Dante Gabriel Rossetti reading proofs of his ‘Sonnets and Ballads’ to Theodore Watts-Dunton in the drawing room at 16 Cheyne Walk, London. This scene was painted in 1882, the year that Rossetti died, just a few weeks short of his 54th birthday.
Part 1 of 2
SHERLOCK Holmes seemed delighted at the idea of sharing his rooms with me. “I have my eye on a suite in Baker Street,” he said, “which would suit us down to the ground. You don’t mind the smell of strong tobacco, I hope?”
“I always smoke ‘ship’s’ myself,” I answered.*
“That’s good enough. I generally have chemicals about, and occasionally do experiments. Would that annoy you?”
“By no means.”
“Let me see — what are my other shortcomings. I get in the dumps at times, and don’t open my mouth for days on end. You must not think I am sulky when I do that. Just let me alone, and I’ll soon be right. What have you to confess now? It’s just as well for two fellows to know the worst of one another before they begin to live together.”
Sir Raymond Priestley mentions ship’s tobacco as a popular smoke among his fellow-explorers on Scott’s Antarctic Expedition of 1910-1913, and describes it as ‘vile’, driving him from anywhere men were smoking it. Apparently, Dr Watson had acquired the enthusiasm on his journey home from India; but it was a fad, and his tastes soon changed in Holmes’s company, as ‘The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes’ record. Many years later, when the detective called on Watson in his new marital home, he remarked ‘Hum! You still smoke the Arcadia mixture of your bachelor days then!’
Part Two
Wilhelmina Neruda (1839-1911) performing on the violin. In ‘A Study in Scarlet’, Sherlock Holmes makes a point of going to hear one of Wilma’s concerts. “He was very late in returning – so late,” says Watson, a trifle enigmatically, “that I knew that the concert could not have detained him all the time.” The story was published in 1887; the following year Wilma married Charles Hallé, founder of the famous Hallé Orchestra in Manchester.
I LAUGHED at this cross-examination. “I keep a bull pup,”* I said, “and I object to rows because my nerves are shaken, and I get up at all sorts of ungodly hours, and I am extremely lazy. I have another set of vices when I’m well, but those are the principal ones at present.”
“Do you include violin-playing in your category of rows?” he asked, anxiously.*
“It depends on the player,” I answered. “A well-played violin is a treat for the gods – a badly-played one— ”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he cried, with a merry laugh. “I think we may consider the thing as settled.”
We left him working among his chemicals, and we walked together towards my hotel.
“By the way,” I asked suddenly, stopping and turning upon Stamford, “how the deuce did he know that I had come from Afghanistan?”
My companion smiled an enigmatical smile. “That’s just his little peculiarity,” he said. “A good many people have wanted to know how he finds things out.”
We never hear of this dog again. In ‘The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes’ however we do hear that in his college days, Sherlock was on his way to chapel when he was bitten on the ankle by a bull terrier. Possibly the memory still rankled.
Sherlock Holmes’s favourite violinist was the brilliant Wilhelmina Neruda (1839-1911), much admired by the great Joachim. Holmes waxes lyrical over her Chopin, but what would Holmes himself have made of that, spoken by any other man? For Chopin did not write any solo violin music, and there is no record of Neruda performing anything by Chopin in public. See the photo above for more.