dreadful penmanship. Late in the Canon, Watson is very bold about addressing his audience directly, as when he uses the introductory paragraph of “The Veiled Lodger” to announce that a certain story will be made public if illicit attempts to get at his papers are not abandoned. By that time, the relationship between Holmes and Watson is one of equals, the author having an established position just as the detective has. Holmes himself observes that “I am lost without my Boswell,” alluding to James Boswell, the companion and biographer of the eighteenth-century figure Dr. Samuel Johnson. Certainly Holmes without Watson is far different, far less comprehensible, the forlorn eccentric of “The Lion’s Mane” with no one to narrate the tales — and, more important, no one to serve as reliable setting for his sparkling gem.
Watson has been called “boobus Britannicus,” a phrase originated by Edmund Pearson (in The Bookman, 1932), who blamed illustrator Arthur Keller for making Watson look truly stupid. That was before Nigel Bruce’s bumbling portrayal in the 1940s films where he is made a constant fool, the better to set off Basil Rathbone’s Holmes. But the original Watson is no boob. Holmes is perhaps generous in telling Watson that “though you are not yourself luminous, you are a conductor of light,” but beyond doubt Watson is a man of common sense — as a physician, and certainly an army doctor, must be — and of courage as well as other good qualities which Holmes often recognizes. He may patronize Watson for lacking intellect to match his own, sometimes descending to cruelty, but it seems clear in most of the stories that he also respects Watson’s judgement. A passage in The Valley of Fear is particularly telling. Holmes has spun an elaborate web of speculation about the case, and Watson is doubtful:
“We have only their word for that.”
Holmes looked thoughtful. “I see, Watson. You are sketching out a theory by which everything they say from the beginning is false.... Well, that is a good sweeping generalization. Let us see what that brings us to....”
Watson proves to be wrong and Holmes right, of course, but the mutual respect remains. Holmes also finds his companion valuable as a reliable ally in time of emergency, the man who carries the gun in several crises and who will keep his wits about him. Indeed, there is more. At the end of “The Abbey Grange” he addresses his friend: “Watson, you are a British jury, and I never met a man who was more eminently fitted to represent one.” Readers of the stories have generally agreed, as did Edgar W. Smith in one of his eloquent editorials in the Baker Street Journal (1955), observing that it is the admirable Watson, rather than the unpredictable Holmes, who would make the more welcome friend. He may be ancestor of a hundred foolish companions to brilliant detectives (a cliché which also owes something to early Westerns), but he is himself an very fine fellow.
Biographical details about Watson are few. Of his family, the reader hears only about the “unhappy brother” whose alcoholism and death are chronicled in the early pages of The Sign of the Four. Watson took his medical degree in 1878 from the University of London (which validated credentials earned through hospital study, rather than providing medical instruction of its own), entered the army, and served in the Second Afghan War. British troops were in Afghanistan for the defence and consolidation of the Empire, and in particular to deter Russia from menacing India through the mountains. A treaty signed in 1879 with local puppet rulers got little respect from the heavily armed populace, and a powerful force massed in the spring of 1880. As Watson reports in A Study in Scarlet, he was wounded at the Battle of Maiwand, which took place July 27, 1880, about fifty miles northwest of Kandahar. It was an utter rout for the British; he was unusually lucky to survive in the slaughter and terrible heat, and to be carried to Kandahar in safety and eventually returned to England. Maiwand (2008) by Richard J. Stackpoole Ryding tells the story of the battle but somehow omits any reliable explanation of how Watson was injured. Although he claims that the Jezail bullet which hit him struck his shoulder and grazed the subclavian artery, there are references in later Canonical tales to a wound in his leg, or in one instance to an injured Achilles tendon. A number of Sherlockians have tried to reconcile all those references, suggesting two wounds, a faulty memory, malingering, or a bullet with an ingeniously complicated trajectory.
Repatriated to England, Watson soon met Holmes (on January 1, 1881, according to at least some scholars) and took up residence with him at 221B Baker Street. He remained there, apparently, for about seven years, until his marriage to Mary Morstan, at the end of The Sign of the Four. Thereafter, in several cases that are part of The Adventures, Watson is clearly living with a long-suffering wife, presumably Mary, and has entered private medical practice. Repeatedly he leaves Mary (and turns over the practice to an accommodating colleague, Jackson or Anstruther) briefly to accompany Holmes on some adventure. But by the time of “The Empty House,” which takes place in 1894, Watson has suffered a bereavement, and is free to move into the old rooms again, abandoning medicine for biography, when Holmes returns to London after a three-year absence. Still later, in “The Blanched Soldier,” Holmes speaks of Watson having “deserted me for a wife,” and one infers a second marriage.
Sherlockians traditionally drink a toast to “Dr. Watson’s second wife,” and a number of them have tried to identify her. The chronology is impossibly complicated, with inconsistencies that can be attributed to Watson’s muddled thinking or, more realistically, to Doyle’s complete indifference to such details. Of course it is more fun for Sherlockians to speculate that, as one of them has put it, “Watson had as many wives as Henry VIII.”
The fair sex is his department, as Holmes says; but he is chivalrous about it, and decent in every way. (Rex Stout’s article “Watson Was a Woman,” in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1941 and the anthology Profile by Gaslight three years later, was only a joke.) He seems to be the ideal Britisher, whom the author holds up to the reader as the measure of the less conventional Holmes. Indeed, one might say, he seems to be the author’s representative. Says Peter Costello in The Real World of Sherlock Holmes (1991): “Dr. Watson, whatever other models he may have had in real life, such as Conan Doyle’s own secretary Major Wood, is largely drawn from Doyle himself. For a start both are medical men of much the same age with sporting interests. Both have a bluff, hearty appearance. Both seem conventional, Imperialist in politics, non-intellectual men of action. Dr. Watson even shares Conan Doyle’s love for Southsea, and his literary tastes.” If Holmes is Arthur Conan Doyle’s mentor, Joseph Bell, surely Watson is Doyle himself.
PROFESSOR JAMES MORIARTY. For all the reputation he has developed as Holmes’s arch-enemy, Professor James (if that was in fact his given name) Moriarty figures in only three stories — in “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House,” with complementary narratives of the events surrounding his death, and briefly in The Valley of Fear. Countless cartoonists and parodists have drawn Moriarty into their creations; such respectable Holmesians as the producers of the Granada television series of the 1980s have succumbed to the temptation to expand his role, for example making Moriarty the genius behind the events of “The Red-Headed League,” an idea for which there is no justification in the original story.
Moriarty is presented, in “The Final Problem” and the second chapter of The Valley of Fear, as the master-criminal behind “half that is evil and ... nearly all that is undetected” in London:
He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed — the word is passed to the professor, the matter is organized and carried out.
In short, Moriarty is the modern Jonathan Wild, a successor to the criminal leader who operated in London at the beginning of the eighteenth century (born in 1683, he was hanged in 1725) and
