The modest bookshelves of my childhood home supported various copies of every Sherlock Holmes publication my father could lay his hands on. He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes oeuvre, and continued for many years to insist (ironically) that the detective not only had lived but was alive and well (if ancient) in Dover, England, keeping bees.
Despite that almost constant exposure to Holmes-related literature and memorabilia, I never read many of the stories myself. I primarily became familiar with the character through TV and by listening to my father’s recording of the old radio programs. Recently, while deciding what books to take on our brief excursion to Orcas Island, I grabbed The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes from the shelf of our local library.
My experience reading all 40 or so stories in the collection over the span of a few days was not unlike how I felt after watching a marathon session of The Sopranos on DVD: I was exhausted and concluded that the episodes are clearly meant to be consumed with a significant break in between.
That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy them, but only that the formula became rather tiresomely repetitive when taken altogether, and I found myself skimming. It would have been a different experience if I were a Victorian-era gentleman who had to wait a month for the next issue of The Strand in order to get more Holmes action, and I’m sure that Conan Doyle was mindful of that when he wrote the stories.
One significant trope jumped out at me, however, that I was unprepared for and that I might not have picked up on had I not read them all in such a short period of time.
Throughout the stories, Watson frequently compares Holmes to “a machine.” Watson, the happily married doctor, laments his friend’s total lack of interest in women; details his exacting, almost obsessive, methods; and often remarks on his irregular sleeping and eating habits. I found this all interesting given the era’s conflicted attitudes toward science and industrialization and my own interests in the variety of forms that technophobia can take in popular culture. At first, it was clear to me that Holmes represented Modern Science and Watson was his counterpart on the side of Traditional Humanity.
Yet it became clear that things were more complex than that. Holmes’ analytical strength comes not only from his highly-refined machine-like mind; it is balanced by an equally strong imagination and understanding of human behavior and emotion. In his employment of elaborate disguises and the manners in which he interrogates witnesses and suspects, for two examples, he reveals himself to possess a shrewd understanding of people and their behaviors that often lie outside of the purely rational.
In fact, the various police inspectors inflicted upon Holmes are much more machine-like than he. In one of my favorite stories from The Memoirs, “Silver Blaze,” Holmes says of Inspector Gregory: “[He] is an extremely competent officer. Were he but gifted with imagination he might rise to great heights in his profession.” Gregory systematically and with great skill collects and records all the “facts,” but he doesn’t know how to put them together to explain the behaviors and motivations of the other characters.
In later stories, Holmes’ brother Mycroft is introduced and we are presented with someone of similar mental capabilities but lacking the social skills or interest in humanity. In one amusing passage, Holmes describes his brother’s club:
There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one.
It is Mycroft, then, who emerges as the dreaded (albeit somewhat buffoonish) dark-side of urbanization and modernization where as our protagonist Sherlock achieves that perfect balance of scientific reasoning, social grace, and creativity.
