Werner - Sherlock Holmes: The Man Who Never Lived And Will Never Die

THE MUSEUM OF LONDON opened in 1976. It tells the ever-changing story of the greatest city in the world and the people who live there. Its galleries chart a journey through London from earliest times to the present. Its ever-changing programme of exhibitions and events and its collections gives you a sense of the vibrancy that makes London the exciting and special place it is today.

ALEX WERNER, Head of History Collections at the Museum of London, has curated a number of major displays including Dickens and London (2011-12), the Expanding City gallery (2010) and London Bodies (1998). His publications include Dickenss Victorian London, Jack the Ripper and The East End (2008), Journeys Through Victorian London (2001) and Dockland Life (2000).

EVER SINCE HIS CREATION, SHERLOCK HOLMES HAS ENTHRALLED READERS.

Our perception of him and his faithful companion, Dr Watson, has been shaped by a long line of film, TV and theatre adaptations. This richly illustrated book, compiled by Alex Werner, Head of History Collections at the Museum of London, is an essential guide to the greatest fictional detective and his world. Using the museums unrivalled collections of photographs, paintings and original artefacts, it illuminates the capital city that inspired the Sherlock Holmes stories, in particular its fogs, Hansom cabs, criminal underworld, famous landmarks and streets.

Accompanying the landmark exhibition at the Museum of London, the first since 1951, this book explores how Arthur Conan Doyles creation of Sherlock Holmes has transcended literature and continues to attract audiences to this day. Authoritatively written by leading experts, headed by Sir David Cannadine, this thought-provoking companion sheds new light on the famous sleuth and reveals the truth behind the fiction, over 125 years after the first Sherlock Holmes story was written.

Special thanks firstly to all the authors, also to Geraldine Beare, Catherine Cooke, David Hay, Jenny de Gex, Michael Gunton, Roger Johnson, Jon Lellenberg, Glen Miranker, Randall Stock, Mark Turner, Jean Upton and Nicholas Utechin for their help at critical moments in the books development; all colleagues at the Museum, particularly Nikki Braunton, John Chase, Sean OSullivan, Maria Rego, Roz Sherris, Anna Sparham, Richard Stroud and Sean Waterman; the books designer, Peter Ward who has brought it all together; Nicki Crossley and Carey Smith and all the team at Ebury Press, and last but not least, to my wife Ann.

S IR D AVID C ANNADINE FBA is Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of fourteen books, including The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, Class in Britain, Ornamentalism, Mellon, and The Undivided Past, and has just completed a short biography of King George V. Sir David is a Trustee of the Wolfson Foundation, the Royal Academy, the Library of Birmingham, the Rothschild Archive, the Gladstone Library and the Gordon Brown Archive. He is also the Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vice Chair of the Westminster Abbey Fabric Commission and the Editorial Board of Past and Present, a Vice President of the Victorian Society, and a member of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee and the Editorial Board of the History of Parliament. He is a former Chair of the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery and of the Blue Plaques Panel, and has also served as a Commissioner of English Heritage, a Trustee of the Kennedy Memorial Trust, and a Trustee of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. Sir David makes frequent appearances on radio and television in the UK and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4s A Point of View programme.

J OHN S TOKES is Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature at Kings College London. He has written widely on the culture of the fin de sicle and, together with Mark W. Turner, has edited two volumes of Oscar Wildes journalism, Complete Works, (Oxford University Press, 2013).

A LEX W ERNER is Head of History Collections at the Museum of London. He has curated a number of major displays including Dickens and London (201112), the Expanding City gallery (2010) and Jack the Ripper and the East End (20089). His publications include Dickenss Victorian London (co-authored with Tony Williams, Ebury Press, 2011) and Dockland Life (co-authored with Chris Ellmers, Mainstream Publishing, 2000).

P AT H ARDY is Curator of Paintings, Prints and Drawings at the Museum of London and Curator of the exhibition on Sherlock Holmes. Having obtained a PhD at the Courtauld Institute on nineteenth-century British Art, she was an Assistant Curator at the National Portrait Gallery where she worked on the critically acclaimed Sir Thomas Lawrence exhibition and then took up the position of Curator of Works on Paper at National Museums Liverpool. Most recently at the Museum she has worked on the exhibition Dickens and London (201112) and Drawing the Games: London 2012 and Nicholas Garland and is currently researching corporate art for an exhibition about this for the Museum of London Docklands in 2015. She is published widely and is currently writing a book on the imagery of nineteenth-century migration.

C LARE P ETTITT is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture at Kings College London. Her first monograph, Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Oxford University Press, 2004) investigated the status of creativity in an industrialising world. Her second book, Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?: Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers and Empire (Profile and Harvard University Press, 2007) was about the clash of African and European modernities in the nineteenth century. From 20062011, she was a Research Director on the Cambridge Victorian Studies Project, and she is now working on Scrambled Messages: The Telegraphic Imaginary 18571900, a four-year AHRC-funded project on the aesthetics of the Atlantic Telegraph.

D R N ATHALIE M ORRIS is Senior Curator of the BFI National Archives Special Collections. She has written and presented on various aspects of silent and British cinema including women working the British film industry, particularly before 1930; film marketing and publicity; and the early career (and London connections) of Alfred Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville. Her current research interests include food and cinema, British cinema costume design, and the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

A LHAMBRA L EICESTER S QUARE, C.1890, E RNEST D UDLEY H EATH

F OR H OLMESIANS THE WORD Bohemian is inevitably associated with the story published in the Strand Magazine in July 1891, but set in 1888, entitled A Scandal in Bohemia. A perennial favourite, this concerns an adventuress, a beautiful opera singer named Irene Adler, and the danger that she might blackmail the hereditary King of Bohemia, thereby wrecking his plans to marry into Scandinavian royalty. Visiting Baker Street in disguise, the King tells Holmes that Adler possesses a compromising photograph taken of them in the course of a romantic liaison. In the event, the risk of blackmail is not borne out not as a result of Holmess attempts to regain the incriminating evidence, which dont really succeed, but because of the singers sense of honour and her professional admiration for the detectives theatrical approach. It would seem, then, that the Bohemia of the title must refer to the Eastern European territory that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century, known after 1918 as Czechoslovakia unless, that is, we consider the real scandal to be not an international embarrassment, narrowly averted, so much as the fact that Holmes, an austere male mastermind, is outflanked by a glamorous female actress to whom he is uniquely, but unquestionably, attracted. Curiously enough, Conan Doyle does indeed introduce, if only glancingly, that other possibility by reminding us at the start that Holmes, solitary and frequently misogynistic, normally loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul (A Scandal in Bohemia). This is a different application of Bohemian and it evokes unconventional personal characteristics rather than a single nationality. The two identifications are, however, linked by remoteness (geographical in one case, sociological in the other), and by the fascination that either might possess for Holmess respectable English readers.