Sherlock Holmes: The Real Life Models Sherlock Holmes
In a sea of fictional detectives that includes the greats, the near-greats, and a great many wannabes, the lighthouse that shines above them all is, of course, Sherlock Holmes. Created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and presented through the narration of the fictional Dr. Watson, Holmes is the most brilliant detective ever. His powers of observation seem supernatural until he utters the famous phrase, "Elementary, my dear Watson," and proceeds to enumerate the logical steps that have brought him to a prescient conclusion. The most innocuous detail can lead Holmes to profound revelations. But where did these amazing powers of deduction originate? Did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle make up Sherlock Holmes out of whole cloth, or did he have a model in mind when he created the great detective?
As June Thompson points out in her book Holmes and Watson, it's generally agreed that Sherlock Holmes's professional career started in 1877 and ended in 1903. Conan Doyle describes Holmes as tall and lean. He studied fencing at university (probably either Cambridge or Oxford&emdash;Conan Doyle never says and scholars disagree as to which would have been Holmes's likely alma mater), and he excelled at boxing, though his mind is his most effective weapon. He attended chemistry and anatomy classes at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in West Smithfield, where Watson was a medical student. Holmes spends much of his time conducting experiments in the science of detection, including the identification of footprint and bicycle tire impressions, handwriting and perfume analyses, and the classifications of paper stock and watermarks. The chemical experiments he conducts in his rooms at 221A Baker Street are often a source of consternation for his good friend and colleague, Dr. Watson. Holmes also possesses some knowledge of geology and botany, though as Julian Symons points out in Bloody Murder, Holmes is "egotistically proud of the vast fields of his ignorance," including matters of "literature, philosophy, and astronomy." (Given some of Holmes' informed observations relating to great philosophers and writers, his "ignorance" might be a bit exaggerated.) He's also an accomplished violinist, but in fits of depression he tends to "scrape carelessly at the fiddle thrown across his knee."
William Gillette plays Sherlock Holmes (CORBIS)
A master of disguise, Holmes can convincingly alter his size, age, or gender. Interestingly, the popular image of Holmes in his deerstalker cap with a drop-stem pipe in his mouth was not Conan Doyle's invention. Though Holmes wears a variety of hats, the word "deerstalker" never appears in the stories. His use of tobacco is present throughout, but the famous drop-step pipe is the handiwork of actor William Gillette who played Sherlock Holmes on the stage at the turn of the twentieth century. Gillette found it difficult to deliver his lines with a straight-stem pipe bobbing up and down in his mouth, so he adopted the drop-step, and the prop stuck with the character.
Holmes is known to be moody and antisocial, cloistering himself in his rooms for weeks on end, brooding and indulging in his infamous drug habit. He started using morphine and cocaine as a student and became dependent upon his "seven-percent solution" of cocaine, mainlining it three times a day at the startof The Sign of Four. Watson admonishes him for his drug use, and in the later stories Holmes apparently has kicked his habit. It should be pointed out, however, that Holmes's drug use was not illegal and would not be until the Dangerous Drug Acts of 1965 and 1967.
Frequently bored with life and what he called the "monotony of existence," Holmes "loathe[s] every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul." He has no lovers and would likely have been a difficult mate. Symons thinks that Conan Doyle deliberately ruled out romance because he believed that Holmes had "to be a man immune from ordinary human weaknesses and passions." Holmes has larger concerns.
Holmes is such a vivid character, readers can't help but wonder where the idea for him originated. Conan Doyle himself was a physician and appears closer to Watson's character. The physical descriptions of Watson even closely resemble the author, from the hale, broad-shouldered physique to the thick, walrusmustache. Peter Costello in his book, The Real World of Sherlock Holmes, theorizes that the inspiration for Holmes came late one evening in March 1885 when young Dr. Doyle returned to his home in Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth, to be greeted by a detective from the local police force. The police had received an anonymous letter regarding the suspicious death and hasty burial of a young man who had recently been a "resident patient" in Conan Doyle's home, and the detective had come to investigate. Conan Doyle was twenty-five years old at the time, just four years out of medical school, and he'd been struggling to build his practice. His earnings were meager for a professional man, and he felt that his station in life was already precarious, so the unexpected visit from the detective rattled him. According to Costello, this incident demonstrated to Conan Doyle "the narrow margin of fate that protects the innocent, the minor twist of evidence that could acquit or hang an accused." Conan Doyle had acted properly with the patient, who had died of meningitis, and after a courteous interview, the detective did not pursue the matter. But the inquiry had left its mark. One year later in the same room where the detective had questioned the young doctor, Conan Doyle started to work on the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet.
But was this local detective, whose visit Costello characterizes as "sinister," the model for Sherlock Holmes? Doubtful. In his autobiographical novel The Stark Munro Letters, Conan Doyle makes much of the incident but not of the detective. The models for Holmes were more likely grander figures whose style and panache were more in keeping with the world's greatest detective. But was there one model in particular who formed the mold from which Sherlock Holmes was cast? And was this model a real person or another author's fictional creation?
Literary scholars generally agree that the main inspiration for the character of Sherlock Holmes was Dr. Joseph Bell, Conan Doyle's professor of clinical surgery at Edinburgh University. A distinguished physician and educator, Bell was personal surgeon to Queen Victoria whenever she was in Scotland and honorary surgeon to Edward VII. Bell published several important medical textbooks as well as numerous journal articles, and for twenty-three years served as editor of the Edinburgh Medical Journal. As Martin Booth points out in his biography of Conan Doyle, The Doctor and the Detective, Bell was one of the most popular professors at the university and his lectures were usually packed.
According to Booth, Bell was "a sparse and lean man with the long and sensitive fingers of a musician, sharp grey eyes twinkling with shrewdness… an angular nose with a chin to match…and a high-pitched voice. " He was a "widely read amateur poet, a competent raconteur, a keen sportsman, a naturalist and a bird-watcher" as well as "a good shot." But his genius was as a diagnostician, for Bell believed that a doctor should use all his senses to find the cause of illness. "Do not just look at a patient, he advised, but feel him, probe him, listen to him, smell him."
Conan Doyle served as Bell's clerk at the Royal Infirmary's open clinic in 1878. Bell led students on rounds, dazzling them with his ability to deduce facts, both medical and personal, from seemingly unremarkable details. For instance, Bell stated that a female patient with soft hands but brawny arms was most certainly a laundress. In another instance, a man's address combined with the callused ball of his thumb indicated to Bell that the man was a sail-maker because he lived on a street near the docks and sail-makers typically have calloused thumbs from working needles through heavy canvas.
One day a female patient arrived at the clinic with muddy boots, carrying a child's coat, and a toddler in tow. She complained of a rash on her right hand. Bell concluded from the woman's accent that she was from Fife and that she had walked a certain road to get to the clinic because of the color of the clay on her boots. He believed that she had dropped off an older child on her way, because the coat she carried was too big for the toddler. As for the skin condition on her hand, he deduced that she was right-handed and went on to say that she worked at the linoleum factory in her town where she must have come into contact with the caustic chemicals used to make linoleum. One can imagine Bell turning to his clerk and smugly uttering, "Elementary, my dear Conan Doyle."
In A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle has his detective echoing Bell's method when he says that "by a man's finger-nails, by his coat sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser-knees, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs&emdash;by each of these things a man's calling is plainly revealed." The great detective uses this method throughout the Sherlock Holmes stories. In A Study in Scarlet, for example, Holmes explains to Dr. Watson the reasoning that led him to conclude that a man of their acquaintance had recently been in Afghanistan:
"Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded. Clearly in Afghanistan."
The parallels between Conan Doyle's creation and Bell in style and intellect are undeniable, but authors of fiction rarely model their characters on one source exclusively. Influences and inspiration usually come from several sources, and Sherlock Holmes is no exception. Rather than a thinly disguised portrait of the renowned surgeon of Edinburgh, Sherlock Holmes contains additional elements, both real and fictional.
A reporter asked Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1894 if he had been influenced by the work of Edgar Allen Poe. The creator of Sherlock Holmes replied, "Oh, immensely! His detective is the best detective in fiction."The reporter asked if that assessment included Sherlock Holmes.
"I make no exception…," Conan Doyle declared. "Dupin is unrivalled."
Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin is the amateur detective who appears in Poe's stories "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (1842), and "The Purloined Letter" (1844), predating Sherlock Holmes's debut in A Study in Scarlet by nearly fifty years. These tales have rightfully earned Poe the reputation as the father of the modern mystery. Other writers, such as Dickens, wrote about crime and criminal enterprises, but no one before Poe made the crime and its detection the central plot. Poe was the first to make the amateur detective a hero. (It would be some time until writers dared cast an actual policeman as a hero given society's fear and mistrust of the police.) He's also the creator of the "locked-room" puzzle, a plot device in which a murder is committed in a sealed room, a weapon is nowhere to be found, and there are no signs of forcible entry or exit. Although Poe was an American, he chose to make his hero a Frenchman and set his stories in Paris.
Like Holmes, Dupin carries on his investigations with a sidekick who serves as a stand-in for the reader, giving the detective the opportunity to voice his brilliant deductions. But while Sherlock Holmes uses his keen observations to uncover otherwise hidden truths, Dupin has the ability to replicate the thought processes of others and in effect, read minds. Julian Symons in Bloody Murder characterizes Dupin as "an emotionless reasoning machine." By contrast, Holmes is hardly emotionless, but he does avoid emotional entanglements and, as many critics have pointed out, is something of a misanthrope.
Portrait of Edgar Allen Poe
(AP/Wide World)
Interestingly, though Conan Doyle openly acknowledged his debt to Poe, Sherlock Holmes dismisses the American author's detective in one story when he tells Watson: "No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin… Now in my opinion, Dupin is a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friend's thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He has some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine."
It seems that Conan Doyle wanted to make it clear to his readers that his creation was only inspired by Dupin, not an Anglicized double. Like all authors, Conan Doyle was proud of what he created and wanted his originality acknowledged.
Holmes is also critical of another popular fictional detective, Emile Gaboriau's Inspector Lecoq. "Lecoq was a miserable bungler…," Holmes says. "…he had only one thing to recommend him and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so."
Perhaps Conan Doyle wasn't feeling particularly charitable on the day that he wrote those lines, but in truth Gaboriau is not a storyteller in the same class as Poe or Conan Doyle.
Gaboriau (1833-1873) was well-versed in the ways of the Sûreté (the French security police), the local police of Paris, and the courts, and this knowledge gives his work an air of authenticity. His police detective Lecoq first appears as a minor character in Gaboriau's early stories, probably because he feared that his readers weren't ready for a sympathetic policeman. Lecoq gradually comes to the fore partnered with an amateur sleuth, then finally takes center stage by himself in Monsieur Lecoq (1869).
Lecoq is described as "an old offender reconciled with the law," one who had been wrongly convicted. He is more observant than those around him, and like Holmes, uses these observations for his deductions. For instance, a hand impression in the snow reveals traces of a wedding band on the right hand, and the marks of heavy, dragging footsteps in the snow lead Lecoq to conclude that the suspect is a middle-aged man. (Middle age apparently was not as spry in the 19th century as it is today. Gaboriau himself died at the age of 40.) Lecoq is the first fictional detective to make plaster footprint casts and to use a striking clock as evidence of the time of a crime. Like Sherlock Holmes, he is a master of disguise with an amazingly mobile face that he can "mold… according to his will, as the sculptor molds clay for modeling." Julian Symons in Bloody Murder characterizes Lecoq as "self-seeking and vain, but… also honest."
This description could also fit the first and perhaps greatest real-life detective of all time, Eugène François Vidocq (1775-1857). It is no coincidence that Lecoq's name is reminiscent of Vidocq's. Gaboriau correctly admired his real-life model, for Vidocq was indeed larger than life and in many ways a character of his own creation.
Portrait of Eugene Francois Vidocq (CORBIS)
The son of a baker, Vidocq was imprisoned for forgery as a young man. He escaped, and continued to escape each time he was apprehended; earning Vidocq the reputation as France's slipperiest prisoner. No prison could hold him. Like Houdini, he could foil the most difficult locks. Finally, the frustrated authorities made him an offer. If he would spy on his fellow prisoners and report all information he gathered regarding ongoing crimes, his sentence would be reduced. Vidocq proved to be so adept, he was eventually offered his freedom if he continued to spy for the police.
Vidocq firmly believed that it took a criminal to catch one, and he saw many flaws in Paris police work. Napoleon was turning Paris into the jewel of Europe at the time, building monuments and renovating entire neighborhoods. But what was the use of turning Paris into a showplace if no one would visit because of the appalling crime rate? The emperor ordered his police minister Joseph Fouché to clean up the crime problem. Fouché allowed Vidocq to assemble a squadron of former thieves, embezzlers, and street toughs who would use their wiles to penetrate the underworld to not only solve crimes, but also sometimes prevent them. Vidocq's band of criminals turned officers was named the Sûreté and was the basis for what would become the modern Sûreté.
The Sûreté was soon the most effective police agency in all of France, perhaps in all the world. Before Vidocq individual police precincts were autonomous agencies; they did not share information or pool resources. One did not have to be a dastardly genius to figure out that by moving from precinct to precinct, one could avoid apprehension. Vidocq changed all that by keeping meticulous records and making that information available to all precincts. He also made strides in footprint, handwriting and document analyses and even suggested methods for the use of fingerprints. But first and foremost, Vidocq was a hands-on investigator who frequently disguised himself to gather intelligence from the criminal class. He maintained two personas for years&emdash;an old man and a street thug. It was said that Vidocq could alter the perception of his height by dress and attitude.
Vidocq was also a master at public relations, and some accused him of instigating crimes so that he could earn high praise for solving them. Oddly, for a man whose trade was stealth and disguise, he was something of a social butterfly. He dined out every night. Among his close friends were the great authors Honoré Balzac and Victor Hugo. Vidocq was said to have been the model for Balzac's Inspector Vautrin in Le Père Goriot and the inspiration for both Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert in Hugo's Les Misèrables. Vidocq's memoirs, which were most likely ghostwritten, are filled with fabulous tales of all forms of skullduggery foiled by Vidocq's brilliant detection and valiant rescues. In all probability these tales were highly embellished, and in some cases complete fiction. But Vidocq's Mémoires can hardly detract from his accomplishments and innovations.
Vidocq clearly was the primary model for Gaboriau's Lecoq and Poe's Dupin. Why else would Poe have made his detective French? Most likely Conan Doyle was well aware of Vidocq's renown, but whether his inspiration for Holmes came second-hand from Poe and Gaboriau or directly from Vidocq's Mémoires as well as other writings about him, there is no question that Sherlock Holmes's lineage stretches back to Vidocq.
The particulars of Sherlock Holmes&emdash;his use of deductive reasoning, elaborate disguises, and scientific analysis to solve crimes&emdash;were the trademarks of Vidocq, but unlike Poe's Dupin and Gaboriau's Lecoq, there is nothing particularly French about Holmes. Though moody and often mysterious, at the core Holmes is an Englishman, and for that aspect of his character, Conan Doyle most definitely had an Anglo-Saxon model.
To a large extent all fictional heroes mirror their authors, and Sherlock Holmes is no exception. His personality and penchant for astounding revelations were borrowed from Dr. Bell; his use of disguises, his devotion to the "chase," and his experimentation into the science of detection came from Vidocq and his fictional progeny, Dupin and Lecoq. But Holmes's righteous desire to uncover the truth no matter how difficult came from Conan Doyle himself.
Arthur Conan Doyle near the end of his career
(AP/Wide World)
Throughout his life, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle investigated crimes as an amateur sleuth. Motivated by a strong sense that justice had not been done by the authorities, he undertook these investigations with vigor and resolve, publishing his findings in the hope that the falsely accused would be vindicated. One of Conan Doyle's most well known crusades was the case of George Edalji, an Anglo-Indian solicitor, who in 1903 was convicted of maiming livestock in the farm country surrounding the village of Great Wyrley. Edalji was serving a seven-year sentence when Conan Doyle took up his cause.
Suspicion fell on Edalji when the local police started to receive disturbing letters taking credit for the animal mutilations. In the letters Edalji was identified as one of the perpetrators: "…It is not true that we always do it when the moon is young and the one Edalji killed on April 11th was a full moon night…"
Edalji was investigated and became the prime suspect in July 1903 after the police received its most alarming letter to date. For some reason the unknown writer changed person in this installment from "we" to "they," but the threat is clear. "There will be merry times in Wyrley in November," the letter states, "when they start on little girls, for they will do twenty wenches like the horses before next March." Terrified that their daughters would be slaughtered like the horses and sheep that had already been attacked, the community felt it had to act, and Edalji became the target of their fears as well as their long-held prejudices.
Edalji's father, the Rev. Shapuji Edalji, who had originally been a Parsee, had emigrated from Bombay and married an Englishwoman whose uncle, an Anglican clergyman, arranged for his post in Wyrley. Many of the locals resented having a "black" vicar with a white wife and half-caste children. They felt that true Englishmen should be spreading religion to the "blacks" of the world, not the other way around.
George Edalji, the Reverend's son, was a solicitor with a solid practice in Birmingham. His success further rankled the bigoted locals who viewed this slight, frail man with oddly bulging eyes as physically as well as socially inferior. After the eighth incident of animal mutilation, the police went to the Reverend's house and searched for evidence of George Edalji's involvement. They found a pair of mud-encrusted boots, a pair of similarly mud-stained trousers, an old housecoat that appeared to have spots of blood and horse saliva, a coat and a waistcoat that contained horse hairs that matched the latest victimized animal, and a set of razors which were "…wet and one had a dark stain."
The newspapers of the time dubbed George Edalji the "English Dreyfus" because like the Jewish French soldier, Edalji was the victim of prejudice and dubious written evidence. On first meeting Edalji, Conan Doyle had serious doubts that he could ever have committed these crimes. In an analysis worthy of Sherlock Holmes and Bell, Dr. Conan Doyle could see that the man's eyesight was severely impaired. A specialist confirmed that Edalji had "eight dioptres of myopia" and no prescription lens could adequately improve his vision. Upon visiting the crime scenes, some of which were difficult to enter through bushes and briar patches, Conan Doyle became convinced that a physically unfit person with Edalji's impaired vision could not possibly have negotiated these muddy fields in the dark.
Piece by piece, Conan Doyle evaluated the evidence that the police had gathered and discredited their theories. The mud on Edalji's boots and trousers was black while the earth in the field where the last horse was maimed was yellow clay. The dark spot on the razor was found to be rust not blood, and the supposed traces of blood and horse saliva on his clothing were in fact food stains. The police surgeon nevertheless maintained that the hairs found on Edalji's clothing did come from the eighth maimed horse.
Though Conan Doyle largely discredited the case against Edalji, the police refused to release him. It was at this point that Conan Doyle himself then began to receive threatening letters. In one of two that he received in May 1907, the writer says,
"…Desperate men have sworn their Bible oath to scoop out your liver and kidneys… and there are those who say you have not long to live. I know from a detective of Scotland Yard that if you write to Gladstone [the Home Secretary] and say you find Edalji is guilty after all, and you were mistaken and promise to do no more for him, they will make you a lord next year. Is it not better to be a lord than to run the risk of losing kidneys and liver?..."
The police insisted that these threats had come from Edalji himself. Faced with such a ridiculous proposition, Conan Doyle had no choice but to do what Sherlock Holmes would do&emdash;find the real villain.
In the course of his investigation, Conan Doyle learned that similar vindictive anonymous letters had been sent to the police eight years before the ones in 1903. These letters were written in the same tone and style as the later ones &endash; as well as the ones Conan Doyle received. After carefully inspecting all the letters, he theorized that they were written by two people&emdash;one educated, the other hotheaded and semiliterate. He also took note of the fact that letters from both periods contained invective against the headmaster of the Walsall Grammar School. Conan Doyle felt that at least one of the culprits had attended Walsall and that he was away during the lull between 1895 and 1903.
As Conan Doyle wrote of his investigation, "My first step in the enquiry lay at Walsall. I must enquire whether there had been at the school, during the early nineties, any boy who (a) had a particular grudge against the headmaster, (b) was innately vicious, and (c) subsequently went to sea? I took this obvious step. And I got on the track of my man at once."
He visited the headmaster at Walsall and asked if there were any former students who fit these three criteria. The headmaster immediately pinpointed a young man named Royden Sharp who had been a poor student and a disciplinary problem and who had set out to sea as an apprentice in 1895. Conan Doyle delved further into Sharp's background and discovered that the young man had apprenticed at a butcher's shop immediately after his time at Walsall and that he had worked on an Irish cattle boat. As Peter Costello says in his book, The Real World of Sherlock Holmes, Royden Sharp "knew how to approach and handle animals: a vital talent… for a cattle slasher." Conan Doyle also found a witness who claimed that Sharp had shown her a large horse-lancet, a blade specially designed for slaughtering cattle, the same kind of blade that had been used to maim the eighth horse.
The evidence overwhelmingly pointed to Royden Sharp, but Conan Doyle never accused him publicly. Instead, he published papers proving Edalji's innocence. But the authorities ignored the findings, staunchly maintaining that Edalji was the culprit. Edalji was released from prison after serving three of his seven years. Eventually he was allowed to practice law again and lived to 85. Conan Doyle was never able to uncover the identity of Sharp's accomplice in writing the letters, the "educated one." He had considered Sharp's older brother who had moved to California, but could not assemble adequate evidence. Later students of the case presented the possibility that George Edalji's brother Horace could have been involved. That contention was never proven conclusively.
Douglas Wilmer as Holmes (CORBIS)
As Martin Booth points out in his biography of Conan Doyle, The Doctor and the Detective, the author and his creation shared many of the same characteristics. They were both tall and fit, and they both boxed. They both enjoyed a "good joke." They were both pack rats who kept untidy quarters where documents and books were piled high. Each had one brother. Both Sherlock Holmes and his creator were agnostics. But these kinds of similarities are to be expected between an author and his hero. In every hero there is always a large part of the author's personality. What's interesting about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is that he modeled himself on the character as much as he modeled the character on himself, taking up cases and causes as Holmes would. No doubt, the yearning to be a person like Sherlock Holmes was always there within him, but it took the success of his stories to bring it out.
Bibliography
Booth, Martin. The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1997.Costello, Peter. The Real World of Sherlock Holmes: True Crimes Investigated by Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Carroll & Graf. 1991.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The True Crime Files of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Berkley. 2001.
Fido, Martin. The World of Sherlock Holmes: The Facts and Fiction Behind the World's Greatest Detective. Holbrook, MA: Adams Media. 1998.
Harrison, Michael. The World of Sherlock Holmes. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. 1975.
Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder. New York: Penguin. 1972.
Thomson, June. Holmes and Watson. New York: Carroll & Graf. 1995.
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