Sherlock Holmes E-Book

Nick Rennison

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Ingenious, charming, informative and full of delight. - The Times Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography blends what we already know of the great sleuth's career with carefully documented social history to answer the questions admirers have long puzzled over. Nick Rennison reveals for the first time Holmes's influence on the political events of late-nineteenth-century England and his connections to the British criminal underworld. It also brings to light his close friendships with key figures of the day, including Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud; and exposes the truth about his cocaine use.

Leseprobe

Nick Rennison works as an editor, writer and bookseller. His books include a poetry anthology, a short study of Sigmund Freud and two guides to fiction, The Good Reading Guide (6th edition, 2003) and The Good Reading Guide to Crime Fiction (2nd edition, 2003). He has been fascinated by the life and career of Sherlock Holmes since reading about him as a child.

‘Delightful and cleverly constructed … great fun.’Lesley McDowell, Sunday Herald

‘Wherever Watson’s narratives fought shy of naming names, Nick Rennison imaginatively supplies the long-suppressed details.’Christopher Fowler, Independent On Sunday

‘Rennison plays wonderfully with ideas based on Doyle’s fiction … In fusing historical fact with his imagination, Rennison mirrors Doyle’s own method.’James W. Wood, Scotland on Sunday

‘Deserves to win readers beyond the serried ranks of core Sherlockians … Rennison is in his element … Delightful.’Andrew Lycett, Literary Review

Copyright

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2005 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This paperback edition published by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd, in 2006.

Copyright © Nick Rennison 2005

The moral right of Nick Rennison to be identified as the author ofthis work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs andPatents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the priorpermission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. The publishers willbe pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes broughtto their attention at the earliest opportunity.

First eBook Edition: January 2010

ISBN: 978-1-848-87779-5

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House

26-27 Boswell Street

London WCIN 3JZ

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO

EVE, WITH LOVE AND THANKS,

AND TO THE MEMORY OF

NORAH ALLENBY (1916–2005)

Contents

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. ‘My ancestors were country squires’

2. ‘This inhospitable town’

3. ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive’

4. ‘He is the Napoleon of crime’

5. ‘You should publish an account of the case’

6. ‘I’ve had to do with fifty murderers’

7. ‘The many causes célébres and sensational trials in which I have figured’

8. ‘I should never marry …’

9. ‘I travelled for two years in Tibet’

10. ‘I then passed through Persia …’

11. ‘I hear of Sherlock everywhere’

12. ‘Occasional indiscretions of his own’

13. ‘A small farm upon the downs’

14. ‘There’s an east wind coming’

15. ‘The greatest mystery for last’

Select Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FIRST AND FOREMOST MY THANKS must go to my editor at Atlantic, Angus MacKinnon, who had the original idea for this book and who approached me to see if I would be interested in writing it. His suggestion launched me on a very enjoyable investigation into the detective’s life and career. Over the last two years, friends and family have been very tolerant of my growing obsession with Holmes and many have been kind enough to offer their own ideas and thoughts on the great man. Travis Elborough drew my attention to several books and newspaper articles about Holmes that I had not seen and introduced me to a study of Moriarty that had escaped my notice. Hugh Pemberton was one of the first people to provide a sympathetic audience for my thoughts about Holmes’s role in the events of late Victorian England and his enthusiastic response was much appreciated. Allan Dodd bought me drinks at the Sherlock Holmes pub in central London and listened patiently as I described, in unnecessarily lengthy detail, my difficulties in sorting fact from legend in Holmes’s life. Paul Skinner sent me information about Charles Augustus Howell which I would not otherwise have seen. Susan Osborne, Dawn Pomroy, Richard Shephard, Andrew Holgate, Gordon Kerr and Kathy Crocker have all shown a consistent interest in the project and have, possibly without realizing it, provided me with encouragement to finish it.

At Atlantic, Bonnie Chiang, Clara Farmer and Toby Mundy have all been extraordinarily encouraging and supportive and I could not have wished for a better publisher. My thanks also go to Celia Levett whose sympathetic copy-editing has added much to the text and to Mike Levett whose indexing skills are much appreciated.

Back in the 1960s my parents owned Penguin editions of several of the volumes of Holmes short stories and it was through these books that I was first introduced to the delights of Dr Watson’s narratives. I would like to thank my parents for this introduction and also for the support they provided, forty years later, during the writing of this book. My greatest thanks go to my partner, Eve Gorton, who has spent more time in the company of Sherlock Holmes than she ever expected that she would. She has often been a greater believer in this book than its author and it is dedicated to her.

INTRODUCTION

THE YEAR IS 1895. London is swathed in dense yellow fog. As the greasy clouds swirl up the streets and condense in oily drops on windowpanes, two men peer out from rented rooms at 221B Baker Street. One is tall and gaunt with a narrow face, hawklike nose and high, intellectual brow. The other, shorter and stockier, is square-jawed and moustachioed. Outside, the smog envelops a vast city that holds a thousand sinister secrets but inside is a haven of comfort and bachelor domesticity. Suddenly, out of the surrounding gloom, a hansom cab emerges. A young woman descends from it, and looks up briefly at the two men at the window before ringing the doorbell of 221B. Another client, with a tale of mystery and potential danger, has come to consult Sherlock Holmes. The game is once again afoot, and Holmes and Dr Watson will soon be in pursuit of the truth about another dark story from the hidden metropolis.

Few individuals in English history are as well known as Sherlock Holmes. From the moment in 1887 when, in a narrative published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for that year, his colleague and friend Dr John Watson revealed the detective’s extraordinary powers of analysis and deduction, he captured the imagination of the public. As Watson continued to act as Holmes’s Boswell, recording more of his exploits and adventures in magazine articles and books, his fame spread. Watson’s accounts have been translated into dozens of languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish, from Armenian to Vietnamese. Students of Swahili can read Mbwa wa Familia ya Baskerville. Those fluent in Slovak can turn the pages of Pes Baskervillský. There are versions of the stories in Esperanto, in Pitman’s shorthand and, of course, in Braille. There is even a translation of ‘The Dancing Men’ into the code that plays such a central role in that story.

Dramatized versions of Holmes’s life began to appear in the 1890s and have continued to be performed to the present day. On any given day in 2005 an amateur dramatic society somewhere in England or America will be staging a play in which Sherlock Holmes makes an appearance. He has been the subject of hundreds of films from the early silent era to the present day. Sherlock Holmes – The Musical by Leslie Bricusse, screenwriter of the Dr Dolittle movie, opened in London in 1989. (Admittedly, it closed almost immediately and has rarely been seen on the stage since.) There has been a ballet called The Great Detective, produced at Sadler’s Wells in 1953, and at least one opera has required a tenor Holmes and a bass Watson to sing feelingly of their mutually rewarding partnership and the joys of detective work.

Although Holmes has been dead for more than seventy years, people still write from around the world to ask for his help. Until recently Abbey House, the headquarters of the Abbey National Building Society, which stands on the site of his one-time lodgings in Baker Street, employed a secretary to answer the letters that were delivered to the address. Since his death in 1929, a growing army of Holmes scholars has produced a library of theses and dissertations on his life and work. In half the countries of the world there are Sherlock Holmes societies, their members dedicated to the minute examination of his life and work: the Singular Society of the Baker Street Dozen in Calgary, Canada; the Copenhagen Speckled Gang; Le Cercle Littéraire de l’Escarboucle Bleue in Toulouse; the Tokyo Nonpareil Club; the Ural Holmesian Society in Ekaterinburg; the Illustrious Clients of Indianapolis; the Friends of Irene Adler in Cambridge, Massachussetts; the Six Napoleons of Baltimore. All these and many more are devoted exclusively to the study of Sherlock Holmes. Even writers of fiction have taken the basic facts of his life and expanded them into novels and short stories of varying degrees of credibility.

Like other emblematic figures from the nation’s past – Henry VIII, Robin Hood, Winston Churchill – he has been seized upon by the heritage industry. Pubs and hotels are named after him. Tours of Sherlock Holmes’s London wind daily through the streets of the capital. Holmes memorabilia crowd the shelves of gift shops and tourist boutiques. Should you feel so inclined, it is possible to buy silver statuettes of Holmes and Watson, Sherlock Holmes fridge magnets, Hound of the Baskervilles coffee mugs, a 221B Baker Street board game and a Sherlock Holmes plastic pipe designed to provide the authentic Holmes aura without actually encouraging smoking. There is even a Sherlock Holmes teddy bear dressed in an Inverness cape and deerstalker hat.

Yet Holmes himself remains a curiously elusive figure. Apart from a few monographs on arcane subjects (types of tobacco ash; the polyphonic motets of the Renaissance composer Orlande de Lassus; ciphers and secret writings) as well as a manual on beekeeping, he published nothing under his own name. In one narrative (‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’) Holmes claims to have published two short monographs on ears in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute but a trawl through nineteenth-century back numbers of that periodical suggests that he was referring to works that he had merely planned rather than completed. Two narratives of his work, which he wrote in the first person, were published in The Strand Magazine in 1926, three years before his death. Otherwise the record is blank. His preferred means of communication was the telegram, more impermanent in his time than the e-mail is today, and no irrefutably authentic letters written by him survive.

For any students of Holmes’s life and work, the alpha and the omega of their research remain the texts written by his colleague and friend Dr John H. Watson. There are fifty-six short narratives and four longer ones, which all scholars and Holmesians agree are the work of Watson or (in two instances) Holmes. There are a few texts (‘The Case of the Man Who Was Wanted’, ‘The Story of the Lost Special’) that some commentators wish to claim for the canon but their status remains disputed. There are also those unidentified papers, which once, almost certainly, existed but which seem to have disappeared. ‘Somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox & Company at Charing Cross,’ Watson wrote in ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’, ‘there is a travel-worn and battered tin dispatchbox with my name upon the lid. It is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases to illustrate the curious problems which Mr Sherlock Holmes had at various times to examine.’ Cox & Company’s building in Charing Cross was destroyed in the London Blitz and, if there were still papers in the vault, a decade after Watson’s death, they were lost in the conflagration.

It is always worth remembering just what a small proportion of Holmes’s cases is recorded in Watson’s surviving narratives. In The Hound of the Baskervilles Holmes refers in passing to the ‘five hundred cases of capital importance which I have handled’. The events in the Baskerville case took place more than a decade before Holmes’s supposed retirement and, as we shall see, more than thirty years before his actual and final retirement from all involvement in criminal investigation. Those thirty years saw well over a thousand further cases. From a total of approximately 1,800, Watson gave us accounts of sixty. In other words, only between 3 and 4 per cent of the extant cases are recorded by the doctor.

Yet the primary source for Holmes’s life remains the work of Watson and, as Holmes scholars have long known, Watson’s narratives, for a variety of reasons, have to be interpreted with care. Often Holmes himself muddied the waters by misleading Watson, providing him with false information and spurious facts that merely sent the doctor off in pursuit of red herrings. Often Watson deliberately obscures the truth, hiding real characters under pseudonyms or disguising towns and cities beneath invented names. Sometimes he is quite simply wrong. It is easy to forget the circumstances in which Watson wrote his narratives. Although, as he points out in ‘The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist’, ‘I have preserved very full notes of these cases,’ and clearly he must have had his notes beside him as he wrote, the full stories that he handed over to Arthur Conan Doyle for publication were not produced until years, sometimes decades, after the events they describe. ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’, for instance, shows Holmes investigating the macabre deaths in the Tregennis family whilst he was holidaying in Cornwall with Watson in the spring of 1897 but it was not written up in full until 1910. In the case of the investigation known as ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’, Watson is recalling events from 1903 but the story was not published for another twenty years, appearing in The Strand Magazine for March 1923. In these circumstances it is not surprising that Watson occasionally slipped up. Even the most egregious errors – setting one of the stories at a time when Holmes was assumed to be dead, for example – become understandable to a degree.

Despite the difficulties imposed by the shortage of authentic records, few Victorian lives deserve study as much as does that of Sherlock Holmes. And a Victorian he undoubtedly was. Although he was only in his late forties when Victoria died, he remained rooted in the world into which he was born and in which he grew up. We think we know the Victorians. In contrast to our contradictory selves, grappling with the complexities of modernity and post-modernity, they seem the products of a simpler era. Frozen in the clichéd poses we have imagined for them, the Victorians appear immune to the fears and anxieties that trouble us. Staring at us from sepia-tinted photographs, they look certain of the world and their own place in it in a way that we cannot hope to match. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Anyone born, like Holmes, in the 1850s and growing up in the late Victorian era, lived through a period of intellectual and social upheaval just as dramatic and threatening as any the twentieth century was to offer. Religious beliefs were crumbling under the assault of new theories of man and his place in the world. The British Empire, on which the sun was supposed never to set, may have appeared to be everlasting but the seeds of its ultimate collapse had already been sown. Germany and America had emerged as its competitors on the world stage. New ideologies – socialism, communism, feminism – began to shake the foundations of state and family on which Victorian confidence and security were built. Scratching the surface of Victorian complacency soon reveals the underlying angst about a world that was changing rapidly and unpredictably.

The ambiguities of Holmes’s character mirror those of the age in which he came to maturity. Highly rational and committed to the idea of progress, he was haunted by darker dreams and more troubling emotions. Drawn into the service of an empire that he knew, intellectually at least, had already passed its zenith, he remained steadfast in his commitment to it. Yet, even as he fought to preserve stability and the solid values of the age, he himself was driven by a lifelong search for change, stimulation and excitement. His own innermost beliefs – social, aesthetic, scientific – often clashed with those that he outwardly professed. To follow Holmes through the twists and turns of his career in the 1880s and 1890s is to watch the Victorian era battling with its own demons.

CHAPTER ONE

‘MY ANCESTORS WERE COUNTRY SQUIRES’

THE VILLAGE OF HUTTON LE MOORS lies on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, a dozen miles from the small town of Pickering. Despite the onslaught of the traffic passing along what is now the A170 to Scarborough, the heart of the village has changed surprisingly little in the past century and a half. Thirty or forty slateroofed cottages, many of them dating back to the seventeenth century, straggle along both sides of the road. A pub, the Green Man, and the village church of St Chad still provide the central focuses for village life. Half a mile beyond the older cottages, on the edge of the village, stands a small estate of 1950s council houses. They were built on land that the council bought after the Second World War from a Bradford mill-owning family by the name of Binns. Until the mid-1920s, Hutton Hall, a sixteenth-century manor house, stood on the site. Photographs of the house, which appeared in Country Life in May 1922, show a half-timbered frontage studded with mullioned windows and surmounted by the elaborate chimneys so typical of the period. Shots of the interior reveal impressive oak panelling and a large fireplace, adorned with the initials RH and dating back to the time of Elizabeth I, all of which were still in existence when the Binns family lived there. Here, on 17 June 1854, William Sherlock Holmes was born.

Holmes, as recorded by Watson, makes very few remarks about his family and upbringing but those few are clear and unequivocal enough. ‘My ancestors,’ he tells Watson in ‘The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’, ‘were country squires, who seem to have led much the same life as is natural to their class.’ He tells us nothing more. In fact Holmes’s father, William Scott Holmes, inherited the remains of a substantial estate in north Yorkshire.

There had been Holmeses living in that part of Yorkshire for centuries. As far back as 1219 an Urkell de Holmes is mentioned in the records of York Assizes and, by the late Middle Ages, the Holmes family had risen from the ranks of yeomen farmers to the lesser gentry. The Walter Holmes from Kirkbymoorside, eight miles from Pickering, who is recorded as fighting with the Yorkist forces of Edward IV at the Battle of Towton in 1461, is almost certainly a direct antecedent of Sherlock and Mycroft. Walter had chosen the right side in the Wars of the Roses and he prospered as a consequence. Several years after the battle he was knighted by Edward and the family went up another rung on the social ladder. Walter survived the transition from a Yorkist monarchy to the reign of the Tudors with his status intact (he seems to have been one of the few Yorkshire baronets to have supported Henry VII before the Battle of Bosworth).

His grandson, Ralph, was to raise the Holmes profile even higher. In the mid-1530s, Sir Ralph, one of the century’s more opportunist converts to Protestantism, was in a position to benefit substantially from the dissolution of the monasteries. As the great landholdings of monastic establishments such as Fountains Abbey and Rievaulx Abbey came under the hammer, Sir Ralph and people like him were poised to pounce. Much of the property owned by Fountains Abbey was sold, at a knockdown price, to entrepreneur Sir Richard Gresham. However, Sir Ralph Holmes, an associate of Gresham, received his share of the spoils in the form of an estate at Hutton le Moors as well as other landholdings dotted around the Vale of York and the fringes of the moors. It was Sir Ralph, made prosperous by his part in the despoliation of monastic property, who built Hutton Hall, the house in which, 300 years later, his most famous descendant was to be born.

Under the later Tudors and Stuarts the family made a point of avoiding the religious and political controversies of the time. Sir Stamford Holmes was a member of successive Elizabethan and Jacobean parliaments but an undistinguished one. There are records of only two contributions by him to their proceedings. In one he intervened in a debate on shipping convicts to Barbados to suggest that the colonies in New England might also be a good destination for lawbreakers. He was reminded by a fellow MP that, since felons were being sent there as indentured labourers, they were already being used for this purpose. In the other he asked the Speaker whether the doors of St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, where Parliament met at the time, could be closed since he and other members were feeling the draught.

By the time of the confrontation between king and Parliament in the 1630s and 1640s, however, even the most lackadaisical of MPs and landowners were forced to choose sides. Although Sherlock Holmes, ascetic and intellectual, would probably be classified as one of life’s Roundheads, his ancestors chose the king’s cause and remained firm Royalists throughout the Civil War. Sir Symonds Holmes, grandson of Sir Stamford and great-great-grandson of Sir Ralph, fought with Prince Rupert’s cavalry at the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644. The family suffered for its loyalty although the Holmeses were not forced, like so many others, into exile during Cromwell’s rule.

At the Restoration, monarchists such as the Holmes who had kept the faith stood to prosper. Sir Richmond Holmes, son of Sir Symonds, moved south to London in the 1670s after his father’s death and thereafter spent more time on the fringes of Charles II’s court than he did on his Yorkshire properties. In attempting to carve out a career there, he began the slow slide into indebtedness that plagued the family for generations to come. Friendship with the likes of the dissolute Earl of Rochester, poet and philanderer, was an expensive indulgence and, by the time of his death in 1687, Sir Richmond owed large sums to half the moneylenders in the capital.

The eighteenth century saw a continuous decline in the fortunes of the family. As one scapegrace spendthrift succeeded another, the estate was sold bit by bit until only the old manor house at Hutton le Moors, first built in the 1550s, was left. Sir Selwyn Holmes, reputed to be an associate of Sir Francis Dashwood and a member of the infamous Hell-Fire Club, was the most notorious of a succession of Holmes ancestors who more resembled Sir Hugo Baskerville than they did their intellectual descendant, Sherlock. Sir Seymour Holmes, Sherlock’s great-grandfather, the last of these roistering Georgian roués who squandered most of the family inheritance, died of an apoplexy in 1810. He was succeeded in the baronetcy by his fourteen-year-old son. Sherlock Holmes’s grandfather, Sheridan Holmes, inherited little but debts and the family name. Then at Harrow, the school that the Holmes males had attended for generations, the young Sheridan was in no position to improve the family fortunes but sufficient funds were eventually found to see him through Christ Church, Oxford, and to allow him later to travel abroad. (He seems to have departed Oxford without a degree.) It was on foreign shores, if nothing else, that he was to meet his future wife.

The only exotic influence in his family tree claimed by Holmes is his grandmother, the woman Sir Sheridan Holmes married, who was ‘the sister of Vernet, the French artist’. ‘Art in the blood,’ he goes on to say, ‘is liable to take the strangest forms.’ The Vernets were a tribe of French painters, who produced distinguished artists in several generations. The patriarch of the family was Antoine Vernet (1689–1753), several of whose more than twenty children became artists. One, Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714–89), was so committed to his art that he arranged to be lashed to a ship’s mast during a storm at sea so that he could observe the effects of light and turbulent water at close hand. The most famous of the Vernets, whose youngest sister married Holmes’s paternal grandfather, was the grandson of Claude-Joseph, one Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet (1789–1863), known to his familt as Horace. Best known as a painter of scenes of military valour and derring-do, Horace was at the heart of the Parisian art establishment, serving as president of the French Academy from 1828 to 1834. His sister, Marie-Claude, was born in Paris in 1798. She was just nineteen when she met the Englishman who was to take her across the Channel to a life she could not have imagined as she was growing up in Napoleonic France.

We do not know the circumstances in which Sheridan Holmes, Sherlock’s paternal grandfather, first encountered his wife to be. He was certainly in Paris for several months in the spring and summer of 1818 – a few surviving letters confirm this. It may well be that Sheridan harboured artistic ambitions and, in order to pursue them, travelled to Paris where he was introduced to one of the extensive Vernet clan. The marriage took place in London at St George’s, Hanover Square, in the early summer of the following year. The entry in the church’s marriage register, with the bride’s name misspelled as Verner, still exists. Holmes owed more to his French ancestry than he ever admitted. It is worth noting that the composer Mendelssohn, who knew the Vernet family well, said of Horace that his mind was so orderly that it was like a well-stocked bureau in which he had but to open a drawer to find what he needed. He added that Horace’s powers of observation were so great that a single glance at a model was sufficient to fix the details of his or her appearance in his memory.

Sherlock’s father, William Scott Holmes, the eldest of three children, was born in Hutton le Moors on 26 November 1819. Comparison of his date of birth and the date of his parents’ marriage immediately reveals that Marie-Claude must have been pregnant with him as she walked down the aisle at St George’s. Two further children followed in rapid succession, Maria in 1821, and Emily in 1822, whereupon Sir Sheridan, who had probably suffered from ill health most of his life, went into a decline and died of consumption in the autumn of 1823 at the age of only twenty-seven. He was succeeded by his four-year-old-son, Sherlock Holmes’s father. Marie-Claude, still only in her mid-twenties and far from her Parisian birthplace, had to cope with her abrupt widowhood, living in an ancient and draughty house on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors with three young children to bring up alone. The new young baronet was educated, like so many of his forebears, at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, but he went one better than his father and graduated with a second-class degree in Classics in the spring of 1841. We do not know how he passed the next four years of his life. Perhaps, like his father, he travelled on the Continent but, if he did, he found no bride waiting for him in Paris. His own choice for a wife was made much nearer home.

On 12 July 1845, William Scott Holmes married Violet Mycroft at Hutton le Moors in the parish church of St Chad. The Mycrofts were another family of impoverished Yorkshire gentry who had lived at Marton Hall near the village of Nun Marton for centuries. There was little to distinguish them from dozens of other families of their class. The branch from which Violet descended had been clergymen for generations. Her father, Robert Mycroft, who married the couple, was rector of St Chad’s and we can assume that William and Violet had known one another since childhood. Robert’s grandfather, George Riley Mycroft, who was rector of Lastingham in the North Riding of Yorkshire for more than fifty years, gained some small renown as the author of The Beauties of Creation: or a New Moral System of Natural History, Displayed in the Most Curious Quadrupeds, Birds, Insects and Flowers of Northern England, published in York in 1727. George Mycroft, despite a desire to corral the natural world into his own moral view of the universe, was a scrupulous observer of the creatures he saw in his moorland parish and as a result his book was still being read at the end of the century. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, makes a brief reference to ‘Mycroft’s remarkable acuity of observation’ in a letter of 1791. Violet herself had been born at Skelton, just outside York, where her father was then curate, on 11 May 1823.

Sherlock Holmes once remarked, ‘I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors, and that such a sudden turn to good or evil stands for some strong influence which came into the line of his pedigree. The person becomes, as it were, the epitome of the history of his own family.’ It is difficult to believe that, if he looked back at his own pedigree, he could gain much support for his theory. The life of Sir Symonds Holmes, the seventeenth-century ancestor who fought for the king in the Civil War, conducted experiments in microscopy (he was one of the first subscribers to Robert Hooke’s ground-breaking work Micrographia in 1665) and, in the 1660s, became an early member of the Royal Society, provides some evidence for an ancestral interest in the sciences. This link is strengthened by the fact that his mother’s great-grandfather found such fascination in the natural history of the North of England. It would later be reflected in his own scientific bent. Otherwise the centuries-long procession of Holmes’s ancestors differed little from many other families from the lower echelons of the English gentry.

Sherlock Holmes was the second child of his parents, arriving seven years after his brother Mycroft, born in 1847. Where did the name Sherlock originate? Conan Doyle, when in the mood to fuel the fantasy that he had invented Holmes, would claim that he had borrowed the name from a cricketer of the 1870s and 1880s, but the truth is more mundane. Sherlock, like Mycroft, was a family name. One of his great-uncles on his mother’s side had been Joseph Sherlock, an eighteenth-century lawyer in the town of Pickering, and the name had already been used for several children over two generations. The practice of using these family surnames as first names was a common one. There is an exact parallel in the naming of Holmes’s friend and agent, Arthur Conan Doyle, who took his middle name from his great-uncle, Michael Conan, a well-known editor and journalist.

In the seven years that separated the births of the two Holmes brothers, Violet Holmes – if the veiled hints that survive in a handful of letters are to be trusted – had twice been pregnant and twice lost the child through a miscarriage. In such matters, Victorians of her class used euphemisms more often than direct language but the references to her ‘most delicate state of health’ and her ‘two sad losses’ seem fairly clear. If we assume that Sherlock Holmes was born after his mother had lost two previous babies, it would explain much about his early childhood. We have little evidence on which to base speculation about his first years of life but what there is does suggest that he proved an anxiety to his family from the first. That anxiety can only have been increased by Violet’s past history. A fragment of a letter that survives in the Vernet family archives in France, dated 21 November 1854, is almost certainly from Marie-Claude Holmes, in her Yorkshire exile, to her brother Horace, and the ‘petit enfant’ who is described as ‘faible’ is probably the five-month-old Sherlock. If Sherlock was ‘faible’ in his first year of life, he soon became stronger. There is no evidence that, physically, he was anything other than robust but from his early childhood onwards his parents worried about the mental and emotional development of their younger son.

In the 1880s, Watson described his room-mate’s sudden swings of mood. ‘Nothing could exceed his energy,’ Watson says, ‘when the working fit was upon him; but now and again a reaction would seize him, and 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.’ This was surprising enough behaviour in an adult, although Watson seems to have adapted to it with remarkable good humour. In a child, however, the sudden withdrawing into silence and immobility, the days when the young Holmes refused to respond at all to the world around him, were alarming to his parents. Another letter, this one from Sherlock’s father to an old college friend, speaks of the boy’s ‘strange indifference to the daily round of our bucolic life’ and of the impossibility of sending him away to school.

There is no doubt that Sherlock Holmes was a difficult and worrying child but is there any evidence that he was, as some ingenious commentators have suggested, autistic? In the mid-nineteenth century autism still awaited clinical definition and description. (The word was coined in 1911 by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler* and it was not until the 1940s that detailed case descriptions were published.) Yet there are certainly similarities between stories of Holmes, both as a child and as an adult, and modern case histories of autistic individuals. The odd detachment from the everyday world, the peculiar fixations on particular objects and the careful classification of them (his monographs on the 140 different varieties of pipe, cigar and cigarette tobacco ash, for example), the inability to understand or empathize fully with other people’s emotions and the heightened acuity of some senses – these all mirror ways in which the autistic interact with the world. Yet the final judgement must surely be that Holmes was not autistic in today’s definition of the word. No autistic person would have been able to sustain such a wide-ranging and demanding career as he did over nearly fifty years. No autistic person would have reacted with such a sudden outburst of suppressed emotion as does Holmes in ‘The Adventure of the Three Garridebs’ when he believes that Watson has been shot.

As his father’s letter shows, however, there could be no question of Sherlock attending school. In 1860, the thirteen-year-old Mycroft, previously tutored at home by his father and by local clergyman William Barnes, was sent south to attend Harrow. Perhaps surprisingly, he adapted with remarkable ease to the spartan environment of the school, and favourable reports of his academic prowess, particularly in mathematics, soon began to arrive in north Yorkshire. The six-year-old Sherlock was probably given his first lessons by his mother but they were to be cut short by tragedy. Violet Mycroft Holmes died on 23 August 1861. On her death certificate the cause of death is given as ‘consumption’ and she had no doubt been suffering from what the Victorians often called ‘the white death’ for years. Indeed, the state of her health may well have contributed to her miscarriages in the early 1850s.

Less than three years later, the family suffered another bereavement. Holmes’s grandmother, born Marie-Claude Vernet, died of heart failure on 18 January 1864. She was sixty-five and had lived for more than forty years in the wilds of the Yorkshire Moors, far from the Parisian salons and artists’ studios in which she had spent her youth. The losses of both mother and grandmother severely affected the Holmes brothers, but it was the younger Sherlock who was hit the hardest. Fourteen at the time of his mother’s death, Mycroft had been attending Harrow for barely a year. He came home for the funeral, returning afterwards to school and, in its bracingly unsentimental atmosphere, was forced to come to terms with the bereavement in order to survive from day to day.

The great public schools in the mid-nineteenth century were slightly more civilized than the self-contained worlds of Hobbesian nastiness and brutishness that they had been before Victoria came to the throne. The reforming zeal of headmasters like the legendary Thomas Arnold at Rugby brought improvements. But they still remained places where only the strong flourished and the weak went to the wall. In 1853, only seven years before Mycroft arrived at Harrow, a monitor at the school had beaten a younger boy so badly, striking him thirty-one times with a cane, that the victim had been permanently disfigured and was obliged to leave. Schools such as Harrow, Eton and Winchester (where a young boy called John H. Watson would soon arrive to study) continued to be places where, in the words of one old Etonian, ‘the lads underwent privations that might have broken down a cabin boy, and would be thought inhuman if inflicted on a galley slave.’ Sherlock, seven years younger and still at home, faced permanent reminders of his loss. It is all too easy to make speculative psychological diagnoses of historical figures but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Holmes’s suspicion of women is rooted in his response to the deaths of his mother and grandmother. To the child he was at the time, it seemed as if the two women to whom he was most attached had somehow chosen to leave him. When he tells Watson in The Sign of Four, ‘Women are never to be entirely trusted – not the best of them,’ the memory of those traumatic desertions must surely lurk beneath his words.

Reading became an escape for the young Holmes. His father’s library was as eccentric as its owner and he found many obscure and unusual volumes on its shelves. Early in their friendship, Watson was to note that Holmes’s knowledge of ‘sensational literature’ was ‘immense’ and that he appeared to know ‘every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century’. Holmes himself claimed that the best thing that Inspector MacDonald in The Valley of Fear could do to improve his skills was ‘to shut [himself] up for three months and read twelve hours a day at the annals of crime’. In his boyhood, intrigued by his father’s volumes of the Newgate Calendar – that extraordinarily powerful and often lurid record of the murders, robberies and other crimes of the eighteenth century – this is more or less what Holmes himself had done. In doing so, he had added an array of terrifying pictures to his already powerful imagination but he had also laid the foundations for the mental index of crime that was to prove so useful to him in later life.

Holmes’s loneliness and isolation as a boy led him to become an extraordinarily self-contained and fiercely independent man. Watson was to note, in ‘The Adventure of the Illustrious Client’, the almost neurotic closeness with which Holmes the adult hugged his ideas and thoughts to himself. ‘There was a curious secretive streak in the man which led to many dramatic effects, but left even his closest friend guessing as to what his exact plans might be. He pushed to an extreme the axiom that the only safe plotter was he who plotted alone.’ Holmes never came to appreciate the delights of society. His reference, in ‘The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor’, to ‘those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie’ reveals the depths of his disdain for ordinary social intercourse. Much of Holmes’s strangeness in later life, the feeling he gave people that he dwelt on a different plane to the rest of the workaday world, derived from the peculiarity of his solitary upbringing.

There was only one person who could break through the barriers that the young Sherlock built around himself at an early age. As a boy, he idolized his older brother and traces of this earlier hero-worship can still be read between the lines when he speaks of Mycroft to Watson. But Mycroft, too, deserted him. While his older brother journeyed triumphantly through Harrow, winning scholarships and prizes and forming the friendships that were to stand him in such good stead in his future career in the corridors of power, Sherlock, considered too troubled and unusual a child for the hurly-burly of public school, remained at home. In 1866, while Sherlock, aged twelve, was battling with a succession of private tutors at Hutton Hall, Mycroft went up to Christ Church, Oxford, to read Mathematics. Christ Church, of course, had been the college that most male members of the Holmes family had attended for more than three hundred years. A William Holmes, possibly the brother or a cousin of Sir Ralph Holmes, had been among the first students when the college had been founded as Cardinal’s College by Wolsey in 1524. Mycroft’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all studied there. At Harrow the older Holmes brother had already demonstrated his brilliance as a mathematician and he arrived at Christ Church trailing clouds of glory from his school years.

When he took up the scholarship that he had won, the college was going through a period of major change and reform under its relatively new Dean, H. G. Liddell, and in the year after he came up an Act of Parliament was passed to change the college’s constitution. Mycroft’s tutor at Christ Church was perhaps the most famous don of the nineteenth century, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll. Shy and reserved, Dodgson nonetheless responded warmly to the talent of his new scholar and the two men became close during Mycroft’s three years as an undergraduate. Both shared a fondness for logic puzzles as well as a gift for imaginative fantasy and speculation. After the otherwise lackadaisical Mycroft left Christ Church with first-class honours in 1869, he made the effort to keep in touch with his former tutor for decades to come.

The most significant friendship that Mycroft forged at Christ Church, however, was with Archibald Philip Primrose, the future Lord Rosebery, who was his exact contemporary as an undergraduate. At first sight, the two men were unlikely candidates to become friends. Primrose, the heir to an earldom, whose stated aims were to marry an heiress, win the Derby and become Prime Minister, would seem to have little in common with the plump, indolent and intellectual scion of minor Yorkshire gentry. Yet opposites often attract and for a period the two spent many hours in one another’s company. Eventually Primrose, offered the choice by the college authorities between abandoning his studies and abandoning a racehorse that he owned (strictly against college regulations), decided that the horse took precedence and left Christ Church. Although the two men cannot have known it at the time, their friendship was to have a dramatic and shaping impact on Mycroft’s entire life.

*

Holmes himself once commented: ‘I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.’ If this is the case, what can we deduce about the otherwise opaque characters of Holmes’s father and mother? Sadly, it is almost impossible to rescue any sense of Violet Holmes’s character from the oblivion into which the passage of a century and a half has despatched it. She remains a shadowy and imprecise figure, defined, like so many women in the nineteenth century, solely by her relationships with her husband and her two sons. Holmes’s father is only slightly less enigmatic, although we do know considerably more about the tracings he left behind him.