(Sorry For Quality) From ‘Holmes & Watson’, By Lee Shackleford.

THAT'S HOLMES RIGHT??? IN HIS BOOKSELLER DISGUISE ON THE LEFT???? THAT'S THEM WALKING IN TOGETHER SIDE BY SIDE RIGHT?!!?!? JESUS CHRIST?????

THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

2.06 The Final Problem

The Shore - Barry McGlashan , 2023.

British, b. 1974 -

Oil on paper over panel , 12 1/4 x 8 1/8 in.

The problem with saying that ACD coded Holmes as gay is Late Victorian gay culture was OBSESSED with Classicism, which Holmes has no interest in. Mycroft would've been more recognizable to Victorian audiences as gay, considering he runs an establishment intending to give men the benefits of domesticity in a way that is not reliant on women. It is also named after a Greek philosopher.

That’s very true, though I wouldn’t say Holmes shows no interest in the classics at all—he does compare Horace and Hafiz, with noticeable appreciation. I’m of the school that believes Doyle wrote Holmes as gay just by recording the traits of men he’d known and loved who were queer (or who he wished were uninterested in any intimacy but his friendship) rather than deliberately queercoding him, and we’re left to fill in the blanks of what he could be. I read Holmes as intersex and gay and mycroft as asexual, but the reading could easily be reversed.

On the Origin of (Phallic) Tree Worship

Picture is text from EMPT which reads: “As I did so I struck against an elderly, deformed man, who had been behind me, and I knocked down several books which he was carrying. I remember that as I picked them up, I observed the title of one of them, The Origin of Tree Worship, and it struck me that the fellow must be some poor bibliophile, who, either as a trade or as a hobby, was a collector of obscure volumes.”

The Public Domain Review

*Cultus Arborum: A Descriptive Account of Phallic Tree Worship* (1890)

Offering hundreds of examples from religious history, this book was part of a larger Phallic Series of treatises by Hargrave Jennings.

Just casually looked up Victorian tree worship (as you do) and came across this…

“…A Descriptive Account of Phallic Tree Worship, published anonymously in 1890. The fourth entry in a ten-volume “Phallic Series” printed privately in limited number…”

Obscure volumes, indeed…

he's so me

It’s all right.

Lesser-known steps of the writing process:

Finding all the paragraphs where you used some hyper-specific word more than once

Rearranging paragraphs that you swear you wrote in the right order but turned out to be totally backwards

Going for a walk, coming up with the perfect line, and forgetting it as soon as you get home and open your laptop

Creating a separate document where you can dump all of those nice sentences that no longer fit in anywhere

Waking up in a cold sweat because so-and-so was supposed to be barefoot but never actually took his shoes off

One area where I feel like ACD's Holmes differs from modern interpretations is the degree of Holmes' lack of empathy. He is certainly eccentric, single-minded and arrogant in the books, but he does not come across as uncaring or unkind.

To me it seems that in modern characterisations (including fanfiction), he often comes across as if he doesn't understand other people's emotions, or has no regard for them. But this is not at all true in the books.

Just as an example, in "The Sign of the Four" he asks Watson if he's up for a six-mile track, and even after Watson confirms, Holmes asks again if it might give Watson's injured leg any trouble. There are also other examples where he does display appropriate empathy when speaking to an upset client, and so on. The characterisation is more nuanced here.