Sherlock Holmes Handbook. Christopher Redmond
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That Professor Moriarty was his mathematics tutor in his youth.
• That Holmes had a second brother, Sherrinford (a name taken from Doyle’s earliest notes for A Study in Scarlet, which used the name “Sherrinford Holmes” for the detective himself, and “Ormond Sacker” for Watson).
• That Holmes toured America as a young actor in 1879–81.
• That he assisted in the solution of the Jack the Ripper murders in London in 1888.
• That he enjoyed a dalliance with Irene Adler in Montenegro shortly after his supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls.
At the same time, he gives the status of history to speculations that have been vaguely accepted by Sherlockians, such as a birth date for Holmes of January 6, 1854. The year seems plausible from several Canonical references. The month and date are attributed to Christopher Morley, who apparently chose them to match those of his brother Frank, and to refer to Twelfth Night, a play which Holmes twice quotes. A later scholar has seen significance in Holmes’s behaviour on a January 7 in The Valley of Fear: he shows signs of suffering from a hangover.
More recent “biographies” of Holmes are the work of June Thomson (Holmes and Watson, 1995) and Nick Rennison (Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography, 2005). In addition, a number of novelists have imagined or reimagined parts of Holmes’s life, from Michael Harrison (I, Sherlock Holmes, 1977) to countless authors of pastiches. Doyle might well have been astonished by such detailed attention to his creation, although he saw something of Holmes’s power in the indignant letters he received after “The Final Problem” killed off the detective, as well as the proposals of marriage that arrived for Holmes at other times in his career. Letters in fact still are directed to Holmes at his address of 221B Baker Street, and through the latter half of the twentieth century were answered by a staff member at the Abbey National Building Society, which happened to occupy that address. A selection of them was published as Letters to Sherlock Holmes (1985). More recently, correspondence addressed to 221B is delivered to the Sherlock Holmes Museum nearby at 239 Baker Street. The existence of such letters is a tribute to the plausibility of the figure Doyle originally created, although the image of Holmes that now lives in the public mind is much less subtle and complex than the one that lives in the pages of the Canon.
The Canon, save for four short stories and a few other passages, is presented as memoirs by John H. Watson, a former army doctor who was the companion of Sherlock Holmes for most of his working life. Indeed, the first half of A Study in Scarlet is subtitled as “a reprint from the reminiscences” of the good doctor, leading playful bibliographers to speculate about the very limited press run those Reminiscences must have had. Watson thus must be considered first as an “author” (in which case Arthur Conan Doyle is relegated to the status of Literary Agent, a title some Sherlockians have been happy to give him) and then as a character.
As author — biographer, one might say — Watson is a trifle self-conscious; several Canonical stories mention exchanges between him and Holmes about the narratives he has published, which Holmes says are full of “romanticism” and empty of detective logic. “I could not tamper with the facts,” Watson indignantly replies in The Sign of the Four. But there is much evidence that he does tamper with them, both deliberately and accidentally. “The Second Stain,” for example, acknowledges the need to be “vague in certain details,” to avoid betraying state secrets. The frequent references to towns and streets that do not exist, politicians who did not hold office, and weather that does not match the records in The Times, all suggest similar concealment. Other inconsistencies, such as the jump from June to September within a few hours in The Sign of the Four, can be attributed to carelessness. Sherlockians have taken joy for several decades in identifying and explaining such little errors, often blaming them on a medical man’s dreadful penmanship. Late in the Canon, Watson is very bold about addressing his audience directly, as when he uses the introductory paragraph of “The Veiled Lodger” to announce that a certain story will be made public if illicit attempts to get at his papers are not abandoned. By that time, the relationship between Holmes and Watson is one of equals, the author having an established position just as the detective has. Holmes himself observes that “I am lost without my Boswell,” alluding to James Boswell, the companion and biographer of the eighteenth-century figure Dr. Samuel Johnson. Certainly Holmes without Watson is far different, far less comprehensible, the forlorn eccentric of “The Lion’s Mane” with no one to narrate the tales — and, more important, no one to serve as reliable setting for his sparkling gem.
Watson has been called “boobus Britannicus,” a phrase originated by Edmund Pearson (in The Bookman, 1932), who blamed illustrator Arthur Keller for making Watson look truly stupid. That was before Nigel Bruce’s bumbling portrayal in the 1940s films where he is made a constant fool, the better to set off Basil Rathbone’s Holmes. But the original Watson is no boob. Holmes is perhaps generous in telling Watson that “though you are not yourself luminous, you are a conductor of light,” but beyond doubt Watson is a man of common sense — as a physician, and certainly an army doctor, must be — and of courage as well as other good qualities which Holmes often recognizes. He may patronize Watson for lacking intellect to match his own, sometimes descending to cruelty, but it seems clear in most of the stories that he also respects Watson’s judgement. A passage in The Valley of Fear is particularly telling. Holmes has spun an elaborate web of speculation about the case, and Watson is doubtful:
“We have only their word for that.”
Holmes looked thoughtful. “I see, Watson. You are sketching out a theory by which everything they say from the beginning is false.... Well, that is a good sweeping generalization. Let us see what that brings us to....”
Watson proves to be wrong and Holmes right, of course, but the mutual respect remains. Holmes also finds his companion valuable as a reliable ally in time of emergency, the man who carries the gun in several crises and who will keep his wits about him. Indeed, there is more. At the end of “The Abbey Grange” he addresses his friend: “Watson, you are a British jury, and I never met a man who was more eminently fitted to represent one.” Readers of the stories have generally agreed, as did Edgar W. Smith in one of his eloquent editorials in the Baker Street Journal (1955), observing that it is the admirable Watson, rather than the unpredictable Holmes, who would make the more welcome friend. He may be ancestor of a hundred foolish companions to brilliant detectives (a cliché which also owes something to early Westerns), but he is himself an very fine fellow.
Biographical details about Watson are few. Of his family, the reader hears only about the “unhappy brother” whose alcoholism and death are chronicled in the early pages of The Sign of the Four. Watson took his medical degree in 1878 from the University of London (which validated credentials earned through hospital study, rather than providing medical instruction of its own), entered the army, and served in the Second Afghan War. British troops were in Afghanistan for the defence and consolidation of the Empire, and in particular to deter Russia from menacing India through the mountains. A treaty signed in 1879 with local puppet rulers got little respect from the heavily armed populace, and a powerful force massed in the spring of 1880. As Watson reports in A Study in Scarlet, he was wounded at the Battle of Maiwand, which took place July 27, 1880, about fifty miles northwest of Kandahar. It was an utter rout for the British; he was unusually lucky to survive in the slaughter and terrible heat, and to be carried to Kandahar in safety and eventually returned to England. Maiwand (2008) by Richard J. Stackpoole Ryding tells the story of the battle but somehow omits any reliable explanation of how Watson was injured. Although he claims that the Jezail bullet which hit him struck his shoulder and grazed the subclavian artery, there are references in later Canonical tales to a wound in his leg, or in one instance to an injured Achilles tendon. A number of Sherlockians have tried to reconcile all those references, suggesting two wounds, a faulty memory, malingering, or a bullet with an ingeniously complicated trajectory.
Repatriated to England, Watson soon met Holmes (on January 1, 1881,