“ ‘You may do what you like, Doctor.’ ”
Geo. Hutchinson, A Study in Scarlet (London: Ward, Lock Bowden, and Co., 1891)
“See here! Look at this!”
Richard Gutschmidt, Späte Rache (Stuttgart: Robert Lutz Verlag, 1902)
“Didn’t I tell you so when we started?” cried Sherlock Holmes with a laugh. “That’s the result of all our Study in Scarlet: to get them a testimonial!”
“Never mind,” I answered, “I have all the facts in my journal, and the public shall know them. In the meantime you must make yourself contented by the consciousness of success, like the Roman miser—
Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo
Ipse domi simul ac nummos contemplar in arca.262
257 The brougham was originally designed (ca. 1838) by Henry Peter Brougham, a future baron and former lord chancellor of England. A four-wheeled covered carriage, it was pulled by one horse and had an open driver’s seat in the front.
A brougham.
258 So important did Holmes think this subject that he eventually wrote a monograph about it. In The Sign of Four, he speaks of his work entitled “Upon the tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the use of plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses.”
259 A remarkable feat, taking into account the quantity of gin consumed by Drebber.
260 Ralph Mendelson, in “Hero Neglected, A True Account,” identifies this person as Jacob W. Schmitt, the Cleveland superintendent of police from 1871 to 1893. While relatively unheralded in Watson’s account, the efficient Schmitt deserves his own share of credit in the success of Holmes’s career, at least according to Mendelson. “If Superintendent Schmitt had not acted promptly and furnished even more information than Holmes had requested,” he observes, “Holmes would have been discredited in the eyes of Scotland Yard. Worse than that, he would have been discredited in the eyes of Dr. Watson… . And without the admiring Watson to bolster his career, Holmes would have remained the unknown consultant that he was when Watson first met him.”
261 A jarvey was a driver of a hackney coach, or any carriage available for hire. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable explains that the term is “[s]aid to be a contraction of Geoffrey; and the reason why this name was selected was because coachmen say to their horses gee-o, and Ge-o is a contraction of Geoffrey. Ballantine says, that one Jarvis, a noted hackney-coachman who was hanged, was the original Jarvey.” Another suggested source is St. Gervais, whose symbol is a whip.
262 Holmes’s habit of ending his early cases with a quotation or saying, here attributed to Watson, apes the reported cases of “that inferior fellow” M. Dupin. (See note 83, above.) Morris Rosenblum, in “Hafiz and Horace, Huxtable and Holmes,” translates the quotation (from Horace’s First Satire) as: “The people hiss at me but I applaud myself in my own home, as I gaze fondly at the coins in my strong-box.”
Holmes exhibits a disdain of publicity in numerous cases. As he says in “The Problem of Thor Bridge”: “It may surprise you to know that I prefer to work anonymously, and that it is the problem itself which attracts me.” He later disparages Watson’s accounts of his cases as ruining “what might have been an instructive and even classical series of demonstrations” (“The Abbey Grange”). Yet the growth of his practice likely occurred in large part because of Watson’s publications. The subject of Holmes’s ambivalence about publicity is considered in more detail in this editor’s “What Do We Really Know About Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson?”
APPENDIX
“Mr. Sherlock Holmes”
By Dr. Joseph Bell263
It is not entirely a bad sign of this weary, worn-out century that in this, its last decade, even the petty street-bred people are beginning, as the nurses say, to take notice. An insatiable and generally prurient curiosity, as to the doings of the class immediately above us is pandered to by the society journals, and encouraged even by the daily newspapers. Such information is valueless intellectually, and tends to moral degradation; it exercises none of the senses, and pauperises the imagination. Celebrities at home, illustrated interviews, society scandal on all levels merely titillate the itching ear of the gossip. Memoirs, recollections, anecdotes of the Bar or of the Academy are much more interesting, and may be valuable as throwing sidelights on history, but still only amuse and help to kill the time of which we forget the value. But in the last few years there has been a distinct demand for books which, to a certain poor extent, encourage thought and stimulate observation. The whole “Gamekeeper at Home” series264 and its imitations opened the eyes of town dwellers, who had forgotten or never known White of Selborne,265 to the delightful sights and sounds that were the harvest of the open eye and ear. Something of the same interest is given to the “crowded city’s horrible street” by the suggestions of crime and romance, of curiosity and its gratification, which we find written with more or less cleverness in the enormous mass of so-called detective literature under which the press groans. Every bookstall has its shilling shocker, and every magazine which aims at a circulation must have its mystery of robbery or murder. Most of these are poor enough stuff; complicated plots, which can be discounted in the first chapter, extraordinary coincidences, preternaturally gifted detectives, who make discoveries more or less useless by flashes of insight which no one else can understand, become wearisome in their sameness, and the interest, such as it is, centres only in the results and not in the methods. We may admire Lecocq [sic], but we do not see ourselves in his shoes. Dr. Conan Doyle has made a well-deserved success for his detective stories, and made the name of his hero beloved by the boys of this country by the marvellous cleverness of his method. He shows how easy it is, if only you can observe, to find out a great deal as to the works and ways of your innocent and unconscious friends, and, by an extension of the same method, to baffle the criminal and lay bare the manner of his crime. There is nothing new under the sun. Voltaire taught us the method of Zadig,266 and every good teacher of medicine or surgery exemplifies every day in his teaching and practice the method and its results. The precise and intelligent recognition and appreciation of minor differences is the real essential factor in all successful medical diagnosis. Carried into ordinary life, granted the presence of an insatiable curiosity and fairly acute senses, you have Sherlock Holmes as he astonishes his somewhat dense friend Watson; carried out in a specialised training, you have Sherlock Holmes the skilled detective.
Dr. A. Conan Doyle.
Dr. Conan Doyle’s education as a student of medicine taught him how to observe, and his practice, both as a general practitioner and a specialist, has been a splendid training for a man such as he is, gifted with eyes, memory, and imagination. Eyes and ears which can see and hear, memory to record at once and to recall at pleasure the impressions of the senses, and an imagination capable of weaving a theory or piecing together a broken chain or unravelling a tangled clue, such are implements of his trade to a successful diagnostician. If in addition the doctor is also a born story-teller, then it is a mere matter of choice whether he writes detective stories or keeps his strength for a great historical romance as is the “White Company.”267 Syme, one of the greatest teachers of surgical diagnosis that ever lived, had a favourite illustration which, as a tradition of his school, has made a mark on Dr. Conan Doyle’s method, “Try to learn the features of a disease or injury as precisely as you know the features, the gait, the tricks of manner of your most intimate friend.” Him, even in a crowd, you can recognise at once; it may be a crowd of men dressed alike, and each having his complement of eyes, nose, hair, and limbs; in every essential they resemble each other, only in trifles do they differ; and yet, by knowing these trifles well, you make your diagnosis or recognition with ease. So it is with disease of mind or body or morals. Racial peculiarities, hereditary tricks of manner, accent, occupation or the want of it, education, environment of all kinds, by their little trivial impressions gradually mould or curve the individual, and leave finger marks or chisel scores
which the expert can recognise. The great broad characteristics which at a glance can be recognised as indicative of heart disease or consumption, chronic drunkenness or long-continued loss of blood, are the common property of the veriest tyro in medicine, while to masters of their art there are myriads of signs eloquent and instructive, but which need the educated eye to detect. A fair-sized and valuable book has lately been written on the one symptom, the pulse; to any one but a trained physician it seems as much an absurdity as is Sherlock Holmes’ immortal treatise on the one hundred and fourteen varieties of tobacco ash. The greatest stride that has been made of late years in preventive and diagnostic medicine consists in the recognition and differentiation by bacteriological research of those minute organisms which disseminate cholera and fever, tubercle and anthrax. The importance of the infinitely little is incalculable. Poison a well at Mecca with the cholera bacillus, and the holy water which the pilgrims carry off in their bottles will infect a continent, and the rags of the victims of the plague will terrify every seaport in Christendom.
Trained as he has been to notice and appreciate minute detail, Dr. Doyle saw how he could interest his intelligent readers by taking them into his confidence, and showing his mode of working. He created a shrewd, quick-sighted, inquisitive man, half doctor, half virtuoso, with plenty of spare time, a retentive memory, and perhaps with the best gift of all—the power of unloading the mind of all the burden of trying to remember unnecessary details. Holmes tells Watson: “A man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, as the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”268 But to him the petty results of environment, the sign-manuals of labour, the stains of trade, the incidents of travel, have living interest, as they tend to satisfy an insatiable, almost inhuman, because impersonal curiosity. He puts the man in the position of an amateur, and therefore irresponsible, detective, who is consulted in all sorts of cases, and then he lets us see how he works. He makes him explain to the good Watson the trivial, or apparently trivial, links in his chain of evidence. These are at once so obvious, when explained, and so easy, once you know them, that the ingenuous reader at once feels, and says to himself, I also could do this; life is not so dull after all; I will keep my eyes open, and find out things. The gold watch, with its scratched keyhole and pawnbrokers’ marks, told such an easy tale about Watson’s brother.269 The dusty old billycock hat revealed that its master had taken to drinking some years ago, and had got his hair cut yesterday.270 The tiny thorn-prick and fearsome footmark of the thing that was neither a child nor a monkey enabled Holmes to identify and capture the Andaman Islander.271 Yet, after all, you say, there is nothing wonderful; we could all do the same.
The experienced physician and the trained surgeon every day, in their examinations of the humblest patient, have to go through a similar process of reasoning, quick or slow according to the personal equations of each, almost automatic in the experienced man, laboured and often erratic in the tyro, yet requiring just the same simple requisites, senses to notice facts, and education and intelligence to apply them. Mere acuteness of the senses is not enough. Your Indian tracker will tell you that the footprint on the leaves was not a redskin’s, but a paleface’s, because it marked a shoeprint, but it needs an expert in shoe-leather to tell where that shoe was made. A sharp-eyed detective may notice the thumb-mark of a grimy or bloody hand on the velvet or the mirror, but it needs all the scientific knowledge of a Galton272 to render the ridges and furrows of the stain visible and permanent, and then to identify by their sign-manual the suspected thief or murderer. Sherlock Holmes has acute senses, and the special education and information that make these valuable; and he can afford to let us into the secrets of his method. But in addition to the creation of his hero, Dr. Conan Doyle in this remarkable series of stories has proved himself a born story-teller. He has had the wit to devise excellent plots, interesting complications; he tells them in honest Saxon-English with directness and pith; and, above all his other merits, his stories are absolutely free from padding. He knows how delicious brevity is, how everything tends to be too long, and he has given us stories that we can read at a sitting between dinner and coffee, and we have not a chance to forget the beginning before we reach the end. The ordinary detective story, from Gaboriau273 or Boisgobey274 down to the latest shocker, really needs an effort of memory quite misplaced to keep the circumstances of the crimes and all the wrong scents of the various meddlers before the wearied reader. Dr. Doyle never gives you a chance to forget an incident or miss a point.
263 Dr. Bell’s essay first appeared in The Bookman (London) for December 1892 under the title “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” and is reprinted in the 1893 Ward, Lock & Bowden Ltd. edition of A Study in Scarlet.
264 John Richard Jeffries (1848–1887) was a naturalist, essayist, and novelist whose twenty books included numerous semi-mystical tales of nature. His entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica describes him as one whose “prophetic vision was unappreciated in his own Victorian age… . By combining detailed observation with a mystic apprehension of nature, he was a master both of a straightforward descriptive style and of a sensuous, poetic prose.” Originally a reporter for the North Wilts Herald, Jeffries got perhaps his biggest break when the Times published his 4,000-word letter about the Wiltshire agricultural labourer. The Gamekeeper at Home, a nonfiction work containing his musings on country life and nature, was serialised in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1878 and published in book form in 1887. Despite being a prolific writer, Jeffries suffered from poor health, and he died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-eight, as yet largely unrecognised in the literary world.
265 Gilbert White (1720–1793), of Selborne, England, was a naturalist, poet, and clergyman. He is best known for his great work The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), a collection of letters written to his friends Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington over the course of twenty years. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907–1921) calls it “the solitary classic of natural history. It is not easy to give, in a few words, a reason for its remarkable success. It is, in fact, not so much a logically arranged and systematic book as an invaluable record of the life work of a simple and refined man who succeeded in picturing himself as well as what he saw.”
266 Voltaire’s short novel Zadig Memnon (1747) is generally thought to be one of the earliest examples of “Sherlockian” deduction. In the novel, Zadig is a young Babylonian who suffers Job-like privations in learning that good and evil are inexorably intertwined, and that happiness may come only after great suffering. Eventually, he becomes a king and a sage. What Bell means by the “method of Zadig” is his tendency to observe things closely and—rather like Holmes—draw conclusions from what he sees. When the king’s horse and the queen’s dog are stolen, Zadig is questioned, and, although he states that he has not seen the missing animals, he is able to describe them minutely. He is immediately arrested for the theft but released when the stolen animals are found. Zadig is then fined for having lied about seeing the animals. He defends himself, however, by explaining how he “ ‘observed the marks of a horse’s shoes, all at equal distances… . This must be a horse, I said to myself, that gallops excellently. The dust on the trees in the road that was but seven feet wide was a little brushed off, at the distance of three feet and a half from the middle of the road. This horse, said I, has a tail three and a half feet long, which [was] whisked to the right and left …’ ” He also makes similar observations about the dog. Eventually he is refunded his fine, only to pay almost all of it to his lawyers. When a prisoner later escapes and Zadig observes him through a window, Zadig determines not to become involved but is fined for failing to report his evidence. “ ‘Great God!’ said he to himself, ‘what a misfortune it is to walk in a wood through which the queen’s spaniel or the king’s horse has passed! How dangerous to look out at a window! And how difficult to be happy in this lif
e!’ ” (Translation by Tobias Smollett, 1749.) Fortunately, Holmes did not share Zadig’s conclusions.
267 Conan Doyle’s fine novel The White Company was published in 1891 (London: Smith, Elder & Co.). The tale of knights, fair ladies, war, chivalry, and honour is set in the reign of Edward III (1312–1377) and contains a wealth of historically accurate description.
268 “The Five Orange Pips.” Holmes makes a similar remark in A Study in Scarlet.
269 The Sign of Four, in which Holmes deduces the existence of Watson’s brother and his descent into alcoholism from scratches on Watson’s newly acquired watch.
270 “The Blue Carbuncle.” Here, in a tour de force, Holmes makes a series of deductions about the unfortunate Henry Baker from his lost hat, to be proved virtually one hundred percent correct when they later meet.
271 Bell refers here to the pygmy Tonga and his characteristic blow-gun (The Sign of Four).
272 Francis Galton (1822–1911) was an anthropologist and the half-first cousin of Charles Darwin, and is widely credited with having fathered the science of fingerprinting. In 1892, after expanding upon the research of Sir William Herschel and Dr. Henry Faulds, he published the book Finger Prints, which not only determined that no two people’s fingerprints were alike but also introduced a classification system that broke down the patterns of each print’s loops, arches, and whorls. This system was developed further by Edward R. Henry, future commissioner of the London metropolitan police. Following the 1893 endorsement of the Troup Committee (named after the longtime civil servant and Home Office figure Edward Troup, a Scot who pioneered the practice of delegation of responsibility in the office), fingerprinting was successfully introduced in India in 1897, and in 1901 Scotland Yard established its own fingerprint bureau using the so-called Galton-Henry system (or Galton’s Details), which remains the preferred classification system today. Galton was knighted in 1909.
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