Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes as drawn by Sidney Paget in 1904

 Mr Sherlock Holmes was born on the 6th of January 1854 the youngest child of Siger Holmes and Violet Holmes (nee Sherrinford). His father was a country squire with a small estate in Yorkshire, his mother was the niece of the French artist Horace Vernet (1789-1863). Sherlock was the youngest of three brothers, the oldest brother Sherrinford, born in 1846, inherited the family estate after it is rumoured their father murdered their mother for cheating on him with Sherlock’s maths tutor, a Professor James Moriarty. Many have speculated that this dark event in Sherlock’s early life is what led to his choice of career, and his later obsession with the destruction of Professor Moriarty. The middle brother Mycroft, born in 1847, went on to have a highly successful career within the more shadowy and secretive areas of Her Majesty’s Government.
It is thought that Holmes began his career as the World’s first Consulting Detective in 1881, shortly before meeting the man who would become his biographer, and life long friend Dr John Watson MD (1852-1929). It is through the writings of Dr Watson, published mainly in The Strand Magazine, that the public first became aware of the existence of Sherlock Holmes. It is also through Dr Watson’s writings that we get our image of the man.
Watson described Holmes thus:

His very person and appearance were such as to strike the attention of the most casual observer. In height he was rather over six feet, and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing, save during those intervals of torpor to which I have alluded; and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, had the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination. His hands were invariably blotted with ink and stained with chemicals, yet he was possessed of extraordinary delicacy of touch, as I frequently had occasion to observe when I watched him manipulating his fragile philosophical instruments.

 It is from Watson that we learn of the darker side to the man.

  . . . for days on end he would lie upon the sofa in the sitting-room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night. On these occasions I have noticed such a dreamy, vacant expression in his eyes, that I might have suspected him of being addicted to the use of some narcotic, had not the temperance and cleanliness of his whole life forbidden such a notion.

But he was wrong as he showed later in some disturbing detail.

 Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

When asked by Watson what was it he was taking Holmes replied,

 ”It is cocaine,” he said, “a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?”

So we have Holmes the man of great intelligence, and a man of action when pursuing the solution to a problem, but we also so have Holmes the idle langid narcotics user when bordom would strike. Sherlock Holmes a complicated character of contradictions.

Of course the works of Dr Watson have been the influence and muse of many a film maker or TV producer over the years, and Holmes has constantly been up dated and reinvented. But to know the true Holmes you must return to the good doctor’s original stories, only there will you find the real Sherlock Holmes.