Stevenson's 'mutilated villains'; and the central crime, the murder o f Bartholomew
Sholto, is a re-working of the 'sealed-room' mystery taken from Poe's
'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (1841). There were, however, also a number
of innovations and developments. Besides making the technical improvements
oudined in the letter, and shifting the love interest from the background of the
vengeance plot to the foregrounded detective quest, he also reinvented
Holmes as a sophisticated, and philosophically inclined, virtuoso, thereby
setding the ambiguides of ^ Study and, as Roden suggests, tailoring his hero for
a 'wider and more reputable readership'."" I n a letter to Ronald Knox of 5
July 1912, Conan Doyle noted that, while Holmes 'never shows heart', he
changed entirely as the stories went on. In the first one . . . he was a mere calculating
machine, but I had to make him more of an educated human beinj; as I went on with
h i m . ' "
I n The Sipi, Holmes's humanizing education took two forms. First, Conan
Doyle dropped the idea of h im as a narrow specialist, and gave him the
cultural credentials of an educated member of the late-Victorian middle class.
I n this new incarnation. Holmes is able, for instance, to explain Carlyle's
indebtedness to German Romanticism, to quote philosophical maxims from
Goethe, and to recommend Winwood Reade's 'daring' secularist work The
Martyrdom of Man to Watson."^ Here Conan Doyle simply projected his own
educated tastes onto Holmes. I n the 1880s he had himself discussed Carlyle
and Reade in letters to local Portsmouth newspapers and at meetings of the
Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society."* His second approach was less
direcdy personal. Writing i n the month after his dinner with Wilde, and his
first brush with the i88os avant-garde, he decided to incorporate a comic
portrait of an aesthete into his story in the figure of Thaddeus Sholto. Though
the fictional aesthete bears some slight physical resemblance to Wilde, his 'very
high head' and bald scalp, his luxurious Oriental decor, his collection of
European wines and paintings, and his suburban address, make h im more like
a popular caricature than the real t h i n g . " * I n a less satirical spirit, Conan
Doyle at the same time chose to emphasize Holmes's bohemian tendencies by
investing h im w i t h the borrowed prestige of advanced and mildly decadent
c u l t u r e . " * While A Study had opened widi an imposing portrait of the Bell-like
hero as an eccentric man of science, its sequel begins with an equally dramatic
image of h im as a Wildean Aesthete. At the outset, he is figured as a worldweary
cocaine (and morphine) addict, who abhors the 'dull routine of
existence', and later, during a dinner with Watson, he is shown to be a
'brilliant' conversationalist."* Though the solitary and reserved specialist-
Holmes oiA Study had been 'communicative enough' at times, he is now able
to 'talk exceedingly well' when he chooses on a wide range of arcane subjects,
including 'miracle plays', 'medieval pottery', 'Stradivarius violins', 'the Buddhism
of Ceylon' and 'the warships of the f u t u r e ' . ' " (In his autobiography,
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