221-B Baker Street

The London Underground and Sherlock Holmes

“I should like to see him clapped down in a third-class carriage on the Underground, and asked to give the trades of all his fellow-travellers.”

– A Study in Scarlet

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"The London Underground, or “tube”, has a few mentions in the Canon. The above quote, from A Study in Scarlet” is Watson’s reaction after reading Holmes’ The Book of Life article in a magazine. In the Red-Headed League, the duo of Holmes and Watson ride the Underground on their way to Saxe-Coburg Square. In The Beryl Coronet, Alexander Holder rode the tube on his way to Baker Street. Lastly, Cadogan West’s body was placed upon the roof of a stopped Underground carriage in The Bruce Partington Plans."

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"Jumping forward to the third season of BBC’s Sherlock, we have John Watson riding the tube shortly after the opening credits for The Empty Hearse. Later in the same episode, Sherlock and Watson are exploring the abandoned Sumatra rail station looking for a missing rail-car that is rigged with explosives."
 

Sherlock Holmes, the Somerton Man, and the Case of the Missing Socks…
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"All of which brings me round to Australia’s curious incident of the Somerton Man. What would Sherlock Holmes have made of a death scene riddled with so many voids, so many geese that failed to cackle, so many dingoes that didn’t howl?"

"Naturally, the biggest absence is the lack of any identity, followed by a lack of a definitive cause of death (though the coroner put it that the death was not natural [Feltus, Ch.10]), along with a lack of any preceding timeline for the man. Beyond these ‘macro-absences’, however, there are numerous micro-absences, all of which would surely have been grist to Holmes’ mental mill":

* Overcoat but no hat
* Tickets (one used, one unused) but no money
* No wallet
* No ration card
* Absence of dirt on his shoes
* No shoes (apart from the pair he was wearing)
* He had five ties but no socks (apart from the pair he was wearing)

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Sherlock Holmes and Eclipses​

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Sherlock Holmes was famously interested in only those things that mattered to his profession.
Specifically regarding astronomy, the conversation went something like this:

"My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth traveled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it."
"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."
"But the Solar System!" I protested.

"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

"So it may seem odd that today, with the Solar Eclipse mania at its height, we should bring Sherlock Holmes into the astronomical conversations. But, as always, there is a method to our madness."

"While Holmes himself may not have been conversant in the workings of the Solar System, there were those around him who were. Particularly his arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty, who famously wrote a treatise on The Dynamics of an Asteroid."

But it was in "The Greek Interpreter," where we see that Holmes did in fact know a bit more than he initially let on:

It was after tea on a summer evening, and the conversation, which had roamed in a desultory, spasmodic fashion from golf clubs to the causes of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic, came round at last to the question of atavism and hereditary aptitudes.
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"The obliquity of the ecliptic has nothing to do with eclipses per se, but is essentially "the angle of inclination of the Earth's equator with respect to the plane of its orbit, which to us, produces the apparent relative tilt of the Earth's polar axis which causes the annual seasons." So Holmes was aware of the Earth and its general properties." (READ MORE)
 

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