Sherlock Holmes Handbook. Christopher Redmond
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offers many illustrations taken from early editions of the Canon, and although the volumes are much too heavy for recreational reading, the typography is easy on the eye.
It is difficult to think of Sherlock Holmes without his deerstalker hat, which is never mentioned in the Canon, but was the inspiration of an early illustrator. That lasting gift from artist to character is one example of how important illustration has been in establishing the myth of Sherlock Holmes, and in making the stories successful and memorable. No wonder, then, that Walter Klinefelter found it easy to devote a full volume to Sherlockian illustration: Sherlock Holmes in Portrait and Profile (1963). Admirable so far as he goes, he only scratches the surface, for there have been dozens of illustrators whom he has no room to mention.
Unless one is merely a cartoonist, there is more to illustrating Holmes than the presence of the deerstalker hat and its usual companions the magnifying glass, the curved pipe, and the Inverness cape. Still, some modern illustrators do no more than that when they try to interpret Holmes visually. One expects from an illustrator the discernment of an artist, revealed in features, expressions, and gestures that match the Holmes described in the text. It is for achieving those expressions and gestures, in particular, that two early artists — Paget and Frederic Dorr Steele — are acknowledged to be great interpreters of Holmes, while others are nearly forgotten. In addition, the reader deserves authenticity in Victorian clothing and furnishings; the scenes illustrated should be ones that are not merely exciting and action filled but significant to the progress of the story; the illustrations should be placed on the page or in the volume in such a way that the story is not spoiled for the first-time reader; and their reproduction should be clean and clear.
The first person to draw Sherlock Holmes for print was D.H. Friston, whose illustrations for A Study in Scarlet appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. (It is not clear that the often-reproduced cover of Beeton’s is intended to represent Holmes or have anything to do with A Study in Scarlet.) Klinefelter is critical of Friston’s Holmes, calling it “a travesty,” not so much in physiognomy as in clothing and headgear. Those illustrations were abandoned when A Study in Scarlet was republished, and in Friston’s place stood the author’s father, Charles Doyle, by 1888 confined to a mental institution and exercising his talent rather for therapy than professionally. Gibson and Green, in their Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle, observe that “The six frail drawings bear no relation to later conceptions of the subject but are of interest none the less.” Later illustrators for the same novel included George Hutchinson.
SIDNEY PAGET. Always admired, the drawings of Sidney Paget for the original publication of about half the Canon have been more widely known since facsimile editions became available. One or two of them, such as a drawing for “Silver Blaze” of Holmes and Watson together in a railway carriage, and one for “The Naval Treaty” of Holmes sniffing a rose in a moment of ecstasy, have become virtual icons. Others, less often reproduced, still capture moments of characteristic action, or aspects of Holmes’s milieu, as no other illustrations have been able to do. It can be seen as a tribute to Paget’s mastery of his medium, and of his Victorian subject as well, that selected illustrations have twice been reproduced by the spicy British magazine Mayfair with off-colour captions replacing the original Canonical ones.
Gibson and Green in their Bibliography explain the conjunction of Paget and the Canon thus: “George Newnes wanted the [Strand] magazine to have a picture at every opening, and to achieve this appointed W.H. Boot as the art editor. He in turn chose one of the Paget brothers for this series, intending it to be Walter Paget, though in fact the offer went to Sidney Paget. The choice was a good one and met with the author’s approval, though he had envisaged a ‘more beaky nosed, hawk-faced man’.” Tradition says that Walter Paget became, rather than the artist, the model for Holmes.
It was Paget who attached the deerstalker hat to Sherlock Holmes, identifying the detective’s “travelling cap” as the headgear he himself favoured: a cloth cap in plain or (often) houndstooth fabric, with fore-and-aft peaks and with earflaps that could be tied up or down. He first drew such a hat in a picture to go with “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” when it appeared in 1891. (However, researchers have found a deerstalker in drawings that appeared in the Bristol Observer newspaper when it published The Sign of the Four as a serial in 1890; the artist is unknown.) Paget drew it only four more times, but that was enough, especially as one of the five deerstalkers is seen falling from Holmes’s head into the gorge of the Reichenbach in an illustration for “The Final Problem.” Other artifacts of the Paget household can also be identified in some of the illustrations.
“I found Sherlock Holmes half asleep”: a corner of the Baker Street suite, with chemical laboratory, as drawn by Sidney Paget for “A Case of Identity” when it appeared in the Strand magazine in September 1891, early in the sequence of stories. The soft edge and complex shape of this illustration are characteristic of Paget’s work.
Sidney Paget did a total of 356 illustrations for the Canon, to accompany the magazine publication of The Adventures, The Memoirs, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Return. (Many of them were carried along when those texts were published in book form.) Ann Byerly, writing in Baker Street Miscellanea in 1983, described his technique:
Employing the black-and-white watercolor technique, he worked [the illustrations] up on a kind of cardboard about 6” X 8” in size, first pencilling in his composition, next filling in the background with a light wash, then applying black watercolor paint to dark areas in the picture, and finally, filling in the details with black and white after that had dried.... Much more of his draftsmanship is evident when an original is tilted to the light to catch the glint of the pencilling than is apparent in the reproductions.
(Still less, of course, can be seen in most modern facsimiles.) Some of the drawings were reproduced from engravings, others from (cruder) woodcuts. Warren Scheideman, writing in the same issue of BSM, notes that some of Paget’s genius resides in the “creative rather than formal” shape of his drawings, which lack hard edges: “The lines drift into the text, sometimes like smoke, clouds, dreams, or thoughts, often in physical conjunction with the words they illustrate.”
Sidney Paget was born October 4, 1860, and was a young painter and newspaper artist when he was accidentally chosen to illustrate “A Scandal in Bohemia” and the stories that followed it. He went on to produce drawings for many other stories by Doyle, and for other authors’ works in the Strand and elsewhere. In October 1897, it is reported, he painted Doyle’s portrait. He suffered from a “chest complaint” in the early years of the twentieth century, gradually doing less and less work, and died January 28, 1908. He and his wife, Edith Hounsfield, whose wedding-present from Doyle was a silver cigarette-case inscribed “From Sherlock Holmes,” had six children; one of them, Winifred, has written about her father and was a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London from its founding until her death in 1978. “Only a handful” of his original drawings are known to exist, Ann Byerly reported in 1983.
FREDERIC DORR STEELE. The leading American illustrator of the Canon was in fact its illustrator only for the final three volumes of short stories. Walter Klinefelter, in Sherlock Holmes in Portrait and Profile (1963), introduces the contributions of Frederic Dorr Steele thus:
For the text of the stories of The Return, which made its first American appearances in various numbers of Collier’s Weekly from September 26, 1903, to January 28, 1905, Steele drew forty-six illustrations. The master detective’s visage appears in twenty-six of them. For each story Steele also provided individual headpieces and decorative initials. But at the most these drawings, though of very special merit, comprise the lesser part of this artist’s contribution to the embellishment of The Return. The choicest of his drawings for this section of the canon consist of the ten gorgeous portraits which he executed in color for the front