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.
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