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Holmes seems to have earned enough in the services of well-placed clients, to take on only a few cases, and still retire at a comparatively young age, to the country and his bees. His wits unimpaired, many believe his talents were called upon again and again by the grateful men who guided England's government.

(This is nonsense..Marigold)

Is Holmes still alive? Of course! He is as alive as anything in the Universe. His image is shared by millions!

The Holmes personality is dual: "extreme exactness, and poetic contemplativeness; extreme langour and devouring energy." He was possessed of a "catlike love of cleanliness, and a chin as smooth as linen," and untidy; "cigars in the coal scuttle and tobacco in the end of his Persian slipper. His fingers were perpetually stained with ink, chemicals and tobacco."

Holmes is an unsocialable character, discouraging visitors, and he was certainly not a ladies man. His habits are frugal and austere, and he often fasts to increase his mental powers. He has a robust sense of humor and can "laugh to the point of choking," although is sometimes possessed of the darkest of moods." "Capable of sensitivity at the appropriate time and place, he is a brain."

**I, Sherlock Holmes, by Michael Harrison. Memoirs of the late consulting private detective-in-ordinary, to their majesties Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, and King George V.

"You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love story or elopement into the Fifth Proposition of Euclid."

"I suppose, Watson, that we must look upon you as a man of letters."

"Your fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of view of a story."

"You have erred, perhaps, in attempting to put color and life into each of your statements."

"Love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things." SH

"I shall never marry, myself, lest I bias my judgement." SH

"I am not a whole-souled admirer of womenkind." SH

"I value a woman's instincts." SH

"Their most trying trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hair pin or a curling tong." SH

"Womens' heart and mind are insoluable puzzles to the male." SH

"The Napolean of crime."

Born in 1844 and died in 1891, this fatherly, ecclesiastical, and soft-spoken man, was a vilian of unspeakable horror. Extremely tall and thin, with a high domed forehead curving to meet his sparse grey hair, he was both attractive and repellent. His sunken black eyes peered out of a head stuck out and oscillating from side to side like a snake. He was of good birth and excellent education and, although fussy about his clothes, he dressed inconspicuously and was a little blacker in appearance than the commonplace. It was best to go unnoticed in a world preferring to avoid the issue of evil and to "live and let live." Moriority, of course, encouraged this complacency. Only Holmes was clever enough and of sufficiently high and tenacious of purpose to defeat him.

This mathematician appears to have organized a criminal syndicate in London; associating with the criminal class and bringing his superior wits to the strategy of committing "perfect crimes."

His genius and deductive skills were admired by Holmes who, in turn, was able to defeat him by those same skills in that great battle at Reichenbach. THE FINAL SOLUTION

"Hudson eagerly removes practically everything."

The best account we have of Hudson was penned by Watson in THE DYING DETECTIVE.

"Mrs. Hudson, the landlady of Sherlock Holmes, was a long-suffering woman. Not only was her first floor flat invaded at all hours by throngs of singular and often undesirable characters, but her remarkable lodger showed an eccentricity and irregularily in his life which must have sorely tried her patience. His incredible untidyness, his addiction to music at all hours, his occasional rifle practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him, made him the very worst tenant in London."

The Victorian Age saw a considerable rise in the comfort and ease of the suburban middle-class. Ladies like Martha Hudson crowded their houses with a wide assortment of furniture and bric-a-brac in a profusion we would find overpowering. Ladies wore stiff, rather formal, clothes which proclaimed their impregnable virtue. Not only had the industrial revolution brought down the price of fabrics, but the apprenticeship system made finished handmade and elaborately stitched garments of high quality available at a relatively modest cost. Although she was able to overlook Holmes' many failing as a tenant, we may be sure that she was personally concerned with his appearance, as she was solicitous for his comfort and well-being.

"My brother has not the energy or ambition to be a detective."

"Sherlock has all the energy in the family."

"Mycroft has his rails, and he runs on them."

"In that great brain of his, everything is pigeonholed and can be handed out in an instant."

"All other men are specialists, but his specialization is omniscience."

Much as we know Sherlock Holmes to have been reclusive and private in his habits, his brother Mycroft managed such a life of discreet anonymity that we know almost nothing about him, despite assurances of his importance, behind the scene, in the politics of the British Empire. Older and stouter than Sherlock, he is probably more careful and less eccentric in matters of dress and appearance. Tall and distinguished, comfortably esconced in the Diogenes Club, he makes his shrewd and unpretentious way through a world of rapid social, economic and technological change. If, in retrospect, we envision the Victorian Age as a placid time, an era of comfort and respectability, this is a tribute to the vigilance and moral exertions of men like Mycroft Holmes who advised the great statesmen and shouldered the burdens of Empire.

The Diogenes Club was a silent place where talking was forbidden and where its members sat in huge easy chairs reading the latest periodicals.

He was consulted many times by his famous brother, who considered Mycroft's powers of observation even greater than his own. But, because it required physical exertion, Mycroft was reluctant to carry out much in the way of detective work.

Wife of Dr. Watson

"She was seated by the open window dressed in some sort of diaphonous material, with a little touch of red at the neck and waist."

Pundits argue just when Watson married Mary Morstan, but it was probably within the year following the Golden Jubilee celebration of 1887. Thus the Empire was in its heyday, and such a story of the exotic East, such as The Sign of the Four becomes possible. Nearly a century later, the high-water mark of imperialism seems far-off. Unlike Irene Adler, whose wrdrobe reflectes the haute couture of Paris, we may be sure that Mary's wardrobe is solidly English and Victorian. She and Watson are from the same social stratus and, like him, her father had served in India. Both reflect the increase in wealth which the days of the Empire afforded the upper-middle classes, but compared with Adler, Mary was rather unsophisticated and uncomplicated as well. Watson admires her for her seemingly uninterest in wealth.

It is significant that it is Watson who is drawn to Mary, whereas holmes is unable to forget Irene. Mary is twenty-seven, that sweet age when youth has lost its self-consciousness and become a little "sobered by experience." We know that Watson responded to feminine wiles and that Mary evoked this response. Thus, despite their staid English backgrounds, we may confidently suppose both to be glowing with romantic love.

1819-1901 Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India.

She ascended the throne in 1837, upon the death of William 1V, proclaimed Empress of India in 1877. Sherlock Holmes was born in her reign.

The last fifteen years of Victoria's sixty-four year reign (1837-1901) saw the sunset of her time and nearly all of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The two were almost opposites and yet each respected the other. Each possessed a strong measure of honesty, courage, and good will. Victoria's life concerns events well before Holmes' career which had shaped the era into which he was eventually born. Victoria was a passionate and clever woman, although deficient in the kind of intellectual wit for which Holmes was so famous, and may be regarded as successfully fullfilling her role as wife and mother as well as Queen and Empress. Surprisingly, in the context of her times, many of her views on social matters were advanced and liberal. She much preferred the unpretentious informality of Highland Scotland to the artificialities of Windsor and London. Combining the business of government and family, she secured marriages for her children and grandchildren with all the important thrones of Europe. Her mourning for her husband, Albert, who died in 1861, and her ample and grandly maternal form, are qualities which determine the costumes of her last years. The ensemble combines to set her off as the icon of the era to which her name is given.

"I am the King"

"Heavy bands of astrakan were slashed across the sleeves and front of his double-breasted coat, while the deep-blue cloak, which was lined with flame-colored silk and secured with a brooch of single-flaming beryl. Boots, which were trimmed at the top with rich brown fur, completed the impression of opulence."

This hereditary and colorful king seeks help from Holmes to retrieve a photograph of himself and Irene Adler. The outcome of this case was said to affect English History. Nineteenth Century Germany and the rest of continental Europe was a crazy quilt of nations, states, and noble families. By the end of her reign, Queen Victoria had married her children and grandchildren into nearly every one. Thus the business of the British royalty and foreign affairs are intertwined. Like Victoria, our King is passionate, arrogant, self-centered, and determined to preserve honor. In the rapidly changing Europe of the pre-World War 1 period, many forces combined to alter the balance of power centered in hereditary titles and upstart financiers and industrialists. In every friendship lurked the seed of emnity. The grand scale of the king's style of living is threatened by scandal. Sherlock Holmes gets to meet this character and smooth the path of nations.

We may hope that in the twenty-eight years allotted him, before all is to be drenched in blood and swept away by war, he may learn better to manage his affairs and the politics of Bohemia.

Wheeler is an excellent portrait of the late Victorian type, being only five years before the first Sherlock Holmes tale. The street urchin surviving disease and neglect was resourceful enough to acquire cast-off clothing against the awful London weather. He was numerous and common enough to "go everywhere, see everything, and overhear everything." Organized ("all they wanted was organization"), by Holmes, they were a potent force against crime.

England became the most populous nation in Europe in the seventeenth Century. Political, social, and economic dislocation bred a class of landless urban poor, who were often homeless and out of work, and whose children were exploited in factory sweat-shops as the industrial revolution progressed. Despite the social legislation of Disreli's ministry, many of these youngsters were ill-kempt and uneducated. Others received only the most minimal schooling before being forced into factories or bound into apprenticeships.

With the passage of time, his standing on the force must have improved and his fortunes and, thenceforth, his wardrobe. The social politics of the man on the force was somewhat in flux, although solid aristocrats were in charge, Doyle did not doubt their inferiority to himself. Lestrade is a foil to Holmes' wit and brilliance but, nevertheless, he was the "best of the professionals." He was energetic, tenacious, and patronizing, but Holmes bemoans his conventionality and lack of imagination. Empire and Industrialism combined to raise the standard of living, expectations, and education of the Middle-Classes of Victorian England.

"Somewhere in the dark ooze at the bottom of the Thames lie the bones of that strange visitor to our shores."

"They are naturally hideous, having large misshapen heads, small fierce eyes, and distorted features."

Anthropology scarcely existed in the Victorian Era. Tonga is an archetypal savage out of the semi-conscious dreamworld where myth gives new shape to scattered facts and fears. This nimble little savage is ruthlessly cruel, inscrutable most of the time, yet has the makings of a loyal and trusted servant to his European master. Although fully grown, he is diminished in stature and seen as childlike, never to become a man. The portrait tells us more about the author than about the ancient race of Andaman aborigines. Along with the blow gun and a bit of jungle atmosphere, there hovers about him the tang of the Malays and the South China seas, he is a sort of pirate; a shrewd little devil, an uncivilized imp, at once attractive and frightful.

Considering the merciless subjugation of native peoples by the superior technology and mercilous greed of colonial imperialism in the Americas, Asia and Africa throughout the eighteenth and nineteeth Centuries, he combines the fears and perceptions of the enslaver as he views his faceless minions, and dreads lest his newly acquired grip be loosed. In the thralls of Victorian custom and rigidity, the English can, paradoxically, envy the native's "freedom." This impossible collection of contradictory traits constitutes the exotic charm, both of Tonga and the Indian and far-Eastern culture, which became fashionable in late-Victorian drawing rooms, Tonga may be conceived by the imagination, but was never meant to reflect the Andaman Islanders or anyone else.

"Pinned like a beetle to a card." The seal and whaling captain, Black Peter Carey, was born in 1845 and died in 1895, stuck through his breast to the wall with a steel harpoon.

As captain of the "Sea Unicorn" of Dundee in 1833, this fiend terrorized his men and when ashore flogged and brutilized his wife and daughter and even chased after the vicar of that Sussex village. He drank rum to excess, making no improvement on his temperment.

He is not just an unscrupulous sea-dog, but an officer and captain turned criminal. He is crafty enough to defraud Neligan's father and scheme away in his vile mind (Black Peter). Brute strength and violence hold a fascination for men like Peter Carey who embodie contradictions inherent in the far-flung sea- based Empire, combined with the fierce blackness of a storm at sea.

"Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him."