Enter Mr. Sherlock Holmes

THE London ‘season’ of the year 1886 was, upon its surface, much like other and similar seasons before it. No blare of sudden trumpets marked its advent. Victoria was still placidly upon her throne; Lord Salisbury had, for the second time, ousted Gladstone from the premier’s chair; Ireland was seething with outrage and sedition; and Beecham’s Pills were ‘universally admitted to be a marvelous antidote for nervous disorders.’ In literature the gods, perhaps, were Stevenson and Henry James and Henty, depending upon one’s age; but an Irishman named Wilde was making himself a figure of fantastic moment by his championship of sestheticism. At the Gaiety, Mr. Cellier’s Dorothy had begun its celebrated run of 968 performances, and The Harbour Lights were gleaming brightly at the Adelphi. In Piccadilly the race of hansom cabs was swift and dangerous. No wars immediately threatened; the wide world was at peace. A smug and happy time, a time of prosperity and great contentment. And no celestial phenomena existed to indicate that, once more in the history of the world, a blue moon was marking an epochal event. Certainly no planets fell to tell an impoverished provincial doctor, resident at Southsea, Portsmouth, that he had brought forth a new immortal in the world of letters.

Sherlock Holmes, however, was already in the world. With a Dr. Watson, late of the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers, he had engaged a suite of rooms at No. 221-B Baker Street, London, and entered upon his astonishing career as a consulting detective. As far as the world is concerned, he is there yet.

I

Times had not been of the best for Dr. A. Conan Doyle of Bush Villa, Southsea. The young man had recently married, and was eking out the slender returns of early medical practice by writing stories for the magazines. It had occurred to him that he might go on writing short stories forever and make no headway. What was necessary, he was certain, if one intended to be an author, was to get one’s name upon the cover of a book. A first novel — The Firm of Girdlestone — had been an impressive failure, and was still in manuscript about the house. But he had, for some time, been turning in his mind the possibility of something new and fresh in the literature of detection. Gaboriau had pleased him by the precision of his plots, and a boyhood hero had been the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, Poe’s masterful amateur detective. What was there, he asked himself, that he — Doyle — could bring to this field which would be indubitably his own?

Outside, over his door at night, burned the red lamp that was the sign of his profession. In the daylight his brass name plate, polished every morning, shone brightly in the Portsmouth sun. But the patients that either of them should have attracted were few and far between. In his patients’ sitting room, — three chairs, a table, and a patch of carpet, — as he smoked and thought, there rose before him the remembered image of his former teacher at the university — one Joseph Bell, ‘thin, wiry, dark, with a high-nosed acute face, penetrating gray eyes, angular shoulders,’ and a peculiar walk. Joseph Bell, M.D., F.R.C.S., Edinburgh; consulting surgeon to the Royal Infirmary and Royal Hospital for Sick Children, whose voice was high and discordant, whose skill as a surgeon was profound, and whose uncanny trick of diagnosis was a legend of the institution. It occurred to the young physician, waiting for his patients who did not come, that if Joseph Bell had determined to be a detective he would have reduced ‘this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer an exact science.’

Bell, for reasons which Doyle the student had never quite understood, had singled him out from among the droves of others who frequented the wards, and made him his out-patient clerk. It had not been an onerous position. The student herded the waiting patients into line, made simple notes of their cases, and ushered them into the big room in which Bell sat in state. But it had been quickly evident to young Arthur Conan Doyle that Joseph Bell learned more about the patients at a glance than he, the questioner, had learned with all his questions.

‘He would sit in his receiving room,’ wrote Doyle the novelist, later in life, ‘with a face like a red Indian, and diagnose the people as they came in, before they even opened their mouths. He would tell them their symptoms, and even give them details of their past life; and hardly ever would he make a mistake.’

The results were often highly dramatic, the author tells us.¹ To a civilian patient, on one occasion, he observed : ‘ Well, my man, you ’ve served in the army.’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘Not long discharged?’

‘No, sir.’

‘A Highland regiment?’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘A noncom officer?’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘Stationed at Barbados?’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘You see, gentlemen,’ explained the physician to his surrounding students and dressers, ’the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army; but he would have learned civilian ways if he had been long discharged. He has an air of authority, and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.’

And no little of the dry humor of Joseph Bell’s deductions is visible in another case that is of record. It is recalled by Dr. Harold Emery Jones, a former classmate of Conan Doyle at Edinburgh.

‘What is the matter with this man, sir?’ Bell suddenly inquired of a trembling student, standing by. ‘Come down, sir, and look at him. No, you must n’t touch him. Use your eyes, sir! Use your cars, use your brain, use your bump of perception, use your powers of deduction!’

The stammering student did his best: ‘Hip-joint disease, sir?’

‘Hip-nothing!’ retorted Belt disgustedly. ‘The man’s limp is not from his hip, but from his foot, or rather from his feet. Were you to observe closely you would note that there are slits — cut by a knife — in those parts of the shoes on which the pressure of the shoe is greatest against the foot. The man is suffering from corns, gentlemen, and has no hip trouble at all. But he has not come to us to be treated for corns, gentlemen; we are not chiropodists. His trouble is of a more serious nature. This is a case of chronic alcoholism, gentlemen. The rubicund nose, the puffed and bloated face, the bloodshot eyes, the tremulous hands and twitching face muscles, with the quick, pulsating temporal arteries, all combine to show us this. But these deductions, gentlemen, must be confirmed by absolute and concrete evidence. In this instance, my diagnosis is confirmed by the neck of a whiskey bottle protruding from the patient’s right-hand pocket.’

Of another patient he once said: ‘Gentlemen, we have here a man who is either a cork cutter or a slater. If you will use your eyes a moment, you will be able to define a slight hardening — a regular callus, gentlemen — on one side of his forefinger, and a thickening on the outer side of the thumb; a sure sign that he follows the one occupation or the other.’

And of still another he observed: ‘Gentlemen, a fisherman! You will note that, although it is a summer’s day, and very hot, the patient is wearing top boots. When he sat upon the chair they were plainly visible. No one but a sailor would wear top boots at this season of the year. The shade of tan upon his face shows him to be a coastwise, not a deep-sea sailor who makes foreign lands. His tan is that produced by one climate only — it is a local tan. A knife scabbard shows beneath his coat, the kind used by fishermen in this part of the world. He is concealing a quid of tobacco in the farthest corner of his mouth, and he manages it very adroitly indeed, gentlemen. The sum of these deductions is that he is a fisherman. Further to prove the correctness of my diagnosis, I notice a number of fish scales adhering to his clothes and hands, while the odor of fish announced his arrival in a most marked and striking manner.’

To the wondering Watsons it was all very marvelous indeed.

II

Smoking in his sitting room at Southsea, waiting for the patients who seldom came, young Dr. Conan Doyle heard again the strident voice of his former mentor, haranguing the awkward students of Edinburgh’s school of medicine. In one familiar and oftrepeated apothegm there was the very substance of a new detective: —

‘From close observation and deduction, gentlemen, it is possible to make a diagnosis that will be correct in any and every case. However, you must not neglect to ratify your deductions, to substantiate your diagnoses, with the stethoscope and by all other recognized and everyday methods.’

Out of his memories of Joseph Bell, hawk-faced and a trifle eerie for all his sardonic humor, the creator of Sherlock Holmes builded the outlines of his great detective. But it was an outline only; the special genius of Conan Doyle, himself, was necessary to complete the picture. It was from the first, indeed, only the potentialities of a living Sherlock Holmes latent within his medical creator that made possible the gaunt detective’s entrance upon the foggy stage of London’s wickedness.

The name, one fancies, was an inspiration. To think of Sherlock Holmes by any other name is, paradoxically, unthinkable. It was a matter, apparently, that gave the author only slight concern. Obviously, his detective must not be ‘Mr. Sharps’ or ‘Mr. Ferrets’; good taste rebelled against so elementary a nomenclature. His love for the American essayist — also a physician — dictated the choice at one end: ‘Never,’ he later wrote, ‘have I so known and loved a man whom I had never seen.’ But Sherlock was longer in coming. A leaf from a notebook of the period exists, and the astonished eye beholds it with dismay. ‘Sherrinford Holmes’ was the detective’s name as first it was jotted down by the man who was to create him. And from the same source one is permitted to deduce an earlier thought than ‘Watson.’ The good Watson, one learns with tardy apprehension, was to have been ‘Ormond Sacker.’ It is a revealing page, that page from Conan Doyle’s old notebook, and a faintly distressing one. In the end, however, it was Sherlock Holmes,² and Sherlock Holmes it is to-day — the most familiar figure in modem English fiction; a name that has become a permanent part of the English language.

III

It was late in the year 1880, or perhaps early in 1881, that Holmes and Watson met and discovered their common need of the moment, which was a comfortable suite of rooms at a figure that would suit their pocketbooks. One inclines to the latter date, in view of the recorded fact that it was as late as March the fourth, in 1881, that Holmes revealed his profession to his fellow lodger. Devotees will recall the passage in A Study in Scarlet in which the revelation is set forth; but one fancies that early readers of that first adventure must have come upon it much as Crusoe came upon the footprint in the sand.

Young Stamford introduced them, then vanished from the tale, his whole existence justified. The day following, they inspected the rooms in Baker Street and took them on the spot.

It is amazing that the good doctor did not guess the truth about his new acquaintance weeks before he was told. Yet by that very failure to suspect he was forever to establish himself in the character of Watson. That first meeting, indeed, was to establish a tradition of the saga — a bit of dialogue which was, in essence, to be a sort of prologue to every tale that was to follow. The doctor’s record of the lines is quite precise: —

‘Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,’ said Stamford, introducing us.

‘How are you?’ he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’

‘How on earth did you know that?’ I asked in astonishment.

‘The Lauriston Gardens Mystery,’ it will be recalled, followed quickly on the heels of Holmes’s confession that he was a consulting detective — perhaps the only one in the world; and for the first time, under the eyes of his admiring Boswell, the greatest detective of history or fiction set forth upon his mission of humane vengeance. It was a perfect morning for the adventure — that is, ‘it was a foggy, cloudy morning, and a dun-colored veil hung over the housetops, looking like the reflection of the mud-colored streets beneath.’ And a man named Enoch Drebber, of Cleveland, U.S.A., or so his cards revealed, was dead in dreadful circumstances, in a house at No. 3, comma, Lauriston Gardens, a trifle off the Brixton Road.

Thus opened the strange case of Jefferson Hope, for which Gregson and Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, received the credit, but which was solved by Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, and later set forth by his friend and companion, Dr. John H. Watson, who had all the facts in his journal. It is an admirable bit of melodrama, well told in vigorous, Anglo-Saxon English, delayed in the middle by a secondary story that is reminiscent of Bret Harte at his worst, and ending on the inevitable explanation of the detective.

The book was written in the spring of 1886 and by July had been returned by Arrowsmith, unread. ‘Two or three others sniffed and turned away.’ The friendly editor of the Cornhill Magazine, who had paid thirty pounds for a much shorter tale some time before, found it at once too short and too long. On the point of laying it away beside its predecessor, The Firm of Girdlestone, the despairing author bethought himself of yet another publisher who might be cozened. Thus near was Sherlock Holmes to dying at his birth.

Ward, Lock and Company received the tattered manuscript and looked it over, and on the last day of October Dr. Conan Doyle, gloomily smoking in his patients’ sitting room, received a letter:—

DEAR SIR -

We have read your story and are pleased with it. We could not publish it this year as the market is flooded at present with cheap fiction, but if you do not object to its being held over till next year, we will give you £25 for the copyright.

It was not a tempting offer, even for so impecunious a practitioner as Dr. Conan Doyle. Sick at heart, however, from repeated disappointments, he wrote a letter of acceptance, and the deed was done. Sherlock Holmes was committed to the publishers, the pirates, and the world; and A Study inScarlet became the issue of Beetons Christmas Annual for 1887, At no time, the author tells us in his autobiography, did he receive another penny for it. Yet so often has it been reprinted and pirated and otherwise put forth, in many lands, that a very decent income might have been achieved from that first slender volume — when later volumes had been written — if only its author might have kept his title.

That lurid paper-back of Christmas 1887 is to-day one of the rarest books of modern times — a keystone sought by discriminating collectors in every part of the earth. Of equal rarity, and possibly even more difficult to find, is the second edition of the tale, with illustrations by the author’s father. It was issued in 1888, with a brief publisher’s preface that is a masterpiece of inept rhetoric and comparison. ‘The Study in Scarlet and the unraveling of the apparently unfathomable mystery by the cool shrewdness of Mr. Sherlock Holmes,’ the reader was informed, ‘yield nothing in point of sustained interest and gratified expectation to the best stories of the school that has produced “Mr. Barnes of New York,” “Shadowed by Three,” &c., &c.’

The line drawings by Charles Doyle are astounding, viewed at this date. One wonders what his son thought of them, even in 1888. But Dr. Conan Doyle’s kindness of heart is perhaps attested by their inclusion.

IV

British literature in the eighties had a considerable vogue in America, and much of it for a simple reason. No copyright act existed, and it was possible to publish it for nothing. But publication, even under these unfavorable auspices, had helped to make a number of reputations. Among the reputations thus established, in some degree, was that of Dr. Conan Doyle. In England A Study in Scarlet had received some favorable but unvociferous comment; in America it was no inconsiderable success. Thus it happened that, in 1889, when Micah Clarke had been praised by Andrew Lang and published to the world, to mark its author’s versatility, there appeared in London an agent for the American house of Lippincott, with knowledge of that author’s previous work.

At a dinner paid for by the American, there were present by invitation Oscar Wilde himself, a garrulous member of Parliament named Gill, and the still impecunious physician from Portsmouth. Wilde’s conversation was a delight, and as a result of the eventful evening the happy authors were commissioned to write books for Lippincott’s Magazine. Wilde’s contribution was The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Doyle’s was The Sign of Four, in which Sherlock Holmes for the second time — under the eyes of Watson — went forth into the London fogs upon a trail of violence and murder.

The adventure is dated September 1888; and the tale appeared in the issue of Lippincott’s Magazine for February 1890. Are there any who, having read it, can now forget it? It is still perhaps the most vivid and the best of all the many tales that were to follow, and far, far better than the one that had preceded it. Of course, ‘the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mudcolored clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement.’

And through this melancholy glamour, in a four-wheeler, drove Watson and Sherlock Holmes, with Mary Morstan by their side, to a rendezvous beside the third pillar of the Lyceum, and thence to Pondicherry Lodge and the horror of the grinning Face.

It was Jones, this time, who took the credit,—Athelney Jones, you will recall, of Scotland Yard, — and for Watson, at the end of the trail, there was a wife. For Holmes there remained the bottle of cocaine that stood upon his shelf, toward which, when all was over, his long white hand was slowly reaching up.

The book appeared in the autumn of 1890, over the imprint of Spencer Blackett, and was popular from the first. It, too, to-day is rare and difficult to find. But the money that it made for its author was insufficient for his needs, and Dr. Conan Doyle continued to practise medicine at Southsea. A second great historical novel, meanwhile, had been written, — the doctor’s industry was incredible, — and The White Company was all but ready to take its place beside the earlier Micah Clarke. That Sherlock Holmes would again appear between the covers of a book did not enter the author’s mind, save perhaps as a happy possibility — when and if some other publisher, greatly daring, should solicit Watson for another reminiscence.

V

Dr. Conan Doyle, for all his mounting reputation, was a modest man, and still a man of medicine who wrote novels when his profession did not pay. In the latter days of 1890, indeed, he was contemplating a happy union of his two vocations.

As a specialist, it occurred to him, he would have leisure for his writing and perhaps command a greater flow of patients; wherefore, he would go to Vienna and study to be a specialist! The die was cast, and as the year drew to its close Dr. and Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle closed the doors of Bush Villa behind them for the last time. There is to-day, one reads, a tablet on the house, and ‘Doyle House’ is a place of tourist interest. As the birthplace, so to speak, of Sherlock Holmes, it should be marked, one thinks, by national decree.

With the spring, his work in Vienna completed, a new eye specialist tacked his plate over a door in Devonshire Place, not far from classical Harley Street, and the new chapter of adversity was begun. ‘Every morning,’ wrote Dr. Conan Doyle, later on in life, ‘I walked from my lodgings in Montague Place, reached my consulting room at ten, and sat there until three or four, with never a ring to disturb my serenity.’

It was a situation made to order for literary work. A number of popular monthlies had begun to make their appearance on the stands, among them the famous Strand. To the thoughtfully smoking doctor it appeared that a serial might be an impediment in such a journal, but that a series of short tales, featuring a single individual who would appear throughout the series, might be the very ticket. And, happily, the individual was at hand. In the long hours of waiting, all unknowing whither it was to lead him, Dr. Conan Doyle, eye specialist, of No. 2, Devonshire Place, began to write his remarkable series of short detective tales, now famous the world over as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

This time Holmes was in the world to stay. That lean and sinewy figure was to become a symbol as familiar as the Nelson Monument and the Tower of London. A figure of incredible popularity, who exists in history more surely than the warriors and statesmen in whose time he lived and had his being. An illusion so real, as Father Ronald Knox has happily suggested, that one might some day look about for him in Heaven, forgetting that he was only a character in a book.