Fallen Holmes & black armbands
I noted with some interest a letter (written by Peter Calamai) in the back of the
current Baker Street Journal in regards to the notion that members of the public wore
black armbands in their mourning for Sherlock Holmes in 1893.
As the letter states, this tale is often told and the scale
of this sartorial fad varies from account to account. However, as pointed out
in said letter, there isn't any contemporary evidence for the armband story and
you can be relatively assured that had it occurred on any scale – no matter how
modest - it would have made the press in the UK
In fact, in many areas of the press, there was very little
reaction and some UK
It is fair to say that the public reaction to Holmes’s
return was much more pronounced than that to his Swiss plunge.
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Another part of the "lore" of Sherlock Holmes when the facts are much more interesting. Given your knowledge of Doyle's life, do you have any insights on how the black armband myth came about? What is the earliest reference of it that you have encountered? I have not (yet) read Doyle's "Memories and Adventures"; is it mentioned there? Sorry, I don't mean to ask for in depth research, just off-the-top-of-your-head knowledge.
ReplyDeleteI’ve not found any reference before the Carr biography. As is suggested in the journal letter, the armband story was probably a creation of Adrian Conan Doyle.
ReplyDeleteArthur, as you can imagine, talks as little about Holmes as possible in his autobiography and I have no recollection of the armband story there either. Some mention was made of a letter being sent to him referring to him as “a brute” in the aftermath of The Final Problem’s publication but I cannot remember where that first appears without digging through my library.