by Bruce Wexler
The Traveling Detective
By the time that Sherlock Holmes’s career was underway in the 1880s, foreign travel had become an expected part of an upper class Englishman’s education.
Although Holmes had not, like Watson, traveled with the army (Watson served in India and Afghanistan), he displays a cosmopolitan awareness of the world throughout his cases. Conan Doyle almost certainly means us to understand that this is an aspect of his personal sophistication. Holmes also demonstrates a willingness to travel, in Britain and abroad, to render his “consulting” services.
The Victorian era was the first to see widespread travel, due to the great expansion of the railways. Here, Holmes and Watson embark for Switzerland.
In his travels around Britain, Holmes uses trains quite extensively, and displays an extensive knowledge of railway timetables. George Bradshaw had published his first railway timetable in 1839, and by the 1890s, the familiar yellow wrapper bound ‘‘Bradshaw’’ had grown to 946 pages. The late nineteenth century was the era of mass-transit by train, and Holmes made extensive use of them in both Britain and Europe (as shown in Paget’s famous illustration of Holmes and Watson in a railway carriage). They also make good use of the ubiquitous Hansom cab in the course of their adventures around London. At the peak of their popularity, over 3,000 Hansoms worked the streets of the capital. Public transport, in the form of horse-drawn omnibuses and the London Underground ‘‘tube’’ train network was also available.
Two leather-bound versions of Bradshaw’s famous railway timetables. One covers the United Kingdom, and the other is for international travel. Guides like these were vitally useful to Holmes.
But Holmes’s knowledge is not confined to Britain. He also displays a strong interest in, and an extensive knowledge of more far-flung locations, including the American continent. American characters make regular appearances in the Canon, and Holmes assumes the disguise of an Irish-American, Altamont (using his father’s middle name), in “His Last Bow.” To achieve a convincing persona, we are told that the great detective spent time in Buffalo, Chicago, and Skibbareen, County Cork. Famous Sherlockian, William Baring-Gould, suggested in his erudite biography, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective, that Holmes’s intimate knowledge of America came from time he had spent there as a student, traveling the country with a theater troupe. This would certainly explain his familiarity with stage make-up and the art of disguise.
Sidney Paget’s famous illustration of Holmes and Watson in a comfortable railway carriage. It is taken from “The Adventure of Silver Blaze.” The duo would often use the time they spent traveling by train to review a case.
City sophisticates Holmes and Watson study the occupant of a Hansom cab.
Hansom cabs were a popular means of public transport, and were often favored by Holmes and Watson.
Holmes adopts the guise of an American, Altamont, in “His Last Bow,” using mannerisms acquired on his travels there. He is described as looking like a caricature of Uncle Sam.
William Baring-Gould’s erudite biography, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street.
Conan Doyle himself had first toured America in 1894, working the literary lecture circuit. He was by no means the first British writer to have success there. Charles Dickens had first traveled to the United States in 1842. He not only wrote extensively about this “republic of my imagination” in his book American Notes, but also sent one of his characters, Martin Chuzzlewit for an extended visit to the ironically named Eden (actually a disease-ridden settlement where he almost loses his life). This implied criticism did not endear Dickens to his generous hosts. William Thackeray, the famous novelist who had taken the young Conan Doyle onto his knee, had followed Dickens’s example in 1852, lecturing around American on the subject of the English Humorists. Careful not to arouse the hostility of his patrons as Dickens had done, Thackeray repeated this lucrative experience a few years later, delivering his paper on The Four Georges (the Hanoverian kings of Britain).
Indeed, the solution of Holmes’s first ever “written up” case, A Study in Scarlet hinges on events that have taken place on the Mormon Trail to the West, and in Utah itself. The story includes a less than flattering portrait of Brigham Young, “The Moses of America,” and one of the founders of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. In using America as a setting for his work, Conan Doyle was very much following the fashion of the period. To his British readers, America was both exotic and yet strangely familiar. English speaking, but not part of the Empire. Although a constant stream of British immigrants arrived in the United States during this period, two-way travel was both time-consuming and expensive and was mostly limited to people of means.
The main action of A Study in Scarlet takes place in the “Great Alkali Plain,” where John and Lucy Ferrier fall in with the Mormons.
Paddington Station, one of London’s great railway termini, was quite close to Holmes’s and Watson’s residence in Baker Street. They would certainly have embarked for many of their out-of-town adventures from here.
It also seems pertinent that Conan Doyle chooses to explore a particularly uncharted part of the American West in his narrative. The (fictional) Great Alkali Plain is a wild setting for a corrosive mix of religion and violent seduction that plays out in the sad story of John and Lucy Ferrier.
More in the style of the “Grand Tour” of previous centuries, Holmes also travels widely on the Continent. By the 1880s, train travel had made Europe far more accessible, although travel to the Continent was still largely the preserve of the middle and upper classes. During his travels, Holmes visits many of the places popularized by the wealthy gentlemen travelers of the previous century, and the names of familiar European spas and tourist destinations pepper the Canon. As well as recuperating at Lyons (now Lyon) in France in “The Reigate Squires,” Holmes and Watson make a circuitous European tour in “The Final Problem.” In an attempt to evade Moriarty and his dangerous followers, they travel through France, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. During their tour, the pair visit Dieppe, Brussels, Strasburg, Baden, Geneva, Lausanne, the Rhone Valley, Leuk, the Gemmi Pass, Interlaken, Meiringen (home of the Sherlock Holmes Museum since 1981), and the ill-omened falls at Reichenbach.
In 1893, the Conan Doyles had spent several months at Davos in Switzerland, for the sake of Touie’s failing health. Its cool clean air had made the town a Mecca for the rich and ailing. German novelist Thomas Mann was to set his 1924 masterwork, Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) in a Davos sanatorium. Like Conan Doyle, Mann also visited the area with his tubercular wife.
During his stay, the athletic Conan Doyle became one of the first English people to learn how to ski downhill, using a pair of skis he had ordered from Norway. Skiing with local residents, the English Branger brothers, he famously traversed the fourteen miles of the Mayerfelder-Furka Pass on May 23, 1894. He became passionate about the activity, and his considered opinion was that “On any man suffering from too much dignity, a course of skis would have a fine moral effect.” In 1899, he wrote an article about his skiing experiences in Davos, which greatly stimulated British tourism to the resort. It has remained a popular destination for British skiers ever since. So great was the gratitude of the townspeople of Davos, that they erected a plaque dedicated to Conan Doyle, thanking him for “bringing this new sport and the attraction of the Swiss Alps in winter to the attention of the world.”
Conan Doyle, like his creation Sherlock Holmes, was an experienced traveler. The town of Davos in Switzerland erected a plaque to Conan Doyle for greatly enhancing the town’s reputation abroad. He wrote a famous article about his sojourn there.
The Conan Doyle family also stayed in the genteel little town of Meirgingen, probably at the Park Hotel du Sauvage. From here, the family made a trip to visit the local sights, including the Reichenbach Falls. (Holmes and Watson stay at the same hotel in “The Final Problem,” although it is renamed the Englisher Hof.) With a d
rop of 820 feet, the waterfalls at Reichenbach are the most dramatic in the Bernese Oberland, and Conan Doyle fell under the spell of its “dreadful cauldron.” The Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota, and the Sherlock Holmes Society of London erected a plaque adjacent to the Falls in 1957, to commemorate the supposed demise of the great detective and the destruction of his great foe Moriarty in “The Final Problem.”
Holmes also mentions trips he has taken to some rather more exotic destinations, during his “off-stage” activities, including Ukrainian Odessa, and Trincomalee in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka). Both of these journeys were undertaken in the course of 1888 cases. At the time, Odessa was the largest port on the Black Sea, and the fourth city of Imperial Russia. This was a period of great tension between Russia and the Western powers, and Holmes’s visit fell only seven years after one of the vicious pogroms against the city’s Jewish population. When Holmes visited Ceylon, the island was a still a British colony, but the first signs of a Buddhist-inspired independence movement had just begun in the 1880s. Do these significant dates indicate that Holmes was involved in gathering local intelligence for the British Government?
After his supposed demise at Reichenbach, Sherlock tells Watson (during their reunion in “The Empty House”) how he reached Florence a week later, and then “travelled for two years in Tibet… and amused myself by… visiting Lhassa and spending some days with the head Llama.” He then traveled to Iran (“Persia”) and Sudan, disguised as the Norwegian explorer Sigerson, before coming to rest for some months at Montpelier, in the south of France. He also paid a trip to Grenoble, where the sculptor Oscar Meunier molds his bust in wax, only for it to be shot at by Colonel Moran.
Again, both Lhassa and Khartoum were flashpoints in the international situation in pre-First World War years, and perhaps Holmes’s presence there was not accidental. He certainly acknowledges having been in contact with the Foreign Office with information he gleaned on his travels, and he certainly collaborates with the British Government in his later career. In 1898, and after two years’ desperate struggle, Lord Kitchener was to depose the Sudanese Khalifa that Holmes had met in Khartoum during his “short but interesting visit.”
Holmes visited Ceylon in the days of the British Raj, when the island looked like this.
Holmes sacrifices his fine bust (sculpted by Oscar Meunier during his visit to Grenoble, France) to draw Colonel Moran’s fire in “The Empty House.”
Conan Doyle and his family visited the Reichenbach Falls several times. The nearby town of Meiringen, where the Conan Doyles stayed, now has its own Sherlock Holmes Museum.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“It is Always 1895…”
“While Sherlock Holmes might not be ‘real,’ the impact and influence he has nevertheless had on the lives of many are very real, indeed.”
STEVEN T. DOYLE, EDITOR OF THE ‘‘SHERLOCK HOLMES REVIEW’’
‘‘There are no limits to the possibilities of monomania.’’
DR. JOHN H. WATSON
Sherlock Holmes Today
The Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221b Baker Street is a perennially popular attraction.
Of all the great characters of fiction, Sherlock Holmes has almost certainly inspired the greatest cult following and the most active veneration. Both continue, completely unabated. Not only are there collections, museums, and places of interest for Sherlockians to visit, but a lively thread of Sherlockiana persists in almost every aspect of contemporary culture.
One of the greatest fascinations experienced by Sherlockians seems to be that exerted by the iconic sitting room at 221B Baker Street. This has engendered many recreations, both public and private. Perhaps the first of these was Michael Weight’s design for the 1951 Festival of Britain. The Sherlock Holmes Pub in London’s Northumberland Street now houses many of the exhibits that were collected together for this famous reconstruction. Other items were donated to the Conan Doyle Collection in Lucens, Switzerland. As of 1994, The Sherlock Holmes Pub also has a stunning portrait of Arthur Conan Doyle, which was unveiled by his daughter, Dame Jean Doyle.
The Sherlock Holmes Pub at 10 Northumberland Street, London, is just around the corner from Charing Cross Railway Station.
But the most faithful and complete recreation of the iconic rooms is almost certainly that found at Baker Street’s Sherlock Holmes Museum. The Museum was opened to the public in 1990, and was the first to be dedicated to a fictional person. Housed in an exact facsimile of the Hudson/Holmes/Watson establishment 221B, its collection is steeped in a wonderfully authentic atmosphere. The sitting room fire crackles in the grate, the flames glint on the copper coal skuttle, the candles flicker, and gutter, and Holmes and Watson’s personal effects litter the apartment. The distant rumble of traffic reminds us that Baker Street has always been a busy London thoroughfare, and would have been equally so during Holmes’s tenure. Every exhibit displayed in the Museum relates to articles mentioned in the Canon stories, and this dedication to detail contributes to the uncannily ‘‘familiar’’ feeling of the rooms. For a full visual tour of the Sherlock Holmes Museum in London please see pages 79–85.
Perhaps the world’s second most famous Holmes Museum is that found at Meiringen in Switzerland, where another replica of the Holmes/Watson sitting room has been constructed in the cellar of the town’s English Church. Meiringen is the closest town to the infamous Reichenbach Falls, and is the focus for an annual pilgrimage of Holmes’s most devoted followers. Members of Sherlock Holmes societies from around the world converge on the town each year on May 4th, to commemorate the epic struggle between Holmes and Moriarty at the nearby Falls.
The superb recreation of Holmes’s and Watson’s sitting room at Baker Street’s Sherlock Holmes Museum.
The University of Minnesota Libraries can claim not one but two versions of the sitting room at 221B. One full-size and a miniature rendering, created by the late Dorothy Row Shaw. In fact, Minnesota lays claim to the world’s largest collection of material relating to Sherlock Holmes and his creator, with a fabulous collection of ove 15,000 items. These include original letters written by Conan Doyle, and the original periodicals in which the Holmes stories appeared. There are also subsidiary collections devoted to Americans with strong Holmesian connections, such as actor William Gillette and illustrator Frederic Dorr Steele. Steele illustrated twenty-nine of the thirty-two post-Reichenbach stories, and fixed the image of Holmes for the American public. Such is Minnesota’s reputation that has been bequeathed several major collections of Sherlockiana, including that of early Holmes biographer, Vincent Starrett. Curator Timothy J. Johnson has also prepared an on-line addendum to Ronald B. De Waal’s magnum opus, The Universal Sherlock Holmes.
Internationally, there are several other museums that celebrate Holmes, including the Sherlock Holmes Museet of Nykobing, Denmark. Invitingly, the museum promises the visitor not only a ‘‘comfortable easy chair,’’ but promises that ‘‘smoking is allowed, and usually we can also provide you with a cup of coffee or a beer.’’
Of the legion active Sherlock Holmes societies around the world, reputed to number at least four hundred, the most famous and prestigious is undoubtedly the Baker Street Irregulars of New York City. Taking their name from Holmes’s famous troop of street urchins, the society was founded by Christopher Morley in 1934. As well as having an unbelievably illustrious roll call of members (which has included Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Isaac Asimov), the BSI sponsors many smaller ‘‘Scion Societies’’ across America, including the Ribston-Pippins of Detroit, the Dancing Men of Providence, the Creeping Men of Cleveland, and the Sound of the Baskervilles. The ‘‘Sound’’ publish the Ineffable Twaddle newsletter, and Beaten’s (stet.) Christmas Annual. Membership of the Baker Street Irregulars is by invitation only, and is conferred on those who have contributed to the study of the great man. Membership is by receipt of the ‘‘Irregular Shilling’’ and is considered a great honor among Sherlockians. The society meets each January for a
n annual dinner and a weekend of Holmesian celebration and study. In 2007, members met to celebrate Holmes’s 153rd birthday. The BSI also publish the Baker Street Journal, the oldest Holmesian publication in the world, and described by its producers as ‘‘An irregular quarterly of Sherlockiana.’’ The Journal is actually a highly scholarly magazine that promotes a deep understanding of the Canon, and of Sherlock Holmes himself, who they deem to be still living.
Members of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London also play ‘‘The Game’’ (whereby both Holmes and Watson are considered real people, and still living). It comes from a phrase spoken by Holmes himself, ‘‘Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot!’’ Founded in 1950, the society was a revival of a smaller, pre-war club (founded in 1934), whose distinguished members had included Dorothy L. Sayers. As well of publishing the scholarly Sherlock Holmes Journal, the Society has also played an active role in commemorating Holmes around the world, and erecting statues in his honor. The London statue stands, nearly nine feet tall, just outside Baker Street tube station, while the Swiss Holmes sits in pensive bronze in Meiringen’s Conan Doyle Place. There are many other British clubs and societies, including the enchantingly named Poor Folk Upon the Moors. This is the Sherlock Holmes Society of the South West of England. Of course, this area is widely featured in the Canon, as the setting of Baskerville Hall, “Silver Blaze”, and “The Devil’s Foot”. Commemorating the fifteen Canon characters that either come from, or have visited Australia, there are several Sherlock Holmes societies there. These include The Sydney Passengers, The Sherlock Holmes Society of Australia, The Sherlock Holmes Society of Melborne (stet.), and the Elementary Victorians. New Zealand has The Antipodean Holmesian Society, based in Denedin.
