Everyone knows Sherlock Holmes. First appearing to modest praise in A Study in Scarlet (1887) in Beeton’s Christmas Annual and then in The Sign of the Four (1890) in Philadelphia’s Lippincott’s, the detective and his sidekick, Dr. John Watson, gathered a host of admirers in America and England when Arthur Conan Doyle published The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1892. Soon almost everybody was reading of Holmes. His creator grew alarmed when the character began to overshadow the historical novels he prized more highly. Conan Doyle thus tried killing off Holmes in “The Final Problem,” the concluding story of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), by sending him over the Reichenbach Falls during battle with the fiendish Professor James Moriarty. But the author found that he could no more stifle the detective than Frankenstein could his monster. Magazine publishers and the reading public were craving more Holmes. Conan Doyle bowed down to the masses’ demands. He may well have realized—to his chagrin—that Holmes had lifted him from the status of a journeyman writer to the heights of genius.
Holmes returned to print in The Hound of Baskervilles—set prior to the events of “The Final Problem”—which was serialized in The Strand in 1900 and published as a novel in 1902, the same year Conan Doyle was knighted for his medical services during the Boer War. Readers of 1905’s The Return of Sherlock Holmes discovered that Holmes had survived his tumble down the Reichenbach Falls and then spent three years traveling through Europe and Asia before returning to his home on 221B Baker Street. One more novel and two more collections of stories appeared, the last in 1927, three years before Conan Doyle’s death. But Holmes has endured onstage and on-screen. Now, Andrew Lycett, the author of The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes (2007) and the editor of Conan Doyle’s travel writings, Conan Doyle’s Wide World (2020), has penned The Worlds of Sherlock Holmes, a fascinating exploration of the character and the contemporary influences on his creation.
Holmes’s deerstalker halt and his magnifying glass are, to many, his trademarks. Long bewildered by the hat, which I’ve never noticed in reading Conan Doyle, I was relieved to learn from Lycett that it was not Conan Doyle but Sidney Paget, The Strand’s essential illustrator of the Holmes stories, who put it on the detective’s head. Lycett wades confidently into choppier waters, confronting recent heretical attempts to give Holmes—who is apparently immune to sexual desire—either a lady love or to project homosexual desire onto his relationship with Watson. Watson, of course, never fails to appreciate a pretty woman and marries twice. Holmes, invariably chivalrous to women, is more of a cold fish in that way, an extreme intellectual so obsessed with his studies so as to exclude romantic or emotional entanglements.
Holmes shows little direct interest in politics, but Lycett identifies the detective’s views as those of a liberal imperialist in the same vein as his creator. Lycett writes that Holmes’s liberalism is that of someone “fair and open-minded, opposed to exploitation and oppression, but generally conservative.” Both author and character were friendly to the United States, even if Lycett remarks that “Conan Doyle was well aware that the United States had a violent and unpredictable history.” The author sometimes made use of this history, starting with A Study in Scarlet and continuing later in “The Five Orange Pips” and “The Adventure of the Dancing Men.”
Conan Doyle dreamt of a union of the English-speaking nations. In lines that Lycett describes as “immortal,” Holmes alludes to such a dream in “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor” (1892):
It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believes that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being someday citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.
Lycett tells us that Holmes is named after Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Boston doctor and writer. Even so, to Lycett, Holmes is a “European at heart.” He writes that Holmes’s affinity for the Continent’s capital cities, his reading of Goethe and the lesser-known German Romantic Jean Paul, and his love for Wagner and Meyerbeer, widely shared by his peers, proves him to be a European through and through. By those metrics, plenty of Americans could be deemed Europeans—which, of course, they are in a sense. More unique to Holmes, however, is his descent through his French mother from the Vernet family of painters.
Even if Holmes has painting in his blood, he is far more musical: he plays the violin and is a talented composer. One of Holmes’s interests is medieval music, and he wrote a monograph about the motets of the sixteenth-century Flemish composer Orlando di Lasso. Lycett devotes a chapter as well to Holmes’s “athletic tastes.” In that regard, the creation deviates from his creator, an enthusiastic cricketeer who founded the Authors Cricket Club and loved sports in general. Team games bore Holmes, but he is agile and an expert in boxing and fencing. And he—like Watson—can handle a gun.
The book, rich with a judicious selection of illustrations, is a valuable companion to the Holmes series. Hefty as an art catalogue, it is a bargain at the price.
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Source: newcriterion.com
