery took place when he had a long list of patients, Watson made arrangements for Anstruther to take over his practice.

  Watson has left no details of the five unrecorded cases of 1889 and it is therefore not known how many working days he lost over these. But, if Watson followed the same pattern set out above, he may well have so arranged matters that he forfeited the minimum time over these as well or asked either Jackson or Anstruther to look after his patients in his absence. There is no evidence in the canon of Watson taking any protracted time off, even for a holiday, during this period. Indeed, the fact that on two occasions Mary Watson went away alone on visits suggests that Watson was too occupied with his professional duties to accompany her. The case of the Final Problem, during which Watson was absent on the Continent with Holmes for about a fortnight, was exceptional and will be examined in more detail in the next chapter.

  In addition to the inquiries in which he assisted Holmes, Watson was also spending at least some of his leisure time in the evenings writing up his notes on previous investigations. When Holmes calls on him at the beginning of the Stockbroker’s Clerk case, Watson remarks that, on the previous night ‘I was looking over my old notes and classifying our past investigations.’ However, he did not publish any accounts of these cases during this period, either because he was too busy or he may have felt that, with Holmes’ reputation now firmly established on both sides of the Channel, there was no need for him to promote his old friend’s professional expertise.

  Rather than Watson’s practice suffering from these excursions with Holmes, the facts tend to show the opposite is true. By the summer of 1889, the time of the Crooked Man inquiry and only a few months after his marriage and the purchase of the Paddington practice, Watson was evidently successful enough to afford extra live-in domestic help for, in his account of the case, he refers to the ‘servants’ as having gone to bed. One was certainly a maid who had presumably replaced the unsatisfactory Mary Jane who, as we have seen, was under notice in March of that year. The other may have been a cook-general. Moreover, before the time of the Red-Headed League inquiry, Watson’s finances had sufficiently improved for him to move to Kensington, a more fashionable and expensive area than Paddington, and a sure indication of his increasing success as a medical practitioner.

  It is not surprising. While Watson might not have been a highly-qualified consulting surgeon, he was an able and caring GP. This is confirmed by the fact that he had cured a guard at Paddington station of a ‘painful and lingering disease’, presumably when other medical treatment had failed. In gratitude, the man extolled Watson’s virtues as a doctor and consequently more members of the railway staff joined his list of patients. This man may have been one of those whom Watson treated without charging a fee because he found their cases medically instructive, an aspect of Watson’s professional attitude which Holmes comments on in ‘The Adventure of the Red Circle’.

  Watson was also prepared to turn out late at night to tend his patients. When Holmes calls unexpectedly at a quarter to twelve one evening, Watson, who was on the point of going to bed, assumes the visitor has come on behalf of a patient and, although he makes a wry face, he is perfectly willing to comply, even though it might be an all-night sitting. Another late call occurred in the same summer of 1889 when Mrs Whitney arrived to ask for Watson’s help in tracing the whereabouts of her husband, one of Watson’s patients, who had been missing for two days and who she suspected was at an East End opium den. Despite the lateness of the hour, Watson set off immediately in a hansom. Although Mrs Whitney was a friend of Mrs Watson, one feels that he would have reacted similarly, whichever of his patients had asked for his help.

  In fact, far from being neglectful of his patients, Watson was careful to put their needs first. In the Mary Sutherland inquiry (‘A Case of Identity’), Watson limits his involvement in the case to the evenings, spending the day at the bedside of a gravely ill patient, despite his eagerness to know the outcome of the case.

  Part of Watson’s success as a GP was undoubtedly his sympathetic nature, which would have given him a good bedside manner. He cared about people, an attitude already seen in his concern over some of Holmes’ clients, particularly women. Holmes later remarks on this quality of Watson’s in ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’. ‘The fair sex is your department’, he tells him, while in ‘The Adventure of the Retired Colourman’, he speaks of Watson’s ‘natural advantages’ with the ladies. Quite clearly, women found him attractive. This, too, would have contributed towards his success as a GP. It was often the lady of the house who selected the family doctor and Watson, steady, reliable, caring, would have been an excellent choice.

  Nevertheless, despite the calls on his time by his professional duties, Watson could not resist the opportunity to become involved in some of Holmes’ cases. It was as thrilling and as irresistible as the sirens’ song, appealing to that urge for adventure which ran deep in his veins and to that need to maintain the unique male friendship with Holmes which had been built up over the past eight years, when they had shared not only their lives together at the Baker Street lodgings but also so many exciting and dangerous exploits. And once back in Baker Street, it was so very easy to pick up the threads of the old, familiar companionship, as Watson found in the Red-Headed League inquiry in which he accompanies Holmes to St James’s Hall to hear Sarasate, the celebrated Spanish violinist, give a concert, or to sit up with Holmes until the early hours of the morning over a whisky and soda, discussing the case.

  Mary Watson understood this need in her husband. An intelligent, warm-hearted and generous woman, she perceived, perhaps more clearly than Watson himself, the strength of the bond between the two men and went out of her way to encourage it. A meaner-spirited woman might have tried to break it, with possible damaging effects on her own relationship with her husband. In the Boscombe Valley case, it is she who urges her husband to accompany Holmes when Watson hesitates to accept the invitation.

  Even Watson himself seems more aware of the nature of the relationship between himself and Holmes as if, having moved away from Baker Street and distanced himself physically as well as psychologically from his day-to-day contact with Holmes, he was able to assess his own attitude more objectively.

  ‘It was difficult to refuse any of Holmes’ requests, for they were always so exceedingly definite, and put forward with such an air of mastery,’ Watson confesses in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, acknowledging for the first time in quite so frank a manner the force of Holmes’ dominant personality. His response to it was based partly on his genuine admiration for Holmes’ superior intellectual powers.

  ‘I have so deep a respect for the extraordinary qualities of Holmes that I have always deferred to his wishes, even when I least understood them,’ he was later to admit in ‘The Adventure
of the Dying Detective’.

  Nowhere in his accounts of the adventures he shared with Holmes during this 1889–91 period is there any reference to the exasperation he had felt at Holmes’ egotism or cold-bloodedness which is found in his earlier accounts. Once he had left 221B Baker Street and was no longer subjected to the inevitable tensions of living in such close proximity with him, he was less affected by the more infuriating aspects of Holmes’ personality.

  Holmes himself was perfectly well aware of the influence he had over Watson and there are signs that he used it deliberately on occasions to manipulate his old friend to his own advantage.

  ‘I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life,’ he remarks in ‘The Red-Headed League’, making it clear he understands the deep need in Watson for adventure, a need which Watson himself openly acknowledges in ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’, in which he describes himself as ‘tingling with that half-sporting, half-intellectual pleasure which I invariably experienced when I was associated with him [Holmes] in his investigations.’

  Indeed, Holmes’ reference to the ‘humdrum routine of everyday life’ could be taken as much as a comment on Watson’s daily round as a married man and a GP, which to Holmes must have seemed rather dull and conventional, as on his own circumstances when no investigation was on hand to relieve his boredom. At times, his attitude to Watson’s responsibilities as a doctor could be cavalier, even selfish, as seen in this exchange quoted by Watson in ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’.

  ‘My practice—’ I began.

  ‘Oh, if you find your own cases more interesting than mine—’ said Holmes, with some asperity.

  Watson’s reply – ‘I was going to say that my practice could get along very well without me for a day or two, since it is the slackest time of the year’ – has a defensive, almost apologetic ring to it. Holmes is quite clearly putting pressure on Watson to give priority to his, Holmes’, needs rather than to those of his patients.