Baring-Gould believes that the detective first sought solace in the drug following his nervous collapse in “The Reigate Squires,” which probably occurred in April 1887. In that story, Watson notes Holmes’s “strain caused by his immense exertions in the spring of ’87” (in an unrecounted case involving the mysterious Netherlands-Sumatra Company) and describes arriving at his sickroom to find the detective exhausted, bored, and “a prey to the blackest depression.” But Dr. Charles Goodman concludes that Holmes first took to cocaine neither from weakness nor from boredom but from toothache, as a chronic sufferer from pyorrhea.

In “The Missing Three-Quarter,” generally accepted as occurring in 1896 or 1897, Watson describes his efforts to rehabilitate Holmes: “For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus; but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead, but sleeping; and I have known that the sleep was a light one and the waking near when in periods of idleness I have seen the drawn look upon Holmes’s ascetic face, and the brooding of his deep-set and inscrutable eyes.”

Not all scholars accept the notion that Holmes used recreational drugs. Dr. George F. McCleary arrives at the conclusion that despite Watson’s statement in The Sign of Four that he had witnessed Holmes inject himself three times daily “for many months,” in fact, Holmes was never a drug addict but was deliberately deceiving Watson. He bases this conclusion on the “evidence” of Holmes’s skill with makeup and disguise and his personality traits (that is, that Holmes does not fit the “profile” of the common drug user), concluding that Holmes was playing a joke on Watson and that whatever he did inject was not cocaine. Interesting as this theory is, McCleary offers no motivation for this cruel joke. Michael Harrison, on the other hand, asserts that Watson’s descriptions of Holmes—his restlessness, ability to work for days without adequate sleep, and even without rest at all, abrupt changes of mood, and abrupt collapses into somnolence—“are the unmistakable evidence of heavy and prolonged indulgence in some powerful narcotic.”

A more moderate view, shared by Dr. Eugene F. Carey (“Holmes, Watson and Cocaine”) and Edgar W. Smith (“Up from the Needle”), is that Holmes was, in Carey’s words, a “judicious user.” Smith concludes that “he was never a slave to the vice in the clinical sense of the term, for … he was always able to cast off the spell, and to find inspiration in the exhilaration of the chase.”

56 Despite Watson’s description of Holmes as “excessively lean” and possessed of a “hawk-like” nose, Richard Asher believes that Holmes was, with the exception of his heavily tobacco-stained teeth, “enormously attractive to women.” He was, Asher asserts, “a man endowed with all those gifts mental, physical and social which should have made him a success with women.” He buttresses this conclusion by noting Holmes’s effect on Mary Morstan (The Sign of Four), Irene Adler (“A Scandal in Bohemia”), Mrs. Neville St. Clair (“The Man with the Twisted Lip”), Violet Hunter (“The Copper Beeches”), and of course Agatha the housemaid (“Charles Augustus Milverton”), all of whom, Asher asserts, were tangibly drawn to Holmes.

The earliest known illustration of Holmes (reproduced here) belies this picture of Holmes as physically attractive, although there is no evidence that the illustration was drawn from life. The drawings of Charles Doyle, father of Arthur Conan Doyle, who must have met Holmes, depict him even less handsomely (as may be seen here, here and here), although the low point of Holmesian portraiture must be the Charles Kerr illustration for The Sign of Four reproduced here. Not until Sidney Paget took up his pen and began to illustrate the Adventures was Holmes depicted in a way that may be viewed as attractive. Unfortunately, it is well known that Paget used his brother Walter as his model; Holmes himself was in Tibet and points east.

57 An archaic term for scientific instruments.

58 Although there is no mention in the Canon of Holmes obtaining a degree, it is clear that he participated in the “learned world” and contributed a number of scholarly monographs to various fields. Most scholars agree that Holmes attended one of the great universities, either Oxford or Cambridge, although a few suggest that he attended both, and several scholars propose a supplemental course at London University. The intricacies of the arguments, depending heavily on the culture of each of the schools, are well beyond the scope of this work. Notwithstanding his partiality, Nicholas Utechin, long editor of the Sherlock Holmes Journal, published by the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, has produced a fine work entitled Sherlock Holmes at Oxford, which affords an excellent summary of the arguments.

59 Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was a British historian and essayist, born in Scotland and heavily influenced by German writers such as Goethe. Carlyle, who taught mathematics and studied law, sharply criticized hypocrisy and materialism, and Holmes might have admired his firm belief that heroic leaders were integral to the shaping and altering of world events. Writing in a strange, almost violent style comprising unusual words and phrases, frenetic rhythms, and German-influenced expressions, Carlyle published several major works, including the three-volume The French Revolution (1837), the public lecture On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), and the biography History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (1858–1865). He also wrote biographies of Friedrich von Schiller, Oliver Cromwell, and John Sterling.

Despite Watson’s statement here, few scholars believe that the knowledgeable Holmes was actually unaware of Carlyle’s work. In My Dear Holmes, Gavin Brend suggests that Holmes may have pleaded ignorance of Carlyle in an attempt to get Watson to leave him alone. Brend writes that “probably it was at a time when Holmes wanted to give his whole attention to a case, as yet unsolved, and simply could not be bothered to be drawn into a discussion about Carlyle or anything else.” Christopher Morley proposes that Holmes’s inquiry was made on the date of Carlyle’s death: February 5, 1881. Holmes’s pretence of ignorance of Carlyle is not long maintained (see note 115, below). In The Sign of Four, Holmes remarks on Watson’s reading of Carlyle with no suggestion that he has not himself read Carlyle’s work.

60 The Copernican theory (or system), established by Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus, held that the sun remained in a fixed position and that the planets revolved around it; in addition, Copernicus proposed that the Earth rotated on its own axis once every day. His depiction of the heavens represented a slight but significant deviation from the Ptolemaic system, which placed the Earth, not the sun, at the centre of the universe. Although Copernicus wrote up his theory between 1508 and 1514, it was published, as De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI (Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs), only in 1543, the year of his death.