Sherlock holmes who is

If several explanations presented themselves, he tried test after test until one or other of them had a convincing amount of support BLAN , He said it was necessary to find that line of least resistance which should be the starting-point of every investigation EMPT , He warned that it's a bad habit to form provisional theories and wait for time or fuller knowledge to explode them SUSS , He told the first rule of criminal investigation: "one should always look for a possible alternative and provide against it" BLAC , When a fact appeared to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of hearing some other interpretation STUD , Holmes had an old maxim that « When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Holmes said that: « Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing, it may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different BOSC , 77 ; but circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example.

Seclusion and solitude were very necessary for Sherlock Holmes in those hours of intense mental concentration during which he weighed every particle of evidence, constructed alternative theories, balanced one against the other, and made up his mind as to which points were essential and which immaterial HOUN For examples of deductions see each stories. Holmes said that breadth of view is one of the essentials of the detective profession, and the interplay of ideas and the oblique uses of knowledge are often of extraordinary interest VALL , For him, all knowledge comes useful to the detective VALL , His studies were very desultory and eccentric, but he had amassed a lot of out-of-the-way knowledge which would have astonish his professors STUD , He was an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles LION , He had a passion for definite and exact knowledge STUD , He thought that the ideal reasoner would, when he has once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it, but also all the results which would follow from it FIVE , And that it was not so impossible that a man to possess all knowledge which is likely to be useful to him in his work, and this he endeavoured to do FIVE , He hold a vast store of out-of-the-way knowledge, without scientific system, but very available for the needs of his work.

His mind was like a crowded boxroom with packets of all sorts stowed away therein - so many that he might well have but a vague perception of what was there LION , It was one of the peculiarities of his proud, self-contained nature that, though he docketed any fresh information very quickly and accurately in his brain, he seldom made any acknowledgement to the giver SUSS , He said that a man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it FIVE , Holmes told Inspector MacDonald that the most practical thing he could do in his life would be to shut himself up for three months and read twelve hours a day at the annals of crime VALL Holmes would have made an actor, and a rare one SIGN , His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed.

He had the thoroughness of the true artist DYIN , He had at least five small refuges in different parts of London in which he was able to change his personality. BLAC , Holmes thought it is the first quality of a criminal investigator that he should see through a disguise HOUN , but he failed to recognise Jefferson Hope disguised as Mrs. A doddering opium smoker TWIS.

An elderly book-collector EMPT. Holmes worked rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth SPEC , 1. Like all great artists, he lived for his art's sake, and, save in the case of the Duke of Holdernesse, he seldom claimed any large reward for his inestimable services BLAC , 2.

His professional charges were upon a fixed scale, and he did not vary them, save when he remitted them altogether THOR , He told to his client, Helen Stoner, his profession was his reward; but she was at liberty to defray whatever expenses she may be put to, at the time which suits her best SPEC , Blunders was a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew him through the Watson's memoirs SILV , In , Holmes confessed he has been beaten four times: three times by men and once by a woman FIVE , During the long period of continuous work, some cases have baffled Holmes' analytical skill FIVE 3 , a few unavoidable failures SOLI , 3 ans some were complete failures, and as such will hardly bear narrating, since no final explanation is forthcoming THOR , 3.

However, Watson published two cases where Holmes failed :. He was likely to fall into error through the over-refinement of his logic - his preference for a subtle and bizarre explanation when a plainer and more commonplace one lay ready to his hand SIGN , It seemed a certainty when first it flashed across my mind in the cell at Winchester, but one drawback of an active mind is that one can always conceive alternative explanations which would make our scent a false one THOR , When a man has special knowledge and special powers like Holmes it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand ABBE , But he also chafed the police avoid recognition STUD.

When he went into a case, it was to help the ends of justice and the work of the police. If ever he had separated himself from the official force, it is because they have first separated themselves from me. He had no wish ever to score at their expense VALL. Though he was hard with others, he didn't spare himself. On his childhood and adolescence, we don't know anything. Except that in his two years at college he realized that a profession might be made out of what had up to that time been the merest hobby observation and deduction GOLD , The father of a classmate told the young Holmes that all the detectives of fact and of fancy would be children in his hands and that's it was his line of life GOLD , Then now and again cases came in his way, principally through the introduction of old fellow students, for during his last years at the university there was a good deal of talk there about him and his methods MUSG , His career started at that time.

And over a thousand cases by FINA , Moriarty died there and Holmes chose to disappear and make people think he is dead. He returned to active practice in EMPT. Between and he handled hundreds of private cases, some of them of the most intricate and extraordinary character, in which he played a prominent part. SOLI , 2. When he worked, he could stop eating. He told to Watson that: « The faculties become refined when you starve them.

What your digestion gains in the way of blood supply is so much lost to the brain. I am a brain. Therefore, it is the brain I must consider. In the spring of the year , Holmes's iron constitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of constant hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps, by occasional indiscretions of his own DEVI , 7.

During his retirement, he was crippled by occasional attacks of rheumatism. Holmes thought that love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to his true, cold reason which he placed above all things. He should never marry himself, lest it bias his judgment.

SIGN , He had an aversion to women GREE , 3. However, Holmes had, when he liked, a peculiarly ingratiating way with women, and that he very readily established terms of confidence with them GOLD He thought that the woman's heart and mind were insoluble puzzles to the male ILLU , He said their most trivial action could mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct could depend upon a hair-pin or a curling-tongs SECO , He has seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner TWIS , He valued a woman's instinct LION , He could use his seduction talents to woo, for example, the Milverton's housemaid Agatha which he engaged to her to collect datas on Milverton CHAS , The village of Minstead featured strongly in The White Company.

Conan Doyle turned to spiritualism following the deaths of several close family members around the time of the First World War. He was first buried in the grounds of his Crowborough estate and his widow was buried alongside him when she died 10 years later. By entering your email below you are consenting to us sending you newsletters. To unsubscribe, email communications newforestnpa. More info: www. We owe the looks of the great detective, to Sydney Paget, who took his "strikingly handsome" brother Walter as model, when he illustrated the Sherlock Holmes stories in The Strand Magazine.

His brother Walter was also an artist and had done work for the Illustrated London News. Paget the illustrator. Portrait of Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget inspired by his younger brother. Bernard Partridges cartoon for Punch in depicting Conan Doyle being taken over by his character.

The details of his death are unknown We owe the looks of the great detective, to Sydney Paget, who took his "strikingly handsome" brother Walter as model, when he illustrated the Sherlock Holmes stories in The Strand Magazine. Much of that world, of course, has been lost. The British Clean Air Act of would consign to history the coal-fueled fogs that shrouded many Holmes adventures and imbued them with menace. Even so, it is still possible to retrace many of the footsteps that Conan Doyle might have taken in London, to follow him from the muddy banks of the Thames to the Old Bailey and obtain a sense of the Victorian world he transmuted into art.

He first encountered london at the age of 15, while on a three-week vacation from Stonyhurst, the Jesuit boarding school to which his Irish Catholic parents consigned him in northern England. Conan Doyle viewed with fascination wax models of those who had died on the guillotine during the French Revolution as well as likenesses of British murderers and other arch-criminals.

While there, the young man sketched the death scene of French radical Jean-Paul Marat, stabbed in his bath at the height of the Revolution. Conan Doyle had been heavily influenced by Dr. Joseph Bell, whom he met at the Edinburgh Infirmary and whose diagnostic powers amazed his students and colleagues.

Auguste Dupin. John H. In the Victorian era, Baker Street went up to only number Conan Doyle was hardly a stickler for accuracy in his Holmes stories; he garbled some street names and invented others and put a goose seller in Covent Garden, then a flower and produce market. There are even arguments in favor of York Place.