Chookie

This time my victim is Sherlock Holmes, the quintessential English gentleman and inquiring detective. Unusually, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle actually admitted that he had based his character on a real person, Dr Joseph Bell. Before going further, I'll have to spend some time on Conan Doyle.


Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859 to an Anglo-Irish father and an Irish mother (so definitely 75% Scottish). Apart from being a doctor of medicine, he was noted for his stories about Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered a major innovation in the field of fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger (apart from “The Lost World”, I don't know any...). He was a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, historical novels, plays and romances, poetry, and non-fiction.


He spent some considerable time between 1876 and 1881 he studied at the medical school of Edinburgh (which, at the time was probably one of the best in Europe) at this time he became a student of Professor Joseph Bell. He also worked as Bell's clerk at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. After graduation in 1881, he worked as a ship's doctor on the SS Mayumba during a voyage to the West African coast.


In 1882 he and a former classmate set up a medical partnership in Plymouth, but it was short-lived due to the fact that they experienced many personal difficulties (But I can't find what these differences were). The partnership broke up. Arriving in Portsmouth in June of 1882 with less than £10 to his name, he set up an unsuccessful medical practice in Elm Grove, Southsea. While waiting for a patient, Conan Doyle again began writing stories. His first significant work, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887. It featured the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, who was partially modelled after his former university professor Joseph Bell. Conan Doyle wrote to him, "It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes. ... Round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man.”


I will dare to suggest that, had Conan Doyle been a better (or at least, more popular doctor), Sherlock Holmes would never have been. Do I have evidence for this? - Hell no.


According to Irving Wallace (in an essay originally in his book The Fabulous Originals but later republished and updated in his collection The Sunday Gentleman) Bell was involved in several police investigations, mostly in Scotland, such as the Ardlamont Mystery of 1893, usually with forensic expert Professor Henry Littlejohn. Supposedly both were in volved in the 'Jack the Ripper' investigation and, though it was never disclosed, seven days after Bell submitted the name of his suspect, the killings stopped.


Personally, I'd never heard the Jack the Ripper story........

Clemmie

I was wondering when you'd post again. It's been a while, but worth the wait.

Thanks.

Wickerman

Not to go off on a tangent, Sherlock Holmes is one of my favourite characters, but it has always seemed to me to be an unbelievable irony that a character who would become the worlds most prominent fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, would appear around at the same time as another character who would become the worlds arch villian, Jack the Ripper.

On top of this, in 1888 two, not one but two, productions of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde opened in London. One at the Opera Comique, a less professional production and the most prominent one at the Lyceum starring Richard Mansfield.

I have no knowledge of how long the Opera Comique production lasted but the Lyceum production dwindled on for 8 weeks and finally died a death because outside in the real world Jack the Ripper had the Police, the Press, and the public of the East end of London in a grip of fear.
Strange that Conan Doyle didn't include a story about the most mysterious murderer of his time (1888).
Sorry for the distraction...

jungleplanewreck

A very interesting post.

I've always been a great fan of Sherlock Holmes, although I never knew he was based on anyone in particular. Now, who is Watson based on?

Wickerman

Conan Doyle

Linschoten

Good post, thank you. Some years back they had a television series in which, if I remember rightly, Bell was portrayed as conducting (fictional) criminal investigations in the Holmes style.

Pedro

I find Holmes totally delightful and long for the day there is a chapter of the 'Baker Street Irregulars’ in my town. What fun those chaps must have had writing up witty papers to explain and justify the many discrepancies in the Holmes oeuvre. "Be he ever so humble there is no police like Holmes."