Redemption for Doctor Watson

It’s not easy playing second-fiddle. Think about this for a moment: is there a character in all of Western literature more misunderstood, more defamed than Doctor Watson, the unwavering sidekick of detective Sherlock Holmes?

So often, in twentieth-century film and television adaptions, Dr. John Watson is represented as a blithering idiot—often old, always naive, and perpetually astonished. He exists in a constant state of amazement; at the very most, providing a contrast that makes Holmes seem even smarter.

This is strange, because, as he is written in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Watson could not be more different than this scurrilous remaking. Holmes and Watson meet in 1881, in a laboratory where Holmes is conducting research. Watson, a surgeon, has just returned to London from a stint in Afghanistan as an army doctor. He’s looking for lodgings, and an old friend directs him to Holmes, who is in the same situation. When they meet, Watson finds Holmes fascinating. Holmes finds Watson suitable. As both a doctor and a war veteran, Watson is in the unique position to appreciate Holmes’s scientific detective work, as well as offer meaningful assistance as needed. In fact, he appreciates it so well that he begins to profile Holmes, which attracts more attention towards Holmes’s business. And he’s young; according to an estimation by Sherlockian scholar William S. Baring-Gould (which has been corroborated by other scholars, including Leslie S. Klinger), Watson is probably only about twenty-nine years old.

There’s a cartoon by the artist Kate Beaton, from her strip “Hark, a Vagrant,” that perfectly explains his predicament. In it, Dr. Watson-from-the-Sherlock-Holmes-stories, a young and capable professional, finds out that Holmes is recasting him in their adventures with a portly, easily-impressed idiot who goes around yelling catchphrases like “I say!” and “By Jove!”

It is, really, a shocking switch, and it doesn’t fully happen until 1939 when Nigel Bruce played Watson alongside Basil Rathbone’s Holmes in the film adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, as well as the film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, released a few months later. Bruce played Watson fifteen times on film through 1946, and also on the radio numerous times through the 1950s. His Watson is incurably daft. This persona fosters a strange relationship between the two men, in which Holmes is more bemusedly-parental towards his assistant than anything else. “For years, Sherlockians have wrung their hands and bemoaned the fate of poor Watson on screen in films and television and told anyone who would listen that this wasn’t the real Watson,” Klinger told the Los Angeles Times in 2012. He added,

“The thing that Sherlockians say is ‘why would a genius like Sherlock Holmes want to hang around with a fool like Nigel Bruce’s Watson?’ It doesn’t make any sense… The way we have always thought of him is as an intelligent person, young and certainly not older than Holmes, someone who is stalwart and courageous, a little bit physical. He’s someone who can mostly give back as good as he gets from Holmes.”

Thankfully, the madness has stopped, in large part—from Jude Law’s age-appropriate Watson in the Guy Ritchie films, to Lucy Liu’s capable professional in Elementary, to Martin Freeman’s adrenaline-junkie BFF in the BBC Sherlock series, the Watsons doctored up by recent adaptations have restored the character’s common-sense and scientific expertise, as well as their genuine concern for Holmes’s dangerous habits. (This latter quality runs deep, all the way to one of the first Holmes adaptations, William Gillette’s off-the-rails stage melodrama from 1899.)

But I want to dwell on the original Watson, the textual Watson, for a little bit. More than simply “not being an imbecile,” the literary Watson offered more than just common-sense support to our detective. It must not be forgotten that Watson is the writer of the Holmes stories, and, as such, is their architect. He’s responsible for representing their relationship, and even Holmes’s entire persona. Watson might, actually, be the greater mastermind between the two of them.

See, in the books, Watson is easily astonished by Holmes, but I think this is entirely purposeful. Take this example, from the 1891 story “A Scandal in Bohemia.” In one scene, Holmes emerges from his bedroom, in the flat he shares with Watson, wearing an elaborate disguise. According to Watson, Holmes had left the room dressed as himself, but “returned in a few minutes in the character of an amiable and simple-minded Nonconformist clergyman.” Watson notes the striking, convincing elements of Holmes’s costume: “His broad black hat, his baggy trousers, his white tie,” but then begins to describe subtle aspects of his new appearance that really seem to seal the deal: “his sympathetic smile,” and “general look of peering and benevolent curiosity.” After all, Holmes is not simply wearing the outfit of a clergyman, but looks to be an “amiable and simple-minded” one—believable as a distinct person not merely because of his habit, but because of his expressions. Marveling, Watson remarks that Holmes’s changes to his own presentation were “such as Mr. John Hare” (a popular actor and the then-manager of London’s Garrick Theatre, known for playing well-meaning geezers) “alone could have equaled.” He adds, “It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed.”

This is quite the endorsement! Here, in this third installment ever written about Holmes, Watson clues us in that performance is a key part of Holmes’s detective methodology. In the Holmes canon, which totals fifty-six stories and four novels, Sherlock Holmes is recorded as being thoroughly disguised seventeen times. I think about this a lot because my own doctoral dissertation is about “performance and the Victorian detective,” and, you guessed it, one of the chapters is about Holmes. (Is the conceit of this article taken from a talk I gave at Vanderbilt University’s annual “Dickens Universe Winter Conference?” YOU BET.) But I kept returning to Watson’s representations of Holmes’s transformations, intrigued by how Watson remains stunned by his friend’s transformations every single time he sees him transform. In a slightly-later story, “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” when Watson journeys into an opium den alone to look for another acquaintance, he hears a voice whisper to him “’Walk past me, and then look back at me.’” He is confused, but then it makes sense.

“The words fell quite distinctly upon my ear. I glanced down. They could only have come from the old man at my side, and yet he sat now as absorbed as ever, very thin, very wrinkled, bent with age, an opium pipe dangling down from between his knees, as though it had dropped in sheer lassitude from his fingers. I took two steps forward and looked back. It took all my self-control to prevent me from breaking out into a cry of astonishment. He had turned his back so that none could see him but I. His form had filled out, his wrinkles were gone, the dull eyes had regained their fire, and there, sitting by the fire and grinning at my surprise, was none other than Sherlock Holmes. He made a slight motion to me to approach him, and instantly, as he turned his face half round to the company once more, subsided into a doddering, loose-lipped senility.”

Holmes’s physical transformations seem to occur almost as if by magic; it is impossible, even for the most skilled actor, to completely lose their identities inside their performances with physical maneuverings alone, yet Watson swears that Holmes does.

We have to take Watson at his word and this is tricky, when you think about it; he is the spectating character, as well as the narrator. What Watson insists Holmes is able to do is almost physically impossible and has never been done before. Good acting, which Watson affirms time and time again Holmes is able to do, never fully erases the presence of the actor, unless it is done outside an expected, established performance space without the forewarning of the actor’s presence. (Then it doesn’t seem to be “acting” so much as another kind of more general “performance.”) After all, when one attends the theater to see a show, one is not dumbfounded by performers looking and acting differently they they do in life.

Watson knows how this works—in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” when Holmes dresses up as the “simple-minded clergyman,” he compares Holmes to the actor John Hare, a man with an established repertoire. He doesn’t compare him to the characters Hare has played, but to the real man himself. The job of an actor, as we understand it, is to be able to make the audience forget that they are watching the person they know, but the true identity of the performer is never eradicated, completely.

Yet Watson is entirely fooled and startled by Holmes’s disguises every time—which makes very little sense in this aforementioned theoretical way; indeed, John Hare, known for effectively playing old men throughout his career, would have nonetheless been identifiable on a stage as the man playing the geezer if there had even been the remote possibility that he would be acting in the theater, that night. But it also makes no sense because Watson should be familiar with his friend’s tendencies. One would think that after so much time spent as the roommate and friend of a man so prone to disguises, that whenever a stranger strode into their apartment or excessively chatted with Watson on the street, Watson might at least wonder if one of these interlopers could be his disguise-prone friend.

Holmes has established that his performance space is limitless, something Watson can never seem to fully grasp. But the question is, is Watson an audience, or is he (after all, the writer of these stories for a broad reading public) complicit in the performance? See, if Holmes is acting, then who is to say that Watson isn’t acting, too?

Watson’s constant, repeated shock at Holmes’s unveiling of his identity is so salient that it is likely the reason why subsequent adaptations turn him into an easily-dumbfounded fool, seemingly-existing to marvel at his roommate’s abilities. Most adaptations, though, seem to forget that Watson is the one in control. Therefore, I prefer to speculate that this ultimately reveals just how clever a man he is, participating in an odd-couple double act in which his alter-ego is fooled all the time. What if his astonishment is fake? After all, Watson IS a doctor; he can’t be that dumb. It’s elementary. (The 1988 Holmes-Watson comedy Without a Clue suggests something along these lines.)

Reading the Sherlock Holmes stories with Holmes as the performer and Watson as his clever hype-man, swearing to his audience that he has never seen feats more impressive than the feats Holmes will pull off today, relocates the “genius” so often worn by the subject of his stories. The true genius of the Holmes-Watson gambit lies in their very collaboration, their scheme of presentation which is apparently so effective that it gets “Watson’s” stories published in The Strand, and, within the worlds of the stories as well as outside them, made Holmes so extraordinarily famous.

The thing is, Holmes is much less impressive without Watson there to tell you just how impressive he is. If Holmes is so impressive, it’s because Watson has set him up to be. Rather than a sidekick, Watson is rather like Holmes’s manager. Holmes is the talent, but Watson is the strategist. And you can’t put on a show without that.