The new bohemians
Aug. 14th, 2013 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fandomnumbergenerator"Holmes’ props – the violin, the Meerschaum pipe, the batchelor apartment in the metropolis and the cocaine habit – are all intended to establish him as one of the new bohemians: eccentric, sophisticated, and tantalisingly immune to public opinion. Unlike the masses swilling their patent coca tonics, Holmes would have taken the trouble to research and acquire the finest quality of stimulant: his cocaine, we can imagine, by mail-order from Merck in Darmstadt and his hypodermic kit not the standard Parke Davis set but specially tooled by a bespoke chemist in Piccadilly or Mayfair.
The inner Holmes, as well as the outer, was faithfully conceived around the bohemian stereotype. He is solitary, and haunted by an existential darkness – the “black moods” which come over him, his bipolar swings from insomnia or focused, obsessive, day-and-night work to his days and weeks “in the dumps”, when he doesn’t “open my mouth for days on end”. For a doctor like Conan Doyle, this would have been a recognised medical syndrome associated with the highly-strung, neurasthenic ‘type’, the febrile ‘brain-workers’ who were increasingly identified in the medical literature as a high-risk group for drug abuse.
…It’s interesting that, in The Sign of Four, Doyle mirrors these unstable mood-swings with a dual dependence on morphine and cocaine, but the morphine is never subsequently mentioned: perhaps Doyle felt that morphine had rather too strong a whiff of a medical condition, where by contrast cocaine was at most a ‘vice’.
…But the great detective’s career, which ran until the 1920s, witnessed a dramatic turnaround in cocaine’s public image. Concern about its effects built throughout the 1890s, and by 1900 the serious lobbying to control and prohibit it had begun. This was mostly taking place in the United States, but by this stage the Sherlock Holmes stories were being serialised to an enthusiastic American audience in Collier’s Weekly, which was also running editorials about the ‘cocaine menace’.
Doyle had been gradually pruning back the references to Holmes’ habit throughout the 1890s, limiting them to the occasional dark reference to his hero’s “weakness”, but in 1904, in The Missing Three-Quarter, he closed the chapter by stating that Holmes had been “weaned” from his “drug mania” by Dr. Watson – an incongruous detail which lacks support in any of the earlier stories – and, furthermore, that this “drug mania” had “threatened to check his remarkable career”, an interpolation which is entirely inconsistent with the original set-up. Holmes, too, recants thoroughly, calling the hypodermic syringe an “instrument of evil”. But Collier’s were happy: Doyle’s position was explicit, even if incompatible with his original intentions, and Holmes’ cocaine habit remained in the early and formative fictions to be enjoyed and reassessed by successive generations."
The inner Holmes, as well as the outer, was faithfully conceived around the bohemian stereotype. He is solitary, and haunted by an existential darkness – the “black moods” which come over him, his bipolar swings from insomnia or focused, obsessive, day-and-night work to his days and weeks “in the dumps”, when he doesn’t “open my mouth for days on end”. For a doctor like Conan Doyle, this would have been a recognised medical syndrome associated with the highly-strung, neurasthenic ‘type’, the febrile ‘brain-workers’ who were increasingly identified in the medical literature as a high-risk group for drug abuse.
…It’s interesting that, in The Sign of Four, Doyle mirrors these unstable mood-swings with a dual dependence on morphine and cocaine, but the morphine is never subsequently mentioned: perhaps Doyle felt that morphine had rather too strong a whiff of a medical condition, where by contrast cocaine was at most a ‘vice’.
…But the great detective’s career, which ran until the 1920s, witnessed a dramatic turnaround in cocaine’s public image. Concern about its effects built throughout the 1890s, and by 1900 the serious lobbying to control and prohibit it had begun. This was mostly taking place in the United States, but by this stage the Sherlock Holmes stories were being serialised to an enthusiastic American audience in Collier’s Weekly, which was also running editorials about the ‘cocaine menace’.
Doyle had been gradually pruning back the references to Holmes’ habit throughout the 1890s, limiting them to the occasional dark reference to his hero’s “weakness”, but in 1904, in The Missing Three-Quarter, he closed the chapter by stating that Holmes had been “weaned” from his “drug mania” by Dr. Watson – an incongruous detail which lacks support in any of the earlier stories – and, furthermore, that this “drug mania” had “threatened to check his remarkable career”, an interpolation which is entirely inconsistent with the original set-up. Holmes, too, recants thoroughly, calling the hypodermic syringe an “instrument of evil”. But Collier’s were happy: Doyle’s position was explicit, even if incompatible with his original intentions, and Holmes’ cocaine habit remained in the early and formative fictions to be enjoyed and reassessed by successive generations."
—
Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the 19th Century by Mike R Jay
