ABSTRACT
In his Preface to the last collection of Holmes stories, Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927), Doyle surveyed the long career of London’s great consulting detective and his devoted biographer, Dr John H. Watson. Establishing the chronology of that ‘broken series’ of appear ances that constituted Holmes’s forty-year history, Doyle remarked on the faulty memory of a male readership who saw Holmes as an un changing continuum of masculine presence in British culture. He says of Holmes:
In presenting Holmes as an inaccuracy as well as a continuity in the memory of his male readers, Doyle formally inscribes those small de fects of masculine recall which had signed his own absentminded authorship since The Sign of Four. Inconsistencies in the factual records of Holmes’s biographer have fascinated his readers almost as much as the detective puzzles they solve. The bullet wound received by John H. Watson in the shoulder at the fatal battle of Maiwand, but later remem bered as afflicting his leg, or even - as his wedding approached - one of his other members, is the most notorious example of those memory problems which affect the biographer and historian of nineteenthcentury manhood. Holmes is intimately associated with inaccurate recall, both the slips and substitutions of the common intelligence and the
erasures and repressions of painful memory. Without his alphabetical encyclopedias, the numerous bodies of information which pass through 22IB Baker Street would become an unorganized narrative, whose post-modern chaos threatens the structure of memory itself. Through the crisis years of 1880 to 1930, this was a structure whose centre, British masculinity, just about holds.
