Sherlock Holmes speculation

The Sherlockian game (also known as the Holmesian game, the Great Game or simply the Game) is the pastime of attempting to resolve anomalies and clarify implied details about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson from the fifty-six short stories and four novels that make up the Sherlock Holmes Canon by Arthur Conan Doyle. It treats Holmes and Watson as real people and uses aspects of the canonical stories combined with the history of the era of the tales' composition to construct fanciful biographies of the pair.

The game of examining the stories as if they were non-fiction began in the early twentieth century. There are early examples of Sherlockian essays by Arthur Bartlett Maurice and Frank Sidgwick, both published in 1902, but neither of these essays received much notice at first. Notable early scholars of the canon included Ronald Knox in Britain and Christopher Morley in New York. Dorothy L. Sayers, creator of the detective Lord Peter Wimsey, also wrote several essays on Holmesian speculation, later published in Unpopular Opinions. In the foreword to this book, Sayers notes that

The game of applying the methods of the "Higher Criticism" to the Sherlock Holmes canon was begun, many years ago, by Monsignor Ronald Knox, with the aim of showing that, by those methods, one could disintegrate a modern classic as speciously as a certain school of critics have endeavoured to disintegrate the Bible. Since then, the thing has become a hobby among a select set of jesters here and in America.

Sayers also said that the Game "must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere."

When a student at Oxford, Knox issued "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes", an essay which is regarded as the founding text of "Holmesian scholarship". That essay was re-printed, among others, in 1928 and the following year, Sydney Roberts, then a professor at Cambridge University, issued a reply to Knox's arguments, in a booklet entitled A Note on the Watson Problem. S.C. Roberts issued then a complete Watson biography. A book by T.S. Blakeney followed and the "Holmesian" game (commonly referred to simply as "the game") was born. Early Holmesians of note include the bibliographer and book collector Vincent Starrett and the archaeologist Harold Wilmerding Bell.

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