"The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Other Stories"
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

[Part of the]
Introduction

The British biographer Hesketh Pearson, writing in 1947, observed that there are only four characters in literature who are known to every barman and dockworker in England, even if they have not read a word of the stories written about them: Romeo, Shylock, Robinson Crusoe, and Sherlock Holmes. He opines that is because each of them is symbolic. Romeo stands for love, Shylock for avarice, Crusoe for adventure, and Holmes for sport. In Conan Doyle: His Life and His Art, Pearson writes: “Few readers think of Holmes as a sportsman, but that is how he figures in the popular imagination; he is a tracker, a hunter-down, a combination of bloodhound, pointer, and bulldog, who runs people to earth as a foxhound does a fox; in fact, a sleuth.” All this is true. In fact, popular culture has often slapped an Inverness cape and a deerstalker hat on a bloodhound, literally turning Holmes into a hound. But it is only half true, because to be “a regular Sherlock Holmes” is not to be a sportsman. It is to be a robot, a thinking machine who can deduce from the smallest bit of information everything about a person. Holmes is also more than just symbolic; he is iconic. Rather than compare him to literary figures like Romeo and Shylock, it is better to say that his place is among legendary British heroes, where he stands in the ranks of Robin Hood and King Arthur.

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