Really terrific discussion boards are hard to come by. Most...
1) are too big to keep up with;
2) are too small to bother with;
3) boast a disturbingly high ratio of crazy-members;
4) have moderators who are perpetually on vacation;
5) are poorly designed;
6) are rarely on-topic;
Etc., etc. I could go on and on.
Luckily for Sherlock Holmes fans, however, there is a fantastic discussion board out there that does absolutely everything right: Holmesian.net. I have been a member there for a year now and I love everything about it: the characters, the design, the discussion topics. It's not too big and not too small; it's gorgeously and efficiently designed; there is fantastic in-depth discussion not just about the Holmes stories, but about Victorian England, Arthur Conan Doyle, and various film adaptations. What a joy to log on every morning and get my daily fix of Holmesian talk and trivia. A highly recommended site.
I can only think of one possible con: a huge majority of the members there love Jeremy Brett. I won't attempt to deny it: I am a huge Brett fan, so the Brett-centricity of the place doesn't bother me one bit. (I think I've just invented a new word!) And despite the Brett love, anybody is welcome there, regardless of who your favorite Holmes is. So it's really not even a con: just a little tiny caveat.
So hurry off to Holmesian and sign up, if you haven't already!
Very sincerely yours,
M
Friday, May 16, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
A Particularly Peculiar Miniature Mystery
There are many mysteries in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but the greatest one is perhaps what was Holmes doing during the Great Hiatus? Everyone has their own theory to expound. Purists insist that Holmes was telling the truth when he told Watson that he had disappeared to Florence, traveled for two years in Tibet, and “spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpellier, in the South of France.” Others are more skeptical. Some (most notably Nicholas Meyer, who explored the idea in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution) think that Holmes spent at least part of the Hiatus seeking a cure for his drug addiction. Others say that Holmes died at the Falls and that Moriarty took his place. Still others (well, an other, leastways; namely, Mark Bourne, in his story “The Case of the Detective’s Smile”) believe that Holmes visited Alice’s Wonderland and solved the case of the stolen tarts.
It is not within the purview of this essay to discuss the Great Hiatus in its entirety. Instead, I would prefer to focus our attention on one particularly peculiar miniature mystery within the Great Hiatus. It is a small point, but a suggestive one: and remember what the Master himself observed in TWIS: “It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles.”
The mystery is namely this: In EMPT, after he finishes explaining to Watson what he has been up to for the last three years, Holmes says, “I came over at once to London, called in my own person at Baker Street, threw Mrs. Hudson into violent hysterics, and found that Mycroft had preserved my rooms and my papers exactly as they had always been.”
What?
Upon reading that sentence, multiple questions arise in the mind of the reader, but the most puzzling one seems to me to be: why, if everyone was so sure that Holmes was dead, was his apartment never leased to someone else? I can think of only a few explanations for this discrepancy…
1) Mrs. Hudson was so grief-stricken over Holmes’s death that she could not bear to rent the rooms out to anyone else. This scenario is possible - but implausible. Although we know that Mrs. Hudson was very fond of Holmes (see DYIN), what good would come from her not renting out his rooms? (Unless...was Mrs. Hudson in love with Holmes? Was Holmes in love with Mrs. Hudson? Were they carrying on a clandestine affair under Watson's nose? "There we come into those realms of conjecture where the most logical mind may be at fault...")
2) Dr. Watson moved in. This too seems rather unlikely. In “The Final Problem” Watson has rooms bordering Mortimer Street in Westminster (“clambering over the wall which leads into Mortimer Street”); at the time of EMPT he is living in Kensington (“I retraced my steps to Kensington”). There is no indication that he moved back to his old bachelor pad in between. I think we can safely scrap this idea.
3) Mycroft moved in. This is perhaps less objectionable than the idea of Watson moving in, but it is still rather odd. Such a move would be extremely taxing for Mycroft, creature of habit that he was. And too, if Mycroft had moved in, you would think that Sherlock would have mentioned it to Watson. Instead, we hear: “Mycroft had preserved my rooms and my papers exactly as they had always been” and “Our old chambers had been left unchanged through the supervision of Mycroft Holmes and the immediate care of Mrs. Hudson.” If Mycroft had actually moved in, wouldn’t Sherlock have said so? How could he have lived in his brother's apartment without disturbing anything?
4) Dr. Watson paid Mrs. Hudson not to rent the room out to anyone else. If Watson did this, he was certainly much more affected by the death of Holmes than he ever let on. Surely no sane man would pay his late friend’s rent just so nobody else could move into his old apartment. Remember, too, that Watson was never particularly wealthy: such a commitment would surely have put a great strain on his finances.
5) Mycroft paid Mrs. Hudson not to rent the room out to anyone else. Although Mycroft undoubtedly had access to more money than Watson (“hello, Chancellor of the Exchequer!”), how would Mycroft explain such a tactic to Mrs. Hudson without arousing her suspicions? Can you imagine such a conversation? "I want you to keep Sherlock's rooms just as they were because..." Because why? "Because I am devastated by his death, even though we rarely saw each other in life"? "Because I believe Sherlock's spirit would rest easier knowing his rooms are exactly as were upon his death"? "Because I think he might still be alive"? Did Mycroft confide in Mrs. Hudson? If so, why did they not tell Watson?
6) Mycroft paid an agent to live in Baker Street until his brother returned. This agent would have had to live in Baker Street for three years without touching any of Holmes's possessions - unless, of course, Mycroft or the agent took an inventory of all of Holmes's possessions before moving any new items in. The mind boggles at the difficulty of cataloging the syringes, the commonplace books, the various portraits of famous criminals... You would think that Mrs. Hudson would have noted such an effort. And as if getting the items out weren't difficult enough, remember that Mycroft or the agent would have had to move the agent's things out and Holmes's things in in the spring of 1894 before Sherlock's return, all without arousing Mrs. Hudson's suspicions. To sum, a possible explanation - but an exceedingly unlikely one.
7) Holmes and Watson had another roommate that Watson never wrote about, who continued to live in Baker Street during the Great Hiatus and kept Holmes's things in order. This is, oddly enough, perhaps the least objectionable theory of the seven (or one of the least objectionable, anyway). It explains a variety of difficulties rather nicely. Mrs. Hudson would not be suspicious if this person stayed in the rooms after Holmes’s supposed death. We need not worry over Watson’s sanity, or picture poor Mycroft trying to move in while not disturbing his brother’s (numerous) papers, or imagine the difficulty of an unknown agent cataloguing Holmes's possessions. If this theory is true, who is this mysterious person? How long did he or she live at Baker Street? What was his or her relationship to Holmes? Did he or she know that Holmes had survived the incident at Reichenbach?
“These are very deep waters…”
Which of the seven theories do you think is most probable? Is there a possible scenario that I missed entirely?
Until next time.
I remain,
Very sincerely yours,
M
It is not within the purview of this essay to discuss the Great Hiatus in its entirety. Instead, I would prefer to focus our attention on one particularly peculiar miniature mystery within the Great Hiatus. It is a small point, but a suggestive one: and remember what the Master himself observed in TWIS: “It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles.”
The mystery is namely this: In EMPT, after he finishes explaining to Watson what he has been up to for the last three years, Holmes says, “I came over at once to London, called in my own person at Baker Street, threw Mrs. Hudson into violent hysterics, and found that Mycroft had preserved my rooms and my papers exactly as they had always been.”
What?
Upon reading that sentence, multiple questions arise in the mind of the reader, but the most puzzling one seems to me to be: why, if everyone was so sure that Holmes was dead, was his apartment never leased to someone else? I can think of only a few explanations for this discrepancy…
1) Mrs. Hudson was so grief-stricken over Holmes’s death that she could not bear to rent the rooms out to anyone else. This scenario is possible - but implausible. Although we know that Mrs. Hudson was very fond of Holmes (see DYIN), what good would come from her not renting out his rooms? (Unless...was Mrs. Hudson in love with Holmes? Was Holmes in love with Mrs. Hudson? Were they carrying on a clandestine affair under Watson's nose? "There we come into those realms of conjecture where the most logical mind may be at fault...")
2) Dr. Watson moved in. This too seems rather unlikely. In “The Final Problem” Watson has rooms bordering Mortimer Street in Westminster (“clambering over the wall which leads into Mortimer Street”); at the time of EMPT he is living in Kensington (“I retraced my steps to Kensington”). There is no indication that he moved back to his old bachelor pad in between. I think we can safely scrap this idea.
3) Mycroft moved in. This is perhaps less objectionable than the idea of Watson moving in, but it is still rather odd. Such a move would be extremely taxing for Mycroft, creature of habit that he was. And too, if Mycroft had moved in, you would think that Sherlock would have mentioned it to Watson. Instead, we hear: “Mycroft had preserved my rooms and my papers exactly as they had always been” and “Our old chambers had been left unchanged through the supervision of Mycroft Holmes and the immediate care of Mrs. Hudson.” If Mycroft had actually moved in, wouldn’t Sherlock have said so? How could he have lived in his brother's apartment without disturbing anything?
4) Dr. Watson paid Mrs. Hudson not to rent the room out to anyone else. If Watson did this, he was certainly much more affected by the death of Holmes than he ever let on. Surely no sane man would pay his late friend’s rent just so nobody else could move into his old apartment. Remember, too, that Watson was never particularly wealthy: such a commitment would surely have put a great strain on his finances.
5) Mycroft paid Mrs. Hudson not to rent the room out to anyone else. Although Mycroft undoubtedly had access to more money than Watson (“hello, Chancellor of the Exchequer!”), how would Mycroft explain such a tactic to Mrs. Hudson without arousing her suspicions? Can you imagine such a conversation? "I want you to keep Sherlock's rooms just as they were because..." Because why? "Because I am devastated by his death, even though we rarely saw each other in life"? "Because I believe Sherlock's spirit would rest easier knowing his rooms are exactly as were upon his death"? "Because I think he might still be alive"? Did Mycroft confide in Mrs. Hudson? If so, why did they not tell Watson?
6) Mycroft paid an agent to live in Baker Street until his brother returned. This agent would have had to live in Baker Street for three years without touching any of Holmes's possessions - unless, of course, Mycroft or the agent took an inventory of all of Holmes's possessions before moving any new items in. The mind boggles at the difficulty of cataloging the syringes, the commonplace books, the various portraits of famous criminals... You would think that Mrs. Hudson would have noted such an effort. And as if getting the items out weren't difficult enough, remember that Mycroft or the agent would have had to move the agent's things out and Holmes's things in in the spring of 1894 before Sherlock's return, all without arousing Mrs. Hudson's suspicions. To sum, a possible explanation - but an exceedingly unlikely one.
7) Holmes and Watson had another roommate that Watson never wrote about, who continued to live in Baker Street during the Great Hiatus and kept Holmes's things in order. This is, oddly enough, perhaps the least objectionable theory of the seven (or one of the least objectionable, anyway). It explains a variety of difficulties rather nicely. Mrs. Hudson would not be suspicious if this person stayed in the rooms after Holmes’s supposed death. We need not worry over Watson’s sanity, or picture poor Mycroft trying to move in while not disturbing his brother’s (numerous) papers, or imagine the difficulty of an unknown agent cataloguing Holmes's possessions. If this theory is true, who is this mysterious person? How long did he or she live at Baker Street? What was his or her relationship to Holmes? Did he or she know that Holmes had survived the incident at Reichenbach?
“These are very deep waters…”
Which of the seven theories do you think is most probable? Is there a possible scenario that I missed entirely?
Until next time.
I remain,
Very sincerely yours,
M
Friday, May 02, 2008
The Sound of the Master's Voice
In the Canon, Doyle mentions several times that Holmes has a high voice. I never understood what exactly that meant until I found this free audio version of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The reader is (sadly) anonymous, but his renditions of the stories are fantastic. His voice for Holmes is cold and biting and aristocratic, and it gets quite high. Suddenly I understood exactly what Doyle was driving at in his description of his protagonist's voice. The Sadly Anonymous Reader also brings a great deal of nuance to all the characters, including Watson. This is a first-rate adaptation and well-worth downloading. Take a listen!
My more observant readers might be wondering why, in my last entry, I did not address several other important Canonical factors when arriving at Holmes's birth-year - such as the fact that Holmes met Musgrave four years before MUSG, or that Watson once claimed that Holmes had been in practice for twenty-three years. I have been considering the question as well and intend to address it sometime in the future - but suffice it to say till then, I still think there is still enough evidence to place Holmes's birth-date in 1860 or 1861.
M.
My more observant readers might be wondering why, in my last entry, I did not address several other important Canonical factors when arriving at Holmes's birth-year - such as the fact that Holmes met Musgrave four years before MUSG, or that Watson once claimed that Holmes had been in practice for twenty-three years. I have been considering the question as well and intend to address it sometime in the future - but suffice it to say till then, I still think there is still enough evidence to place Holmes's birth-date in 1860 or 1861.
M.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
A Few Trifling Words on the Matter of Holmes’s Age, Or A Demonstration that A Birth-Year of 1861 is Not Entirely Improbable
I’m suffering from spring allergies at the moment, so I’m taking it easy and Holmesing out. (I believe I’ve just created a new verb.) I’ve spent the last few days in my own little Holmesian universe, attempting to answer the age-old question: when exactly was our dear Sherlock born?
Baring-Gould claims 1854. He presumably arrived at this conclusion after reading the passage in “His Last Bow” where Holmes is described as “a tall, gaunt man of sixty.” “His Last Bow” is, of course, set in 1914. Nick Rennison, in his book Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography, follows Baring-Gould’s lead and also claims that Holmes was born in 1854, although he believes June to be a more likely birth-month than January. Laurie R. King claims it is possible that Holmes was born as late as 1868; however, she ultimately decided on 1861 when writing her Mary Russell books. Her reasoning is explained in this essay, which can be found on her website.
After digging around a bit on the Internet, these dates were the only ones that I could find. Most scholars seem to accept the 1854 date without question. But - is there enough evidence to determine if King is justified in bucking tradition and going with a later birth-date? Let’s go back to the Canon and see.
There are two stories in particular that can be mined for data concerning Holmes’s age: “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott” and “His Last Bow.” It makes sense to consider GLOR first, since it was, after all, Holmes’s first case. Following are some excerpts that deal with the dating of the case (and consequently, Holmes’s age).
“You have never heard me talk of Victor Trevor?” he asked. “He was the only friend I made during the two years I was at college.”
“‘Hudson it is, sir,’” said the seaman. ‘Why, it’s thirty year and more since I saw you last.’”
“All this occurred during the first month of the long vacation. I went up to my London rooms, where I spent seven weeks working out a few experiments in organic chemistry. One day, however, when the autumn was far advanced and the vacation drawing to a close, I received a telegram from my friend imploring me to return to Donnithorpe, and saying that he was in great need of my advice and assistance.”
“‘Some particulars of the voyage of the bark Gloria Scott, from her leaving Falmouth on the 8th October, 1855, to her destruction in N. Lat. 15 degrees 20’, W. Long. 25 degrees 14’, on Nov.6th.’”
“‘The case might have been dealt leniently with, but the laws were more harshly administered thirty years ago than now, and on my twenty-third birthday I found myself chained as a felon with thirty-seven other convicts in the ‘tween decks of the bark Gloria Scott, bound for Australia.’”
“‘It was the year ‘55, when the Crimean War was at its height.’”
“‘We prospered, we traveled, we came back as rich colonials to England, and we bought country estates. For more than twenty years we have led peaceful and useful lives.’”
From these quotes we can ascertain a number of things:
1) Holmes attended college for two years. At the end of one of his terms at school, he went to visit Trevor and worked on some organic chemistry experiments.
2) Hudson claimed that it had been thirty plus years since he saw Trevor (Armitage). Trevor himself seemed to agree with this time-frame, saying that “laws were more harshly administered thirty years ago than now.”
3) The shipwreck took place in 1855.
Let us first set aside any questions we may have about Holmes’s university career and instead concern ourselves with the date of the case itself. If we take Hudson and Trevor’s “thirty years” statements at face-value, the case would take place in 1885: an interpretation that would turn the entire Canon topsy-turvy. Most chronologists agree that Holmes and Watson first met sometime between 1880 and 1882, so an 1885 date for GLOR seems impossible. Leslie S. Klinger puts it rather nicely in the first volume of his New Annotated Sherlock Holmes when he writes, “Either ‘the year ‘55, when the Crimean War was at its height,’ is wrong, or the ‘thirty years’ is wrong.”
Which is it, then? Surely there must be some way to reconcile these two seemingly irreconcilable statements. One explanation is that Trevor and Hudson were rounding their dates up. As the Birlstone Smash notes here, “Any comparison between the 1850s and the 1880s would seem a bit like three decades, wouldn’t it?” Seems likely enough to me. Let’s test the theory and say that twenty-five years had passed, instead of thirty plus. As Laurie King writes, “If…one excuses Hudson’s ‘thirty years’ as an exaggeration, and takes Trevor’s twenty years as closer to the facts, adding a brisk five to make a success of the gold fields in Australia and return home rich, then we are looking at 1880 as the second year of university for our detective…” I agree with Ms. King all the way up to the phrase “second year of university for our detective.” Nowhere in his account does Holmes reveal during which of his two years at university the visit to the Trevor household took place: perhaps Holmes visited them at the end of his first year, or perhaps he took off some time in between the two years. But I digress.
I think it entirely possible, therefore, that Sherlock Holmes was attending university as late as 1880. In fact (cocksure chronologist that I am), I think it more than possible: I think it probable. Whether it was his first or second year, or whether those two years were spread over a longer period of time, I do not know.
Let’s take as a working hypothesis that Holmes came to university in 1879 and finished his first year in 1880. How old was he then when he went to school? Laurie King says on her website that “it was, and indeed still is, commonplace for bright students to enter at seventeen or even younger.” Let’s be conservative and say that he was eighteen. This would mean that Holmes was born in 1861.
But wait, some Sherlockians will cry, what about the evidence from LAST? In “His Last Bow” Holmes is described as “a tall gaunt man of sixty.” “His Last Bow” takes place in 1914. Is this conclusive evidence that Holmes was born in 1854? I hardly think so. In the first place, as many commentators have pointed out, Holmes is disguised in this story as Altamont, the Irish-American spy. He has even grown a goatee. Such a get-up is hardly conducive to determining the man’s true age. Second, even if Doyle meant for the “sixty years” description to apply to Holmes himself as opposed to Altamont, is it not possible that he was rounding Holmes’s age upward? If he was in fact born in 1861, he would be fifty-three in 1914. Disguised, couldn’t a 53-year-old look rather like a 60-year-old? I do not think the proposition unreasonable. But if your conscience forbids you from rounding 53 up to 60, then you are certainly free to say he was 55 or 56 and born in 1858 or 1859, and then round. It is certainly not necessary, however, to push his birth-date all the way back to 1854.
Some might think this discussion petty (“1854 versus 1861? who really cares about that? when can we get back to talking about Watson’s wives?”), but on the contrary, the consequences are rather significant. If Holmes really was born in 1861 or later, it adds weight to the notion that Holmes was physically fit enough to infiltrate a secret society in Chicago in 1912, an undertaking that some have deemed unlikely. Mycroft Holmes is now seven years younger; the change in birth-date means that he is much more likely to have taken an active role in the government during the Great War and the run-up to it. If you accept an 1861 birth date and a 1903 retirement date, Holmes retires at the remarkable age of 42: his relative youth gives credence to those who believe that Holmes did a bit more during his retirement than keep bees and toil over his magnum opus on the Art of Detection.
In fact, one’s entire perception of the character shifts. Our image of the middle-aged character drawn by Paget and played by such giants as Gillette, Rathbone, and Brett fades somewhat. Instead, we recognize our dear Sherlock for who he really was: a very young man with a great deal of maturity who knew from an early age that he wanted to devote his life and career to the pursuit of justice.
Sincerely yours,
M.
Baring-Gould claims 1854. He presumably arrived at this conclusion after reading the passage in “His Last Bow” where Holmes is described as “a tall, gaunt man of sixty.” “His Last Bow” is, of course, set in 1914. Nick Rennison, in his book Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography, follows Baring-Gould’s lead and also claims that Holmes was born in 1854, although he believes June to be a more likely birth-month than January. Laurie R. King claims it is possible that Holmes was born as late as 1868; however, she ultimately decided on 1861 when writing her Mary Russell books. Her reasoning is explained in this essay, which can be found on her website.
After digging around a bit on the Internet, these dates were the only ones that I could find. Most scholars seem to accept the 1854 date without question. But - is there enough evidence to determine if King is justified in bucking tradition and going with a later birth-date? Let’s go back to the Canon and see.
There are two stories in particular that can be mined for data concerning Holmes’s age: “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott” and “His Last Bow.” It makes sense to consider GLOR first, since it was, after all, Holmes’s first case. Following are some excerpts that deal with the dating of the case (and consequently, Holmes’s age).
“You have never heard me talk of Victor Trevor?” he asked. “He was the only friend I made during the two years I was at college.”
“‘Hudson it is, sir,’” said the seaman. ‘Why, it’s thirty year and more since I saw you last.’”
“All this occurred during the first month of the long vacation. I went up to my London rooms, where I spent seven weeks working out a few experiments in organic chemistry. One day, however, when the autumn was far advanced and the vacation drawing to a close, I received a telegram from my friend imploring me to return to Donnithorpe, and saying that he was in great need of my advice and assistance.”
“‘Some particulars of the voyage of the bark Gloria Scott, from her leaving Falmouth on the 8th October, 1855, to her destruction in N. Lat. 15 degrees 20’, W. Long. 25 degrees 14’, on Nov.6th.’”
“‘The case might have been dealt leniently with, but the laws were more harshly administered thirty years ago than now, and on my twenty-third birthday I found myself chained as a felon with thirty-seven other convicts in the ‘tween decks of the bark Gloria Scott, bound for Australia.’”
“‘It was the year ‘55, when the Crimean War was at its height.’”
“‘We prospered, we traveled, we came back as rich colonials to England, and we bought country estates. For more than twenty years we have led peaceful and useful lives.’”
From these quotes we can ascertain a number of things:
1) Holmes attended college for two years. At the end of one of his terms at school, he went to visit Trevor and worked on some organic chemistry experiments.
2) Hudson claimed that it had been thirty plus years since he saw Trevor (Armitage). Trevor himself seemed to agree with this time-frame, saying that “laws were more harshly administered thirty years ago than now.”
3) The shipwreck took place in 1855.
Let us first set aside any questions we may have about Holmes’s university career and instead concern ourselves with the date of the case itself. If we take Hudson and Trevor’s “thirty years” statements at face-value, the case would take place in 1885: an interpretation that would turn the entire Canon topsy-turvy. Most chronologists agree that Holmes and Watson first met sometime between 1880 and 1882, so an 1885 date for GLOR seems impossible. Leslie S. Klinger puts it rather nicely in the first volume of his New Annotated Sherlock Holmes when he writes, “Either ‘the year ‘55, when the Crimean War was at its height,’ is wrong, or the ‘thirty years’ is wrong.”
Which is it, then? Surely there must be some way to reconcile these two seemingly irreconcilable statements. One explanation is that Trevor and Hudson were rounding their dates up. As the Birlstone Smash notes here, “Any comparison between the 1850s and the 1880s would seem a bit like three decades, wouldn’t it?” Seems likely enough to me. Let’s test the theory and say that twenty-five years had passed, instead of thirty plus. As Laurie King writes, “If…one excuses Hudson’s ‘thirty years’ as an exaggeration, and takes Trevor’s twenty years as closer to the facts, adding a brisk five to make a success of the gold fields in Australia and return home rich, then we are looking at 1880 as the second year of university for our detective…” I agree with Ms. King all the way up to the phrase “second year of university for our detective.” Nowhere in his account does Holmes reveal during which of his two years at university the visit to the Trevor household took place: perhaps Holmes visited them at the end of his first year, or perhaps he took off some time in between the two years. But I digress.
I think it entirely possible, therefore, that Sherlock Holmes was attending university as late as 1880. In fact (cocksure chronologist that I am), I think it more than possible: I think it probable. Whether it was his first or second year, or whether those two years were spread over a longer period of time, I do not know.
Let’s take as a working hypothesis that Holmes came to university in 1879 and finished his first year in 1880. How old was he then when he went to school? Laurie King says on her website that “it was, and indeed still is, commonplace for bright students to enter at seventeen or even younger.” Let’s be conservative and say that he was eighteen. This would mean that Holmes was born in 1861.
But wait, some Sherlockians will cry, what about the evidence from LAST? In “His Last Bow” Holmes is described as “a tall gaunt man of sixty.” “His Last Bow” takes place in 1914. Is this conclusive evidence that Holmes was born in 1854? I hardly think so. In the first place, as many commentators have pointed out, Holmes is disguised in this story as Altamont, the Irish-American spy. He has even grown a goatee. Such a get-up is hardly conducive to determining the man’s true age. Second, even if Doyle meant for the “sixty years” description to apply to Holmes himself as opposed to Altamont, is it not possible that he was rounding Holmes’s age upward? If he was in fact born in 1861, he would be fifty-three in 1914. Disguised, couldn’t a 53-year-old look rather like a 60-year-old? I do not think the proposition unreasonable. But if your conscience forbids you from rounding 53 up to 60, then you are certainly free to say he was 55 or 56 and born in 1858 or 1859, and then round. It is certainly not necessary, however, to push his birth-date all the way back to 1854.
Some might think this discussion petty (“1854 versus 1861? who really cares about that? when can we get back to talking about Watson’s wives?”), but on the contrary, the consequences are rather significant. If Holmes really was born in 1861 or later, it adds weight to the notion that Holmes was physically fit enough to infiltrate a secret society in Chicago in 1912, an undertaking that some have deemed unlikely. Mycroft Holmes is now seven years younger; the change in birth-date means that he is much more likely to have taken an active role in the government during the Great War and the run-up to it. If you accept an 1861 birth date and a 1903 retirement date, Holmes retires at the remarkable age of 42: his relative youth gives credence to those who believe that Holmes did a bit more during his retirement than keep bees and toil over his magnum opus on the Art of Detection.
In fact, one’s entire perception of the character shifts. Our image of the middle-aged character drawn by Paget and played by such giants as Gillette, Rathbone, and Brett fades somewhat. Instead, we recognize our dear Sherlock for who he really was: a very young man with a great deal of maturity who knew from an early age that he wanted to devote his life and career to the pursuit of justice.
Sincerely yours,
M.
Friday, April 25, 2008
A Decorative Drawing
I thought this blog could use a picture or two. Here's Holmes enjoying a concert given by the great Spanish violin virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate. It was drawn by Sidney Paget for "The Adventure of the Red-Headed League," which was published in the Strand Magazine in August of 1891.
(By the way - where's Watson? Is he the guy directly behind Holmes? Or did he just get so bored that he left at intermission?)
An Introduction to the Dispatch Box
I had called upon my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, one day in the autumn of last year and found him in deep conversation with a very stout, florid-faced, elderly gentleman with fiery red hair.
And with those thirty-four words, I was hooked.
I was in fifth grade the first time I read a Sherlock Holmes story. Although I was familiar with the name (who isn’t?), I was under the mistaken impression that Holmes was a stuffy old man who smoked an incredibly ugly pipe and wandered around wearing a stupid-looking cap and cloak. (Curse you, pop-culture, for reducing poor Holmes to nothing more than a bland stereotype!) Nevertheless, I was still interested in reading the stories for their description of nineteenth-century London; even then I was a nerd for Victorian England.
Our teacher passed out a copy of The Adventures, but told us we were only going to study one: “The Red-Headed League.” We dutifully turned to the appropriate page and began to read.
I was engrossed from the very first sentence.
I loved everything about REDH: the culture of Victorian London, the patient but clueless figure of Dr. Watson, the inscrutable mystery of the stout red-headed pawnbroker - and above all, the enigmatic, energetic, oddly charming character of Holmes himself, so different from the Sherlock Holmes of popular culture.
Instead of forcing us to write a book report on the story, or something equally drab, our teacher had us stop half-way through and predict how Holmes would solve the mystery. I spent a long while scouting the text for clues. I remember lying on the floor with the book and combing the story over line-by-line. I wish I could find what I wrote; it would be incredibly amusing to read now. I do know that my guesses were partially accurate, because the teacher praised me for paying such close attention and getting so much of it right, but unfortunately I ultimately fell into the error of thinking that Spaulding had artificial kneecaps, and that was why Ross left the address that he did, and why Holmes glanced at Spaulding’s knees when asking for directions to the Strand. Sigh. But I fell in love, anyway. Before the week was out, I was at the public library hauling home the 1200-page Complete Sherlock Holmes.
I started from the beginning and plowed all the way through. A couple of weeks after that, I knew I had to get my own copy. So I brought my mother to the book-store and she bought me one. I still have it. The last hundred pages are bent in a rather funky way (I dropped it once and the pages splayed) and the cover is stained with ketchup (I ate some fast-food once and accidentally squirted the book instead of the fries), but it is still in commission. The book was such a behemoth that I felt it deserved a name; I ended up naming it Sherlock and referring to it as a “he.” (Yes, I do occasionally sex my books.) I used to bring him to the lunch-room with me and prop him up next to my friends. I used to carry him on top of my head walking from class to class. And whenever I had those beastly standardized tests, I hauled Holmes along with me. No other book could provide better entertainment for the anxious moments stolen in between exams. The book let everybody know that I was a literature geek and proud of it, thanks much! (It could also, in a pinch, be used as a weapon.)
About a year ago I hauled Holmes out again during a period of illness. I hadn’t conducted a systematic study of the stories before; I had just read them for what they were and enjoyed them for what they were…in short, I did what Doyle intended his readers to do. But then I read about The Game, and I thought, oh, that might be fun… Indeed, it is much more than fun: it is addictive. The Sherlockian universe has become one of my (many) enjoyable little obsessions.
So many minutiae to consider and discover! There are the little questions (how do you determine how far parsley sinks into butter? what is the giant rat of Sumatra, and why is the world not prepared for it? why did Wisteria Lodge occur in 1892 when Holmes was supposedly dead? how did he get a key for the empty house? and why didn’t he ask about a key in A Study in Scarlet?) and the big questions (when was Holmes born? what did he do during his retirement? what were his parents like? what really happened during the Great Hiatus? did he ever fall in love, and if so, with whom?).
I make no claim to be an expert Sherlockian. I have no desire whatever to add a BSI to the end of my name. There are times when I am scandalously irreverent toward the Canon. I even (horror of horrors!) enjoy writing fan fiction about Holmes and Watson and their world. But I do have a deep abiding love for these stories and the culture that gave birth to them, and doesn’t that count for something? I think it should.
In this blog, I intend to include little scholarly “monographs” about famous Sherlockian conundrums, reviews of some Holmes-oriented books and movies, links to some of my favorite Sherlockian websites, questions gleaned while reading through the stories, and maybe even an essay or two about the culture of Victorian Britain. In short, a little bit of everything. I hope that someone somewhere will find something remotely interesting in this collection of assorted Holmesian ramblings.
In closing, I resort to the most clichéd of Sherlockian send-offs: “The game is afoot!”
Believe me to be,
Very sincerely yours,
M.
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