‘Holmes takes my mind from better things’, Arthur Conan Doyle once complained. His mother sternly objected.[1] He did nothing better, she told him. Posterity has agreed with Mrs Doyle. Sherlock Holmes is not merely the best thing the author did, but one of the best things any author has done. The ‘unofficial consulting detective’, operating from his modest ‘digs’ at 221B Baker Street (the ‘B’ is a nice touch), where the detective resides, Mrs Hudson, his dragonish landlady, keeps house, and Dr Watson, premaritally, lodges, has joined that select of literary characters whose fame has soared beyond literature - along with Hamlet, Don Quixote, Samuel Pickwick, Svengali, and Harry Potter.
The Holmes enterprise began modestly with A Study in Scarlet, for which its impoverished author, then a struggling physician, received the measly sum of £25. Now ‘Sherlock’ is a television and film franchise, generating millions world-wide.
How did it happen? Why has Holmes continued to captivate generation after generation when other fictional detectives of the Victorian period are forgotten? One can break the answers down into a mix of elements. But first it will be useful to summarize the life of Holmes’s creator:
Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859, one of nine children of an alcoholic Irish artist who was consigned, in later life, to a lunatic asylum. Young Arthur Doyle was educated at the fee-paying Jesuit college, Stonyhurst. At 16 he spent a year in Austria before enrolling at Edinburgh University’s medical school. In 1880 he spent seven months in the Arctic as ship’s doctor on a whaler. The following year he graduated with a respectable degree, and made another trip to Africa before setting up, less adventurously, in medical practice near Portsmouth, in July 1882. His income had reached £300 a year by 1885, enabling him to marry the sister of one of his patients. Doyle had long written on the side and in 1886 he played around with stories centred on an ‘amateur private detec-tive’, called ‘J. Sherrinford Holmes’. The outcome was the Sherlock Holmes novella, A Study in Scarlet (1887). No top-drawer publisher would take it and it was eventually serialized as a Christmas giveaway in a magazine and then as what was called a ‘shilling shocker’ - pulp fiction for the masses:
This mystery of double murder in Utah and London caught the public taste, and Doyle followed it up with another Holmes adventure, The Sign of Four (1890). It too was well received, but the Holmes mania took off early in 1891 when Doyle submitted six short stories to the Strand Magazine. The editor realised ‘that here was the greatest short story writer since Edgar Allan Poe’ . These Sherlock Holmes stories were devised to correct ‘the great defect’ in current detective fiction – lack of logic. The Strand Stories were illustrated by the equally brilliant Sidney Paget, who supplied the detective with his trademark deerstalker and aquiline profile.
Doyle’s heart was never really in detective fiction. Nevertheless the stories were phenomenally popular in Britain and America and overshadowed everything else Doyle would ever write. In 1893, he killed the detective at the Reichenbach Falls. The Strand Magazine lost 20,000 subscribers overnight. There were protests from high places.
Much as he came to hate him, Holmes made Doyle rich, and by the end of the century he was one of the wealthiest of British men of letters.
How did it happen? Why has Holmes continued to captivate generation after generation when other fictional detectives of the Victorian period are forgotten? One can break the answers down into a mix of elements. But first it will be useful to summarize the life of Holmes’s creator:
Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859, one of nine children of an alcoholic Irish artist who was consigned, in later life, to a lunatic asylum. Young Arthur Doyle was educated at the fee-paying Jesuit college, Stonyhurst. At 16 he spent a year in Austria before enrolling at Edinburgh University’s medical school. In 1880 he spent seven months in the Arctic as ship’s doctor on a whaler. The following year he graduated with a respectable degree, and made another trip to Africa before setting up, less adventurously, in medical practice near Portsmouth, in July 1882. His income had reached £300 a year by 1885, enabling him to marry the sister of one of his patients. Doyle had long written on the side and in 1886 he played around with stories centred on an ‘amateur private detec-tive’, called ‘J. Sherrinford Holmes’. The outcome was the Sherlock Holmes novella, A Study in Scarlet (1887). No top-drawer publisher would take it and it was eventually serialized as a Christmas giveaway in a magazine and then as what was called a ‘shilling shocker’ - pulp fiction for the masses:
This mystery of double murder in Utah and London caught the public taste, and Doyle followed it up with another Holmes adventure, The Sign of Four (1890). It too was well received, but the Holmes mania took off early in 1891 when Doyle submitted six short stories to the Strand Magazine. The editor realised ‘that here was the greatest short story writer since Edgar Allan Poe’ . These Sherlock Holmes stories were devised to correct ‘the great defect’ in current detective fiction – lack of logic. The Strand Stories were illustrated by the equally brilliant Sidney Paget, who supplied the detective with his trademark deerstalker and aquiline profile.
Doyle’s heart was never really in detective fiction. Nevertheless the stories were phenomenally popular in Britain and America and overshadowed everything else Doyle would ever write. In 1893, he killed the detective at the Reichenbach Falls. The Strand Magazine lost 20,000 subscribers overnight. There were protests from high places.
Much as he came to hate him, Holmes made Doyle rich, and by the end of the century he was one of the wealthiest of British men of letters.
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