In our excitement to follow the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, we often skip over the more mundane parts of their lives together in early readings. At some point, though, one starts stopping to smell the roses, so to speak, and ponder the parts of their lives where they weren’t investigating mysteries … like the time they moved into a new apartment.
Two strangers moving into a new apartment together is something that doesn’t happen to all of us, nor that often. Maybe when we’re in college, or starting a career in an expensive city (as was Watson’s case), but ideally we don’t choose to just cohabitate with strangers. You might just get a strange, strange roomie, which is actually what happened to our friend John Watson.
“We met the next day as he had arranged and inspected the rooms at No. 221B Baker Street …That very evening I moved my things round from the hotel, and on the following morning Sherlock Holmes followed me with several boxes and portmanteaus. For a day or two we were busily employed in unpacking and laying out our property to the best advantage.”
There’s a whole lot going on in those few lines if you try to imagine what that “day or two” looked like in real time.
Watson had hotel-level belongings and was able to get everything from the hotel to Baker Street that evening. It’s hard to imagine having enough things in a hotel that it took more than a couple of trips.
Sherlock Holmes, however, shows up with “several boxes and portmanteaus.”
A portmanteau, in case you were wondering, is a large trunk or suitcase that opens into two equal parts. And Sherlock Holmes showed up with “several." Watson has come to London for the first time, and is in start-up mode, but Sherlock Holmes has been living in rooms (plural) on Montague Street in the neighborhood of the British Museum. Now, much of that area has been rebuilt from Holmes’s time, but it’s hard to imagine it being a cheap neighborhood in which to live. Holmes plainly came from money, but, like Watson, had the realization that he was probably not going to continue in the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed on his consulting detective fees at that time. But it still meant he probably had a lot more stuff than Watson.
What stuff? Well, being Holmes, probably not that much more in the way of clothes than Watson. Books, for certain. Papers, notes from his studies of everything useful to his occupation, also probably a part of it. He was still using the labs at St. Bart’s so maybe not so much chemical equipment just yet. And young Holmes was still thinking he could sit in his sitting room and do consulting, so maybe the handcuffs and guns weren’t so important to him yet, either. Definitely not time for a wax dummy of himself yet. Sherlock Holmes was probably still transitioning from student to professional man, so we have to think that most of his things fit that sort of category.
When Watson writes “For a day or two we were busily employed in unpacking and laying out our property to the best advantage,” I have a feeling he actually meant, “Holmes was unpacking and putting things where he wanted.” Watson’s contributions were probably a few books, some picture or memento for the mantelpiece, and a few personal items in the Baker Street bathroom. Most of his gear was probably just stored in his bedroom. If he had an army trunk, a lot of it might have just stayed there.
When Sherlockians do re-creations of 221B Baker Street, they most certainly are picking some point in time like 1895 to lovingly stock their room with Holmes memorabilia. But 221B Baker Street of 1881 was most certainly a different place. Mrs. Hudson’s furniture and pictures on the wall, a mix of books on the shelves that were mostly Sherlock’s, some mantelpiece items from both men. Any painting of Reichenbach Falls would have been too eerily predictive. Watson would later hang pictures of men he admired, Holmes would at some point tack criminal pictures to his bedroom walls and build up that level of debris Watson sees on Holmes’s bedroom mantelpiece. (Nice bedroom, Holmes.) But in 1881things were very different.
The 1954 Ronald Howard TV Sherlock Holmes episode titled “The Cunningham Heritage,” we actually see a Watson and Holmes move-in day, where these two not-so-young gentlemen were coming into Baker Street with all sorts of odd possessions. Watson seems to have brought a wicker basket of books, whilst Holmes unpacks a chemistry lab. Holmes hands Watson a human skeleton a one point, but, as with so many things with that version of Holmes and Watson, it hardly seems a true representation of the Canon as we know it. (Despite the “documentary film” theories of a certain podcast called Sherlock Holmes Is Real.)
Imagining the details of that first incarnation of 221B Baker Street is an intriguing exercise. What bits that we came to know later were there from day one? Whence came the bearskin hearthrug? How many items were just commonplace , and how many had their own story behind them?
221B Baker Street existed in four dimensions and not just three, and exploring the idea of what it looked like when is just one more challenge for Sherlockians, as well as the opportunity for one more niche, dare anyone venture into that rabbit hole: Sitting room chronology.
Always something more to explore in the world of Sherlock Holmes, isn’t there?
