The Creation of Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock is coming back. Given that filming doesn’t begin until January 2015, though, for this Sherlock, at least, it’s going to be a while. But whilst Benedict Cumberbatch’s embodiment is frustratingly few and far between, we’ve hardly had to go without other Sherlock incarnations. Last year, CBS aired Elementary – a sexed-up, drugged-up, twenty-first century rendering of the Victorian stories - and Russia premiered a sixteen episode series of (some) previously unadapted stories in November. Conan Doyle’s creation has, from its nascence, been appropriated, recreated, embellished, reinvented. Every generation since could cite various adaptations, manifest in various mediums. As well as those already mentioned, in the last decade or so cinema screens were assaulted by an especially pugilistic Holmes in Guy Ritchie’s film; the Conan Doyle Estate granted Anthony Horowitz the right to continue the literary legend of Holmes in his publication The House of Silk; and in the US series House, we saw the mystery solving prowess of the Victorian polymath reimagined as a modern day maverick medical diagnostician. No doubt there are many more examples one could list. Sherlock Holmes is a pretty familiar face in the British popular imagination, but, with his ever-burgeoning lineage, is it Conan Doyle’s Sherlock that we recognise?

Baker street celebrates its most famous inhabitant in a variety of ways, none of which is especially true to the original depiction of the character. At the tube station, both the statue outside of, and the decorated tiled walls within, depict Sherlock in his most familiar form, complete with deer stalker and pipe. But Conan Doyle never gave him a deer stalker, nor a pipe. The deer stalker was first placed on Holmes’ head by Sidney Paget, who illustrated the stories in the Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle thought Paget’s detective much handsomer than the one portrayed in his stories. And it was the actor, William Gillette (who assumed the role more than 1,300 times on stage), who first introduced and then institutionalised the pipe with the figure. Holmes’ much repeated catchphrase – ‘elementary, my dear Watson’ – was never in the books. That was first attributed to the character in the 1929 film. And 221b Baker street – Holmes’ home – never existed in Conan Doyle’s time. Since then, however, the street was extended and, today, 221b not only stands, it is marketed as the actual house of an albeit fictional figure.

Sherlock Holmes is the product of collaboration. Conan Doyle created him, and the collective cultural imagination continues to create him. In the case of this ever-evolving figure, perhaps we have an illuminating study of how stories become tradition, and how exceptional characters gain cultural immortality.