Sherlock Holmes Handbook. Christopher Redmond
hundreds of versions of the stories separately and in collections, but the descriptions provided are sparse and often unhelpful, and editions frequently surface that were unknown to this award-winning bibliographer.
A direct source for The Hound of the Baskervilles is generally believed to exist, in a “west country legend” told to Doyle (for so he himself says) by a friend, Bertram Fletcher Robinson. At best, however, he worked from a complex of “black-dog” legends associated with unpopulated parts of England, including Dartmoor. Janice McNabb explores those sources in The Curious Incident of the Hound on Dartmoor (1984). In A Study in Surmise (1984), Michael Harrison sets out in detail what he previously argued elsewhere: that A Study in Scarlet is extensively based — indeed, that the existence of Sherlock Holmes is based — on “the vanishing, from his shop in the St. Luke’s district of London, of a German baker, Urban Napoleon Stanger. This was in 1881.” Indisputably, The Valley of Fear is largely based on the doings of the “Mollie Maguires” in the coal country of Pennsylvania in the 1870s. A few other direct sources for large portions of Doyle’s plots can be identified.
It has become clear that Doyle not only read voraciously but stored what he read, at least half consciously, to reuse and recombine names and details years later. Donald Redmond has written extensively on specific sources as they can be unearthed:
Holmes “spoke [in The Sign of the Four] on a quick succession of subjects” including the Buddhism of Ceylon and miracle plays. In fact, it seems that he was only relating what he had read in the papers. For The Times (London) had on 15 June 1888 reported upon the Congress of Protestant Foreign Missions, then in session, with a long account: “Wednesday afternoon’s conference ... subject was ‘Buddhism and other kindred heathen systems; their character and influence compared with those of Christianity’.... Sir Monier Monier-Williams [the president of the conference] at once proceeded to place in contrast the Bible of Christianity and the Bible of the Buddhists.” Among other matters in the account, evident anti-Catholic accounts would have attracted Conan Doyle’s attention. As to miracle plays, Geoffrey S. Stavert, in his recent A Study in Southsea, points out that the Rev. H. Shaen Solly of Southampton spoke to the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society (in which Conan Doyle was very active) on this exact subject....
After Mary Morstan had left their sitting-room, Sherlock Holmes was probably striving for effect when he “smiled gently” at Watson’s shocked reaction to Holmes’s languid put-down, and cried, “I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money....” In the Sherlock Holmes Journal (vol. 11, Summer 1973, pp. 58–63) I looked at this remark, with instances.
Many such connections are of course conjectural. In the absence of a full reading of everything Doyle can have read over a period of several decades, much will emerge only by chance. And it is often unclear whether a correspondence between something in the news, or in an earlier author, and something in Doyle is deliberate allusion, unconscious repetition, or pure coincidence. The researcher can easily be tempted to substitute wishful thinking for evidence. Patterns do, however, emerge. Donald Redmond reports in Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources (1982) that at least eight of the Scowrers, and some twenty-three other characters in The Valley of Fear, appear to be named after medical acquaintances of Doyle. Many characters in A Study in Scarlet share surnames with neighbours of Doyle in Southsea and Portsmouth, where he lived when he wrote that book. Often, it appears, a character is named for more than one original, or takes a name from one and an attribute (“club foot” or “tiger hunter”) from another.
Sherlock Holmes’s own name has been the subject of much interest, especially in the light of his first incarnation as “Sherrinford Holmes” in a page of Doyle’s handwritten notes. The author claimed that he had taken the “Sherlock” from a bowler of the Marylebone Cricket Club against whom he once had a run of luck — although the eighteenth-century theologian Thomas Sherlock lurks in the background, and James McCord revealed in the Baker Street Journal in 1992 that Jane Sherlock Ball was the mother of one of Doyle’s aunts. “Holmes,” meanwhile, is popularly assumed to come from Oliver Wendell Holmes the elder, the American doctor and author, whom Doyle much admired. Another possibility is a physician friend and neighbour of Doyle’s. Dr. John H. Watson probably takes his name from Dr. James Watson, a medical colleague of Doyle’s in Southsea; the first Moriarty ever encountered by Doyle was a master at his school, Stonyhurst College.
JOSEPH BELL. Doyle always maintained that Sherlock Holmes was modelled on Dr. Joseph Bell (born December 2, 1837, died October 4, 1911), professor of surgery in Edinburgh, and the teacher who impressed the young Doyle most. He wrote in his autobiography, Memories and Adventures, that when he came to create Holmes, “I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details.” Elsewhere in the same book, he tells an anecdote or two about Bell the master of diagnosis, including the famous exchange, quoted in many writings about Doyle, in which Bell begins by greeting a patient: “Well, my man, you’ve served in the army... Not long discharged?... A Highland regiment?” And so on.
Ely M. Liebow accepts that attribution in his biography Dr. Joe Bell: Model for Sherlock Holmes (1982), although he acknowledges that Holmes had other origins as well. (“His importance can be exaggerated,” Richard Lancelyn Green agrees in his Introduction to the Adventures volume of the Oxford Sherlock Holmes.) Bell was editor of the Edinburgh Medical Journal from 1873, and a teacher from 1878, as well as an expert consulted by the police in forensic matters, but it was as a practising surgeon that he was best known. Says Liebow:
Joe Bell was an operator, a great one. He was in all probability better than Syme, better than Lister or Annandale, or any other contemporary, with the exception of the great-but-silent Patrick Heron Watson. While he was in the post-Listerian age, and the post-Simpson age, he would be operating many times in his life without anesthesia and when septicemia still plagued the hospitals. “Rapidity,” writes a colleague, “was his keynote, swiftness in operating.”
His textbook, A Manual of the Operations of Surgery (1866 and subsequent editions), is available in modern facsimile. Doyle, as a medical student, was chosen to be clerk for Bell’s clinics at the Royal Infirmary, and heard the great man assess patients with rapid perceptions that he would later put into Holmes’s mouth: “This man’s limp is not from his hip but from his foot. Were you to observe closely, you would see there are slits, cut by a knife, in those parts of the shoe where the pressure of the shoe is greatest against the foot. The man is a sufferer from corns, gentlemen.” Such flashes of insight made an impression, and when Doyle created Holmes he wrote to Bell, “I do not think that his analytical work is in the least an exaggeration of some effects which I have seen you produce in the out-patient ward.” Bell’s compassion, and his thirst for justice, may also be reflected in Sherlock Holmes.
Doyle wrote his stories in longhand, in a firm, squat, generally legible script but with apparent disdain for the rules of punctuation and capitalization. (“For a medical man, Conan Doyle’s handwriting was commendably legible, though his o could look like an ‘a’,” Owen Dudley Edwards wrote in 1993. For that matter, the o could pass for an s on occasion, and vice versa.) There is evidence in the known manuscripts that his first draft was also generally his last; on occasion he left a space in which he would later fill in a name or phrase. It is generally assumed that at least in later years, the text was then typewritten for attention by editors and printers, but no such typescripts seem to survive.
The manuscripts have been thoroughly dispersed by the publishers or by the author’s heirs, and the whereabouts of some is unknown. A number, including The Sign of the Four and The Valley of Fear, are in private hands. Others are in public collections — “The Red Circle” at Indiana University, “The Three Students” at Harvard, three