Sherlock Holmes – A Portrait

Years ago, probably because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes – The Complete Illustrated Novels and Sherlock Holmes – The Complete Illustrated Short Stories were the second and third books I read, I developed an interest in Holmes.

One of my teachers asked us to prepare an exposé on any literary topic, and I decided to work on a portrait of Sherlock Holmes.

I mentioned that work to a dear friend a few years ago, and she said she’d like to read it. It’s taken me an awfully long time to type my work that was written on pink paper, using black ink and a dip pen (just… don’t ask).

I tried to gather a few clues, but I’m neither Holmes nor Watson (and I’m not Conan Doyle either).

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Sherlock Holmes – A Portrait

To begin a portrait of Mr Sherlock Holmes, we should tell you where and when he was born, but that nobody can tell. Holmes was a very secret person as to his family and relatives, and we must consider that we only happened to know him since his association with Dr John Watson because he had never considered writing a story about his works (though he had written many memoirs concerning his methods).

Then, what we’re about to tell you is based either on information taken in the different short stories and novels, or on what is to be logically thought of the ways of the Victorian era.

Holmes’s ancestors “were country squires who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class. But, none the less, [his] turn that ways is in [his] veins, and may have come with [his] grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest form.” [Cf.: The Greek Interpreter]

The house where he has been raised was so humanly cold and silent that, as a boy, Holmes may have been traumatized by this atmosphere.

His father never talked to him before his adolescence; his mother, like the ladies of her time, didn’t look after her children.

His brother, Mycroft, was seven years his elder; if there was another man with such singular powers as Sherlock in England, that was Mycroft. He was unknown to the public who knew his brother because he evolved in his own circle – that is to say the Diogenes Club (the queerest club in London). [Cf.: The Greek Interpreter]

Mycroft was the kind of man who was reasoning from an arm-chair; he had no ambition, and he was only looking forward to the pleasure of entirely coordinating the government, so much that Holmes said that he sometimes was the British government. [Cf.: The Bruce-Partington Plans]

Because he remained in the ways of his family, Mycroft was never close to Sherlock.

Holmes was friendless at school. He was never a very sociable fellow, but during the two years that he was at college (certainly in Oxford), he happened to become friend with Victor Trevor (this because Trevor’s bull-terrier froze on to Holmes's ankle one morning as he went to chapel and that ever since that accident Trevor came every day to inquire after him since he was laid by the heels for ten days). Their chats ended in a close friendship though Trevor was quite the contrary to Holmes. [Cf.: The “Gloria Scott”]

Holmes understood how he could use his gift, his ability to read and give a meaning to what everybody sees but doesn’t observe when he spent a few days in his friend’s house having to solve the mystery of Trevor’s father’s death.

After college, Holmes came up to London and had rooms in Montague Street. There, he went on with his chemical studies until Reginald Musgrave came to him to ask for his help, and since that time, he became the first private (and illegal at the time) detective. [Cf.: The Musgrave Ritual]

One day, Holmes found nice rooms in Baker Street, but he had to get somebody to go halves with him. That’s why he happened to meet Dr John Watson, who, finding his friend’s gift astounding, decided to write about it and explain Holmes’s ways of deduction, as well as his nature.

We will not speak of ‘The Science of Deduction’ [Cf.: A Study in Scarlet], but rather of his nature.

Once, Watson made a list concerning Holmes’s knowledge.

It ran this way:

Sherlock Holmes–his limits

1. Knowledge of Literature.–Nil.

2. ___________ Philosophy.–Nil.

3. ___________ Astronomy.–Nil.

4. ___________ Politics.–Feeble.

5. __________ Botany.–Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.

6. Knowledge of Geology.–Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.

7. Knowledge of Chemistry.–Profound.

8. ___________ Anatomy.–Accurate, but unsystematic.

9. ___________ Sensational Literature.–Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.

10. Plays the violin well.

11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.

12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

[Cf.: A Study in Scarlet]

After his knowledge, we can consider his habits: an anomaly which often struck Watson in the character of his friend was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was nonetheless in his personal habits one of the most untidy men.

He kept his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe-end of a Persian slipper and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece.

Sometimes, he practiced revolver within doors.

His rooms were always full of chemicals and of criminal relics.

He had a horror of destroying documents; month after month, his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burnt and which could not be put away save by their owner during one of his famous outbursts of passionate energy. [Cf.: The Musgrave Ritual]

Something else makes Holmes different (at least from most of the other contemporary literary creations, if not from real men), he was a drug-addict. He used mostly morphine or cocaine, and he said that he did so because his mind rebelled at stagnation, because he abhorred the dull routine of existence and that he craved for mental exaltation. [Cf.: The Sign of Four]

That’s what he told Watson, but his drug addiction might have had other sources, and his author, trained to be a doctor, might have had more than just a human weakness in mind for his superior character, even if it turned out to be quite an interesting addition to the plots.

Watson said that he’d weaned his friend, but an addict can always find a way back to a drug of choice. However, it seems that, in the end, Holmes did stop taking drugs.

Holmes was a strange man, but he was even stranger with women. He was always perfectly polite, even sometimes chivalrous, but he never trusted women.

The only exception was Irene Norton, née Adler.

To Sherlock Holmes, she was always the woman; Watson had seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes, she eclipsed and predominated the whole of her sex. There was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler. [Cf.: A Scandal in Bohemia]

Adler was among the very few who ever outwitted Holmes, and she was a woman, that made her unique (and perhaps somehow precious) to him.

When the hereditary king of Bohemia, who had had problems with this lady, asked Holmes how he could reward him, Holmes only asked for Adler’s photograph (she was worthy of his admiration).

Other women are usually regarded as being poor, uninteresting creatures at best, or untrustworthy, scheming demons. A few women managed to impress him, such as Miss Violet Hunter in The Copper Beeches, but that lasted only the time of his inquiries. Then, women are a part of the mystery, but once the mystery is solved, they become uninteresting again.

Holmes is ready to do anything to solve a case, and he once got engaged to an unsuspecting housemaid in order to enter the residence of a master blackmailer. [Cf.: Charles Augustus Milverton]

During his inquiries, Holmes was mostly patient with his clients and with the detectives, who were more or less respectful of his talents (because he had chosen his job and accepted an inquiry because of its challenge – and because he was always sure that he’d be able to prove that he was right).

Sometimes, he could be rather mercurial, but one of his main defects was that he was an actor and he never spared theatrical effects: he could act strangely in order to observe someone’s reaction or to study something on the floor; he also could act as if the information he needed wasn’t important to him, and while chatting with a witness, he managed to have the person reveal the facts without realizing what he, or she, was doing, or Holmes pretended that he’d made a bet and the witness revealed the piece of information just for the sake of proving Holmes wrong. [Cf.: The Blue Carbuncle]

Once, he even put make-up on and ate nothing for three days because he wanted everybody to believe that he was dying in order to arrest a murderer. [Cf.: The Dying Detective]

However his most theatrical action was to disappear in the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland; for him, that was the only way to escape to the friends of Professor Moriarty, whom he had killed.

Holmes decided to come back to England in order to solve problems which were too difficult for the Force. When he contacted his friends, he frightened Mrs Hudson, his landlady, and Watson, who were both convinced that he had been dead for years.

Sometimes, Holmes is conceited; he loves to be congratulated, but under his cold, logical way, behind his mask lay the depth of loyalty and care: once he prevented a lady from being horribly murdered [Cf.: The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax], and one day, after Watson had been wounded by a dangerous criminal Holmes told this man: ‘If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive.’ [Cf.: The Three Garridebs]

Holmes, after the death of Mary Watson, his friend’s wife, bought Watson's practice in Kensington through a distant relative of his named Verner (which oddly sounds like Holmes’s grandmother’s surname). Holmes wanted his dear friend to come back live with him at

Baker Street

, and he managed to find at least part of the money to have Dr Verner buy the practice; Watson would discover that only years later. [Cf.: The Norwood Builder]

Holmes could be sensitive as well as simple: he refused a knighthood [Cf.: The Three Garridebs], but once he spent a day at Windsor, whence he returned with a remarkably fine emerald tie-pin. [Cf.: The Bruce-Partington Plans] when Watson asked him if he had bought it, Holmes answered that it was a present from a certain gracious lady in whose interests he had once been fortunate enough to carry out a small commission. Holmes said no more, but we can guess that lady’s august name.

Another remarkable aspect of Holmes’s personality was his peculiar sense of humour; for example, after having burgled the house of a blackmailer with Watson's help, when Inspector Lestrade came to ask for his help on the following day, and when Lestrade told him that the two men were about to be arrested because the under-gardener had seen them and could give a description, Holmes said, ‘That’s rather vague […]. Why, it might be a description of Watson!’ [Cf.: Charles Augustus Milverton]. Or when the Duke of Holdernesse paid him with a six thousand pounds cheque and offered to show Holmes one of the curiosities of Holdernesse Hall, and having seen it, he said: ‘Thank you […]. It is the second most interesting object that I have seen in the North.’ Of course, the duke inquired what the first one was, and ‘Holmes folded up his check and placed it carefully in his notebook. ‘I am a poor man,’ said he, as he patted it affectionately, and thrust it into the depths of his inner pocket’. [Cf.: The Priory School]

As to religion, Holmes proved to have a good knowledge of the Holy Bible [Cf.: The Crooked Man and The Valley of Fear], but he was by no means a devoted man. Religion wasn’t important to him, perhaps because he’d been raised before Queen Victoria turned into a bigot.

After Professor Moriarty’s death, finding no challenge in London, Holmes retired in a lonely villa, about five miles from Eastbourne and situated upon the southern slope of the downs, commanding a great view of the Channel. There, he lived the life of a hermit among his bees and books; he wrote Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen and since Watson had remained in London, he was obliged to write himself what was happening to him.

His great gift and his peculiar personality sometimes made him appear as a cold and distant man, but once he said something that revealed something about his real self.

Looking at a rose, he said: ‘What a lovely thing a rose is! […] There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion […]. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.’ [Cf.: The Naval Treaty]

Holmes is a very complicated character, who entrenched himself behind a logical and rather cold appearance so that those who wouldn’t make the effort to try to understand his ways would not understand who he really was.

It can only be said that Mr Sherlock Holmes is fascinating and complex.

            Orson Welles once said that Sherlock Holmes ‘is a gentleman who never lived – and who will never die’, and he seems to be right: novels, short stories, plays, movies and series have been written and made (and are being written and made) almost ever since the creation of Holmes.

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            When I wrote this, I’d just seen The Secret of Sherlock Holmes at the Wyndham’s Theatre. Mr Jeremy Brett was playing Holmes to Mr Edward Hardwicke’s Dr Watson in the Jeremy Paul play, directed by Patrick Garland. The Sherlock Holmes series, with both actors, produced by Granada (from 1984 to 1994, with Mr David Burke playing Watson in the first episodes) was then a faithful adaptation of the Victorian settings.

Since then, other films have been made, other novels written, and dear Auntie Beeb had the most excellent idea to produce a new series where the concept of Sherlock Holmes is brought to modern London.

The first time I heard about this, before I knew that the BBC was involved and that Messrs Gatiss and Moffat would become the co-creators and would write and update Holmes together with Mr Thompson, as well… I’ll confess that I uncharitably thought that it couldn’t work.

Famous last thought.

Two summers ago, I watched the first episode of Sherlock, series 1, and I fell for this update in a matter of minutes. The work (and love) behind this series is simply astounding, and Messrs Gatiss, Moffat and Thompson’s writing inspires me to improve my own writing. As I recently told someone, I’m probably not objective because I’m a fan, but I find the few critics in reviewers’ hides highly unpleasant because they cling to details and blow them up whilst this is the best work I’ve seen on television in ages.

Since we’ve got to wait for (apparently) about a year to get series 3, I’ve decided to write my own reviews… for fun. Of course, I shall share.

Even though I’m dying to sing the praise of series 2, I’ll probably start with the first episode 1 which became the unaired pilot…

See you soon!

::dashes off to watch the episodes again::