The Life And Death Of Sherlock Holmes | Absolute History

Sherlock Holmes was a phenomenon of his age his creator Arthur Conan Doyle became the highest-paid author of his generation and from the stories forged a new form of popular fiction and yet having produced such a character beloved by a nation in 1891 at the height of his popularity his creator brought the series to an abrupt end [Music] why get rid of her Marco the stories were actually reflecting his own life much more perhaps than we realized and he may have been a little worried that he was giving away rather too much but the character Sherlock Holmes undoubtedly took over cutting Donald's life and it irritated Conan Doyle immensely he decided he would do the older tumours to his character and well kill him off it has been suggested more than once that the inconsistencies in the stories were deliberately put in by the author as a sort of code leading to some sort of revelation an investigation of Conan Doyle's relationship with Sherlock Holmes asks more questions than it answers was there something disturbing behind the story of his invention what made a young doctor from Umbra produced this giant of a literary character a character that has been performed and portrayed more than any ever created this is a journey into the world of Conan Doyle to discover the truth behind his love in relationship for the detective creation that would become his most valuable meal ticket will investigate the untold story of the relationship between the man and his creation and asked the question what was it that made him determined to kill off the character who had dominated his life for so long in one dramatic episode [Music] we're going to track down the people and the influences that lay behind the creation of what is without doubt literature's most enduring fictional character and we're going to ask the question why having created such a successful and acclaimed detective what is his creator Arthur Conan Doyle become anxious to kill off his creation why would Conan Doyle want to rid himself of the character of Sherlock Holmes didn't him in fact give away more of himself than he meant to through The Adventures of his famous character what was he revealing about his own life and does this fictional murder reveal a darker side to an untold story behind the legend it's possible that the world's greatest detective is based on a cocktail of disturbing influences in the author's early life well I'm absolutely convinced myself yes indeed Sherlock Holmes is based on a real character to a large extent when you're doing your first novel you generally want to base it on either yourself or somebody who know very well he's also been described as not so much a character as a collection of characteristics but it's those characteristics which bring him to life dr. Watson does write of him in convincing detail does this therefore mean that there's a lot of a real person in him well actually yes it probably does a sense of a real person in the Sherlock Holmes character is what leads many to this day to believe that he really existed well I've just left fakir Street Station and I'm walking on one of the most famous streets in the world Baker Street in London and here on the left is one of the world's best known addresses two to one B Baker Street this is the address current oil gave to his character and we're people despite him being fictional still come today caught up in the myth condoled once said that he'd never been to London when he started writing the Sherlock Holmes stories in fact he had been to London when he was a boy of about seven or eight as a child he visited family in London and they went to visit he records it in letters to his mother they went to visit Madame Tussauds which at that time was not in Marylebone Road it was in Baker Street if you go to his library you will find tourist map of London and from that I very much suspect he just picked Street at random and said this is where my my character will live in truth I never actually was a 2 to 1 B Baker Street albeit today here on the west side of the street there is a museum dedicated to Sherlock Holmes but in all honesty the address the location of the rooms even the bay window from which Holmes and Watson would look down on the daily traffic along Baker Street were a pure fiction created by dr. Arthur Conan Doyle the story of Conan Doyle's own life and his path to the creation of Holmes is in itself something of an enigma and one which leads 400 miles north of London where the stories are set to Edinburgh Scotland capital city the thing is everyone thinks of Sherlock Holmes as being a London character obviously their ventures are written for the streets of London but it's in fact these streets that we're walking in now the streets of Edinburgh that really did provide in many ways the original back cloth against which command or wrote the adventures these streets the streets of the infamous murderers Burke and Hare of Deakin Brody of major we're characters who've influenced Robert Louis Stevenson's creation of dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde so it's here in the streets of Edinburgh the chilla Cohn was born Conan Doyle's early life was turbulent and unsettled and bore little resemblance to the well-off ordered world of his London gentlemen Detective Conan Doyle was born here in Edinburgh in pigley place where we're now standing on the 22nd of May 1859 he was the third child and eldest son of Charles and Mary Conan Doyle his family were of Anglo Irish Catholic descent and not particularly well off his father Charles ultimate Doyle a talented artist was a chronic alcoholic suffering from depression and epilepsy Jones ultimate joy was fantastic artists wonderful drawings like all sorts of series and spirits emanating from the spire of st. Giles Cathedral he was epileptic and alcohol had a very soft and very debilitating effect upon him sometimes quite frightful he would try to sell his clothes he would sell anything of the house to get drink the mother would find herself bringing home virtually an inert cost who sometimes could become violent drunkenness constantly coming into the stories sometimes drunkenness accompanying great brutality one story in particular which turns on an alcoholic husband who murders his wife and her lover may have been Oh to closely reminiscent of the tragedy of common - and so nearly life on his parents [Music] he was known in the trade as fly my name is given the alcoholic husband turns up time and again in the Sherlock Holmes stories it's possibly the most obvious effect of his own family life on the Sherlock Holmes stories Charles Doyle ended his days in a sanatorium throughout his childhood the family moved from address to address as their financial situation and Charles's condition are deteriorated Doyle's mother Mary was desperate to keep the young Arthur away from his father's destabilizing influence in 1868 the nine-year-old Doyle was sent to a Jesuit boarding school in England his family were devout Catholics he grew up with the Catholic faith ringing in his ears and he was educated at harder and Stonyhurst which were Jesuit schools but another particular influence on him was his mother's tales of chivalry she regaled her children with stories of knights and fair maidens and Conan Doyle's legendary chivalry is recounted by his own children while appealing to the imaginative side of the future writer these heroic fantasies may also have been an escape for the young Conan Doyle from the reality of his own harsher environment Conan Doyle had been brought up quite poor and he was the leader of a street gang in Edinburgh he brought that him and one of the earliest journal coasters for the biggest retailer gamers in an effort to provide for his family he applied for a place at Edinburgh to study medicine what his application was successful he was far from the typical student while studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh Conan Doyle lodged here in George Square now surrounded by university buildings in fact they still had a plaque on the wall here that commemorates his tenure he left here in 1880 to embark upon the greatest adventure of his young life an adventure but he later recalled would turn him into a man it was drilled into him you must do well he must go into profession and what better profession to go into than a doctor because you'll be comfortable for the rest of your life and I I mean he always said he hated stony hands he didn't particularly like Edinburgh University and he regarded it more of a tragedy to get through it but he didn't actually particularly not like the work and didn't find it particularly easy either although still studying on the morning of February 28th 1880 Conan Doyle joined the crew of the greenland whaler hope on a voyage of several months in the dangerous occupation of seal and whale hunting [Music] he returned to Edinboro with a 50-pound share of the cruise profits this period of his life was to have a profound effect on the young man I went on board the Whaler a big struggling youth came off and he said he didn't pass yeah you know out of Aden broke with with flying colors he was rejected for every single Hospital appointment he went for I was forced almost to go on whaling ships and so on to earn his money because there's only a certain type of person who would go on a waiting ship to this you know austere hard life that he was with these very different life experiences under his belt he returns to Edinburgh to resume his studies at the medical school he could have no idea that his time here was to give him the inspiration for the creation of Holmes it was commonplace for students to undertake extramural studies which Conan Doyle did in the course of those studies he encountered the man who more than any other become a true inspiration for the character of Sherlock Holmes and that man was dr. Joseph Bell he first met Bell because he taught Conan Doyle clinical surgery Edinburgh University he was a very popular surgeon there you'd have packed audiences of the students and not only would he show them the surgery techniques but he'd make various deductions and observations about the the people he was dealing with it was noted by many who knew Belle that the eminent lecturers physical attributes were remarkably similar to those of the fictional Sherlock Holmes Conan Doyle has recorded his memories of Bell who was thin high-nosed eagle faced and had a jerky way of walking and a high strident voice were Holmes's voice isn't mentioned in descriptive terms very often but when you go back to the stories it is described as a high strident voice just like Joseph bells many as Sherlock Holmes's other characteristics seem to relate directly back to Bell the character of the poet's sportsmen and bird watcher however most significantly in relation to Sherlock Holmes there is also the fundamental feature of his famously brilliant diagnostic mind Joe Bell was not just a medical diagnostician which he was brilliant at he was also a master of looking at a person and being able to tell their trade their place of residence their status in life Sherlock Holmes is best known for his deductive reasoning and that was something very much that came from Conan Doyle's medical training Josef Belva is known to have used that sort of argument he would look at clues from just seeing the complaint and things about the patient Bell could work out a lot about his background Doyle probably first met Belle in 1878 at a clinical surgery outpatient class students were present and the first patient was shown in before the patient could open his mouth Bell said to the patient I'm a man I see you who have been in the army not long discharged noncommissioned officer Highland regiment recently stationed in Barbados and when asked you know how on earth he could know all of these things Bell says you see gentlemen the man was respectful but did not remove his hat they do not do that in the army but he would have learned civilian ways had he not long been discharged he has an air of authority and he's obviously Scottish as to Barbados his complaint is elephantitis which was West Indian and not British [Music] the students of course loved this performance that's what it was this was him showing them how to be observant Doyle remembered all right and looked at it down and came to use it years and years later when he created Sherlock Holmes although elements of bail are clearly in Holmes's behaviour and Conan Doyle seems to have acknowledged this in a letter he wrote to his old professor there is ample evidence that Holmes is also influenced by other people he encountered during his student life in very early stages he drew these people to make homes but after he'd drawn on them Holmes began to move by himself we're here in Dean Cemetery some distance from the center of Edinburgh and the university's medical faculty and over by a boundary wall of the cemetery is the grave of dr. Joseph Bell to whom Conan Doyle said he old Sherlock Holmes Holmes your scholars would seem to be in agreement because in all honesty the only real similarity between Sean Combs and dr. Joseph Bell is Holmes's amazing ability for the reduction so the benign character of Bell may not have been the strongest influence in the creation of Sherlock Holmes looking further into Conan Doyle's life more disturbing influences behind the character begin to emerge is there a darker side to this story well in 1875 a man by the name of dr. Brian Charles Waller had become the doors lodger and since we've been here that was influential in persuading Connor job to study medicine indeed Brian Charles Waller will become one of the early influences for the real Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes has a dark side to him it's been suggested that this is influenced by a man who Conan Doyle must have known fairly well Brian Charles wallet as the Doyle's financial situation worsened due to the channels Doyle's heavy drinking the rent which Waller paid to the Doyle family no doubt saved them from the workhouse Bram transfollow who was medical doctor of pathology and was seeking a place in the university and called himself of consulting pathologist and in fact corridor would use that initially to launch Sherlock Holmes their homes as a consulting detectives he was also very bossy individual extremely full of himself quite sure that he knew the answers as any rapid in his decisions and in certain ways so aware of how much he knew as to they positively dislikeable one of the important things the pram transfollow put into the character of Sherlock Holmes was the aspects of him which are not likable Watson begins by disliking Holmes quite a good deal and is conquered by discovering that Holmes actually isn't a charlatan but there is a great deal in his work voilá seems to have been quite a good doctor a good research doctor although as a commentator on other doctors he was vicious beyond belief and in fact who was ruthless about everybody some of the creations of Renny Harlin go to the Scotland Yard inspectors is very much taken from Waller whether or not Holmes was influenced by Waller Conan Doyle's relationship with him he has they're being very complex and possibly disturbing for him I'm not sure that Asif Conan Doyle got on very well with Lola he was a big big influence on the family what we do know definitely is that Mary Doyle Conan Doyle's mother after her husband died moved from Edinburgh in fact was given a cottage in Yorkshire on Bryan Charles Wallace estate he lived at the big house she lived in the cottage he may have been in love with Conan Doyle's elder sister there are some signs that he was he wrote a poem about her music but he may also have been in love with Conan Doyle's mother voilá evidently got on very well with mrs. Doyle but another curious fact is that one of his sisters a knotless his sister's was named Brian could it be that the Warner influences in Sherlock Holmes were behind Dials murder of his character but this was a fictional attempt to get rid of a disturbing aspect of his life it's conceivable that this could be one of the reasons behind the murder of Sherlock Holmes accusations of adultery may have been made whether there was anything to it is I think very doubtful but certainly Conan Doyle may have feared that there really was a physical relationship between his mother and Brian Turner and it's certainly where the counter is resenting one or more and more surely such family arrangements together with father's incarceration in the asylum must have had a profound psychological effect on the younger Conan Doyle because of such early psychological experiences his father's descent Wallas influence and the hardships of his early life Conan Doyle unsurprisingly brought darker elements to the character of homes that could be found disturbing Holmes has been described as a manic depressive in this there certainly is evidence for heavy mood swings and the stories a lot has been made of the fact that he took cocaine and morphine Watson reports that when Holmes was bored and his mind not challenged he took cocaine in a 7% solution this was not a heavy dose but it was clearly enough to be habit-forming dr. Watson on several occasions warrens Holmes against taking cocaine but he continued to do very dangerous substance and they'll be very quickly adapted to this unsettling aspect of the home his character has many questioning the author's motives for representing his hero as flawed and fallible but the connections to his early life seemed to emerge clearly there of course it's a euphemism for Conan Doyle's father's drink so far Holmes to be on cocaine not altogether surprising [Music] that homes had a serious addiction all Watsons descriptions of homes nervous activity makes clear the restlessness the ability to work for days without adequate sleep and even without rest at all abrupt changes of mood and equally abrupt descents into a comatose state all tend to suggest the extended use as strong narcotic in addition to the psychological influences on the shaping of the Sherlock Holmes character there is also the society itself in which Holmes is set and the stories unfold Conan Doyle could not have failed to be aware of the darker aspects of the time in which he lived Victorian society in the late 19th century was faced apparently with success and yet with a constant fear of things going wrong the Sherlock Holmes stories are set between 1881 and 1903 during this time the latter part of the Victorian period the British Empire was at its zenith and London with the center of all things however despite the apparent stability of the Empire many felt that this was the final chapter of an era there is a paradox about Sherlock Holmes what is the extraordinary quality that makes her this eccentric 19th century Victorian detective such a phenomenon what was it about him that so gripped the Victorian public's imagination the seems to have been something in these stories that met a need in society as it entered the exciting different yet frightening world of the 20th century a century that threatens to fall apart the fabric of everything that was known and everything that had seemed certain readers of Sherlock Holmes short stories were drawn by the reassurance of the all-knowing detective who would always make things right in the end even then people were starting to get railways the London Underground had started motorcar was coming in later on into the new century but this world of the Sherlock Holmes stories is gas light and hansom cabs trains yes steam trains but people aren't looking at modern technology and I think people were looking back to an earlier safer age when they were on the brink of really quite a social revolution who short stories took often became celebrated in the 1890s a time when London was mushrooming a tremendous speed and very frightening Lee for the average reader of a magazine who would find within this magazine a series of stories about a man who could make sense out of an enormous howling metropolitan wilderness who worked on sound professional grounds and professionalism is coming in more and more somebody who wasn't official and the adventure the omniscience the professionalism the science all opening up an exciting new world while making sense of the frightening one that exists and so it was in the autumn of 1887 prior to the arrival of Jack the Ripper on the streets of Whitechapel the following year London was ready for the arrival of the brilliant but eccentric detective Sherlock Holmes and certain as far as our villains were concerns the readers would be familiar from the press of people like Jack the Ripper and therefore had a belief in people with ultimate evil and the dreadful crimes that they could commit and they would draw upon these experiences when reading the Sherlock Holmes stories when when Watson would write about people who was the worst man in London or you know an evil person and someone the dark and the light would have been the everyday fare for curling Doyle now practicing as a junior doctor in South Sea in southern England during the long wait for patients in its consulting room he did write stories and later recalled how he divided his time between his patients and literature it is hard to say which suffered most there is Conan Doyle knew and his medical practice in South Sea not that many patients during the summer months mainly fully in the winter month with coughs and colds and that sort of thing so during those long periods he started to write he wrote a few letters to newspapers and a few short articles but he had aspirations to write a novel after several early rejections Holmes appeared for the first time in a 200 page novel with the title a Study in Scarlet Conan Doyle found an unusual outlet for its debut the 1887 edition of the colourful Beaton's Christmas annual it was one of the highlights of the 1887 annual and it was from there that he was approached by Australian magazine too to go and actually make the Sherlock Holmes stories the Holmes stories had come at the right time and the readership grew rapidly setting Conan Doyle and his creation on course to making publishing history well I'm walking along at the wing pole Street off the merrily burn road and here on the left is number two upper Wimpole Street because was here that Colin dog set himself up as an eye specialist but his patients were conspicuous by their absence so he sat there waiting for them to arrive he began tinkering with the characters of Holmes and Watson and this really is an important address as far as both Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes are concerned because although perhaps not the birthplace of Sherlock Holmes this is certainly the location where Sherlock Holmes began to mature and very quickly the circulation climbed to 500,000 and then the real proof emerged when publisher after a publisher had to have their family magazines so in fact an entirely new world was created by Sherlock Holmes in a whole series of ways he didn't think much of any of the other murder mystery story tellers out and he was the first one who tried to construct it properly and tried to do the characterization sir and definitely was the public feedback that just grew and grew and grew and made him so popular by the time Conan Doyle was serializing Sherlock Holmes in the Strand The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901 and then later with the valley of fear people were so hooked they made sure they didn't miss an episode in that sense really Conan Doyle prefigures some of the modern soaps not only had Conan Doyle arguably created the soap opera they had also definitely created a new kind of fiction the Sherlock Holmes stories were the beginning of detective stories as a genre and they were in their way the beginning of what we see now mostly on television the modern day detective fiction novel and play or television series is mainly based on the formula put forward by current oil not just the fact that it's two characters it's also the fact of the deductive reasoning and so on without that you probably wouldn't have the very popular CSI series it certainly wouldn't be unfair to say is the father of pop the Godfather of all modern detective fiction the new innovation of the detective story was taking the literary world by storm in a world filled with the likes of Edgar Allen Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson they may have all used detective characters and the mystery story to bring their works to life yet many are now forgotten it was the original quality of Sherlock Holmes that would give birth of the coming revolution in literature based on mystery and detective work watzmann and homes were the first detective pair and since then virtually every other successful detective has been a pair cuarón Hastings and foods often sit no they must be descendants of homes and and Watson Jen me the the formula these days is to have a detective pair one clever one not so clever however conan doyle's likeable and believable characters are matched by equally unlikable characters careful studies of the darker manifestations of human nature what was it in Victorian society or indeed Conan Doyle that creating characters like Moriarty when they based on some perceived evil in society that the writer had identified these are villains that are as full-blooded as lifelike as the hero himself it's also very significant that the villains are normally middle class around socratic figures the ruffian what the blunderbuss is not the problem it figures who should be helping to make society keep society faith who would in fact exploiting and destroying it Moriarty is something of a a mythical figure he's always there on the edge but he's not evil although Holmes I think describes him as evil what really seems to have inspired Conan Doyle to depict thoroughly bad characters is actually domestic violence the probable influence of his own father's alcoholism and any violence that that might have given rise to a within his own family and we do see that in the the stories and that is actually more horrifying certainly to Lee the present-day reader than Professor Moriarty is ingenious schemes I do think there is certainly better link though because people in those times they weren't so sophisticated and there was great superstitious the general public who wanted to believe in things like ghosts and spectral hounds and so on so there I think it did feed upon what the public either expected existed or or hoped might exist it seems then that what made him such a phenomenon as the Edwardian age dawned was that the stories had captured a popular mood and that most could identify strongly with the adventures of Holmes and Watson there was certainly an appetite in the Republic for horrible murders the horror the apparently motiveless evil of the Jack the Ripper murders Holmes was present not as an escapist figure not telling escapist stories but saying there are bad things happening but they can be dealt with and the stories are full of social tragedy things that Holmes can only explain and tragedies which he cannot remedy that's one of the great things about the stories they don't try to give you simply an entry into a world which doesn't exist then you have a whole host of villains all of which are perfectly characterized and perfectly painted for the reader so they can actually believe in these characters and again it's because they were so believable that when he was killed off that people thought he was a real person and more they armbands in in the street in his memory [Music] it's not difficult to imagine the readership of The Strand Magazine walking around their London picking up their latest history to read Holmes's latest adventures in a familiar setting that they knew and understood [Music] and such was his popularity that within a matter of months homes it eclipsed his creator and it would be the fictitious Sherlock Holmes who would go on to achieve immortality leaving his author with a dilemma the question is having created this whole world of characters and in particular having created the character of Sherlock Holmes why did he choose to kill him off to murder his own creation Doyle was enjoying the newfound fame and financial success yet as a writer was frustrated that his life was being devoted to and overwhelmed by the all-powerful Holmes character he wanted to write serious fiction by late 1891 Conan Doyle was growing tired of his creation and the parallel existence of the Sherlock Holmes character with his own line perhaps feeling that Holmes was overshadowing his more serious work I mean the character did take over Conan Doyle's life without a doubt Conan Doyle certainly had high aspirations for his writing the character of the first Sherlock Holmes over took the life of corndog for some Conan Doyle was perhaps not a writer in the grand tradition and his Holmes creation had led him into the pulp fiction category in this sense it's not hard to understand her Holmes could have become bigger than he thought I would say again I'll be contemptuously they wasn't a literary person I don't he hardly read any other books at all even though we have a lot library I'm not actually sure he read anything I don't think he was well-read person from what is known of his life and his influences three possible reasons emerg for the writers motivation in removing Holmes from his life the simple answer would perhaps relate to his feelings about himself as an author the first reasons being his ambition to do something a little more interesting the second could be about his need to confront his own possible shortcomings as a truly great writer Conan Doyle wants to be remembered not for this fictional creation but more for his historical novels his historical writing his more serious work and I think that's probably why he wanted to kill him off and was quite ambitious for himself so although these books had made him a good career of money he then wanted to go on and had higher aspirations Conan Doyle was very pleased with his creation but he felt certainly from halfway through the first series of short stories that the home stories were hackwork they brought in the money what he really wanted to do was to write stories of chivalry of derring-do this is the sort of thing that he thought was really important the third argument is perhaps more complex than the obvious namely that he was tired of the character could it be that the darker aspect of his life was somehow bound up with his Holmes character in a way that his creator could no longer tolerate overwhelmed by the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon Conan Doyle was finally rejecting his dark alter-ego and his early life experiences there was perhaps just one other reason there was I think nothing in Sherlock Holmes which Colin Doyle really disliked but the stories are written unbelievably close to the surface Conan Doyle wrote them at full steam he made very few alterations in most of them after he had written them that means that they were actually reflecting his own life much more perhaps than we realized it's apparent that Conan Doyle was writing about the more difficult sides of his own life when he writes of alcoholism drug addiction and violence it's not surprising therefore that having spoken of them he should wish to dispose of them permanently through his fictional character even before he finished writing the first dozen stories he told his mother that he wanted the last one to be absolutely the last he wanted to kill Holmes off his mother said you can't you must you shouldn't she knew a good thing when she saw awhile however his mother's words went unheeded his creator was about to make the biggest decision of his career Conan Doyle was rapidly coming to the conclusion that he must kill Sherlock Holmes but how would he carry out the murder deciding on a radical solution to his dilemma Conan Doyle wrote to his mother informing her how he intended winding him up for good and all he takes my mind from better things Conan Doyle did in fact write a second series and at the end of it he was absolutely determined to get rid of Sherlock Holmes in the final problem published in The Strand in December 1893 Holmes encountered Professor Moriarty his archenemy for the last time in a mutually fatal showdown having been on a holiday to Switzerland he was introduced to the famous halls at Brighton backwards thought would make a splendid resting place for poor Sherlock [Music] however getting rid of homes and not to prove as easy as he had first land he said that he fully intended to leave him there quote even if I buried my banking account along with him and the public of course were not happy with that at all the decision was to RuPt the Victorian public to the core after the final problem had gone to print Doyle received letters from distraught readers in tears they could not let Holmes go when Holmes was killed off in the final problem actual some of the city workers went down London wearing black armbands in memory of Sherlock Holmes thinking that he was a real character and the sales australia zine then plummeted members of the world family was said to be distraught there was a mass revolt from the general public with the Strand Magazine and Conan Doyle as their targets what is certainly true is that the publisher the editor and the author received angry letters from readers Conan Doyle gleefully quotes one in his autobiography from a lady it began you the fears of conan doyle's mother was soon realized as 20,000 readers cancelled their strand magazine subscription outraged by the death of their detective era Conan Doyle was overwhelmed by the reaction however he was soon to be distracted from this public uproar by personal tragedy which would shake the author's world to its foundations his wife Louisa was diagnosed with tuberculosis Conan Doyle chose to nurse er himself and his dedication and devotion kept her alive into the 20th century but this be only the first in a series of blows for the writer with the death of his father Charles and later his son Kingsley in the Great 1914-18 war it may have been these combined stresses that sowed the seeds for the author's new passion for the occult and spiritualism the belief that the spirits of the dead can communicate with the living or as he termed it life beyond the veil seeking comfort for these personal tragedies he became one of its greatest exponents but the next development of his life was to prove that he was still on top of his game as the supreme writer of detective fiction for the next eight years doyle excluded holmes from his life and concentrated on his other work but in 1901 he had an idea for perhaps his most legendary work to date one that would leave its mark for generations to come but this novel needed a detective he didn't want to create a new character why not news Holmes the Hound of the Baskervilles was a landslide success and remains one of the most frequently performed stories today what he didn't do there was bring Holmes back to life he presented the Hound of the Baskervilles as an adventure that had occurred before the events at Reichenbach Falls an American publisher said name your figure so Conan Doyle named a figure that he thought was way too high and would just send the American publisher packing and the publisher turned around and said fine when are you going to send the first one this maker and all I think it's still true today the highest paid author per word in existence he might have been they were taken out I guess by JK Rowling but so there's very few others who can make that claim the hounds reception showed the passion for this great detective was as strong as ever inevitably the story was so popular it was suggested that he might actually think about bringing poems back to life but after all as someone pointed out he provided Holmes with a death that didn't require a body to be produced finally Conan Doyle surrendered to the public demand for more home stories in 1903 he resurrected homes in the empty house with an explanation of how homes had not really plunged into the Falls after all well there's one or two opinions on the significance of the the mystery years or the great hiatus as is known about to explain the absence Conan Doyle had homes going off by himself meeting the denying armor and doing various other things for crown heads of Europe and so on and basically we could say going to find himself having a sabbatical for a few years but in reality Holmes had never really gone away shortly before his reimagines an entrepreneurial American actor William Gillette expressed an interest in reviving the Holmes character by playing the part on stage however Gillette wanted to update the story and with some apprehension he wrote to Conan Doyle humbly putting forward some minor changes William Gillette met with rotor Conan Doyle and said may I marry Sherlock Holmes off colonel was so disinterested by this time he said you may do with him you know whatever you want to do and he did this reaction to Gillette seems to suggest the continuing complex relationship which Conan Doyle had with the character he had created when the actor arrived in England and met with Doyle to read the almost completely revised play to him Conan Doyle gave him his full attention and as the meeting drew to a close spent a moment in thought his announcement is as revealing as it is contradictory it's good to see the old chap again I think Conan Doyle's relationship with his character setting towards the end of his life was more on Jekyll and Hyde relationship on the one side he probably quite loved the character because it gave him power it made him well-known it gave him money of course but on the other side if the attractive only really wanted to do which was the spiritualism and his historical writings and so on so it was very much a double-edged sword for him and a love-hate relationship this was 1914 Conan Doyle could not have known that the fictional world he had created was soon to be eclipsed by tragedy and the old order that the writer had known was to be lost in the trenches of northern France with the outbreak of World War Conan Doyle's personal life was to be tragically changed it was to the spiritualist movement the Conan Doyle would turn a game interest in spiritualism didn't really flourish I suppose until after the great war when both his son Kingsley and his brother Ennis were killed particularly because after World War one he was so much aware of the people who had died because of it including his son and his brother he did a lot of traveling athos spiritualism he went to Australia to America giving lectures he could write a story get a good income from it and then plough it back into what he really believed was his main purpose in life to extend the message of spiritualism Condors legacy was to extend far beyond that which he could have imagined in creating for the homes character through just a series of short adventure stories he had given birth to a new popular culture brought one of the most enduring heroes to a new generation of readers and brought the science of deduction into the 20th century had this resolved his demons could Holmes now be left to fade away into obscurity when he said that Holmes had retired to Sussex to keep these Conan Doyle himself received letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes care of Arthur Conan Doyle Condor continued writing Sherlock Holmes toys from time to time almost for the end of his life it was a mood of resigned acceptance he would write a story and accept whatever figure slightly deranged publishers were willing to give him for it having murdered Holmes in the final problem then resurrecting him and restoring him to public adoration he decided simply to let his hero retire gracefully from London mirroring the author's own life at this time for the world's greatest detective long walks on the Sussex Downs and beekeeping would become the activities of Holmes's later years and by 1927 Conan Doyle had decided that it was time for his creation to take his last bath as he pinned the last lines of the adventure of sjostrom old place it was clear that he had finally we read at the great homes adventure he broke it off leaving the public wanting much more he wasn't going to become a soap manufacturer he wanted to give in to new ways of writing and did when the final stories were published in book form as the casebook of Sherlock Holmes Conan Doyle added his own farewell to his creation I fear that mr. Sherlock Holmes may have become like one of those popular tenors who having outlived their time are still tempted to make repeated farewell vows to their indulgent audiences this must cease and he must go the way of all flesh material or imaginary he died on July the 7th 1930 anew York newspaper devoted its front page tip and treated its readers to the unintentionally humorous medline Conan Doyle dies of Sherlock Holmes Fame but it was the Daily Herald that delivered the most memorable announcement confirming for many the extraordinary relationship that had now been established between author and creation had left behind him and enduring and substantial legacy the four novels and 56 short stories about his fictional detective ironically his other writings are for the most part forgotten it is perhaps significant whenever I wanted to honor the birth of its favorite son here on Piketty place they chose not a statue of Arthur Conan Doyle but a statue of his creation Sherlock Holmes in death as in life Conan Doyle was overshadows are eclipsed by his famous creation indeed with a cruel twist of irony given that Charles's childhood was blighted by his father's alcoholism the only true memorial to the birth of Conan Doyle here aside from the rather nondescript plaque on the wall is on the other side of the road where we have a pub called the Conan Doyle we're still faced with the fact that today people will think of Sherlock Holmes without thinking of Conan Doyle it is unfair without Conan Doyle there would have been no Sherlock Holmes what is about this eccentric 19th century detective that made him so unique what is that extraordinary quality that makes him such a phenomenon and why is he still relevant even today but it is about him that still has the ability to hold our attention and pull in 21st century audiences with blockbuster movies and TV programs all over the world it's curious I suppose that a character who was created more than 120 years ago should still be popular and still considered relevant he's something of a bohemian which appeals to the rebel in all of us for the Victorian audience Sherlock Holmes was seen in advance of his time ahead of his time in his deductions and his mannerisms and so on for an audience in the 21st century it's very much the reverse he's seen as a link back in time to another perhaps better time as people would perceive it but where his values and where his instincts and where his deductions are equally valid now as they were then despite the fashions that Sherlock Holmes raised over his fictional lifetime in the years that have followed and as interest in the stories of grown a growing number of may claims that there was a real Holmes the man of course is fictional this at least seems certain although there is a world that wills him to exist we're attracted I think to something that safely dangerous safely because it's back in the past safely also because we know that Sherlock Holmes is there and he'll get us out of it whilst mystery and intrigue still surrounds The Legend of Sherlock Holmes there is something in these stories that makes the reader try to dig beneath the surface to discover for themselves something larger than the stories perhaps the reason is simple Doyle or Watson was a marvellous storyteller the original Holmes adventures are still bestsellers and have been translated into more than 50 languages the legend has evolved and taken on a life of its own at the same time ensuring an unusual afterlife for both Holmes and his creator tourists still make their pilgrimage to Baker Street searching for the actual home of the great detective but why do they still come and pay homage to homes and by default current oil there is the fact that for modern audiences and modern readers and scholars they were use it as a window looking back in time at the almost perfect characterization of the Victorian period the types of characters places and how things actually worked in Victorian society modern life over the last century or so has lost a lot of the certainties that we had before now you don't know what's going to happen in the next year five years and you don't really know who you can trust either and moving back to look for Sherlock Holmes who is going to solve the problem and save the world it's quite a comforting thing to do there is clearly something of Conan Doyle about Sherlock Holmes maybe it's just his humanity the combination of the light and the dark together something perhaps central to the makeup of every human there is a little bit of Sherlock Holmes in assault and there's also a little bit of us that would like to be transported back to this Victorian ear of the fog filled streets and so on where everything was exciting we had a British Empire was in its full strip in this little veneer as it were a restore Victorian respectability that they would like to inhabit but would Conan Doyle have been gratified by the immortality of his character in the face of his attempts to dispose of him I wouldn't know the answer to that but there is something endearing about hold I suppose and Watson to a couple of good friends who solve problems and it seems that it's a formula that dials stuck on and it worked but the main relevance really is in the character of Sherlock Holmes that I've said the the Bohemian the man we would perhaps all like to be whether he was aiming for such a close relationship is debatable however some do see Sherlock Holmes as : doors voice on humanity whether the author liked it or not Sherlock Holmes continues to live I think most of all because when you get right down to it human beings know that what differentiates them from animals are their mind and search relic Holmes is the celebration of mind it is turning mind into a fascinating believable likable admirable figure so long as we are going to be able to maintain ourselves as human beings Sherlock Holmes seems justifiably likely to enjoy when we respond to Sherlock Holmes perhaps the truth is that we are responding to Condor Conan Doyle may have been the man who murdered Sherlock Holmes but both character and author live on in the minds of those who continue to read his works [Music]

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 35,935

Rating: 4.805263 out of 5

Keywords: history history documentary funny history fun history school, timeline, sherlock holmes, sir arthur conan doyle, classic movies, dr. watson, tv series, absolute history, the man who murdered sherlock holmes, mystery books on audio, mystery books to read, victorian era, victorian murders documentary, victorian murders, victorian murders london, london documentary, london documentary national geographic

Id: A7kb2kn9fZs

Length: 57min 45sec (3465 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 07 2019