Sherlockian.Net: Dr. Watson Is Not Himself Luminous . . .

and Other Blonde Jokes

Remarks by Chris Redmond for the Bootmakers of Toronto annual awards dinner, January 29, 2000

Light is a motif that runs all through the Sherlock Holmes tales. The word "light" appears in every one of the sixty stories -- a fact that I'm able to tell you because of a few minutes' exercise searching a computerized version of the texts. In all the years that I have been enjoying Sherlockian research, there has been no development more important than the appearance of a machine-readable text of the stories, which saves vast amounts of time in hunting for elusive details and makes it possible to answer all sorts of questions that nobody ever asked. In this case, what does the Canon have to say about light? If you've had a chance to read the most recent issue of the Bootmakers' magazine, Canadian Holmes, you saw Patrick Campbell's excellent article about lanterns, dark-lanterns in particular, and his report that the Canon includes a total of 106 mentions of various kinds of lamps and lanterns. Just using the word "light", you can find -- for example -- "the lights of the shipping" in "His Last Bow"; the light that reflected off Dr. Watson's linoleum in "The Crooked Man" and betrayed the mark of a hobnailed boot; the light in Holmes's eye in "The Noble Bachelor"; even the Royal Marine Light Infantry, in A Study in Scarlet. The stories offer us sunlight, moonlight, gaslight, skylight, daylight, firelight and fanlight. They offer us literal light, and many times they offer us metaphorical light, as in Holmes's telegram in "The Bruce-Partington Plans": "See some light in the darkness, but it may possibly flicker out." Three times they offer us lighthouses -- and two of those times are metaphorical also.

Who was that lady I saw you with? No blonde, but Sherlockian webmaster Shraddha Pai, poses with Chris Redmond at the Bootmaker dinner in January 2000

You wanted something light, Dayna? What colour? There's the "tiny pin-point of yellow light", far out on Dartmoor. There's the green light on the police-boat in The Sign of the Four. There's the pink light favoured by Isadora Klein in "The Three Gables". There's the gray light of dawn in The Sign of the Four. There's the red light of the setting sun in "The Gloria Scott", and the red lamp outside Dr. Barnicot's surgery in "The Six Napoleons". (A red lamp in Victorian England was nothing to do with the red-light district; it was the sign of a doctor's house, and you will recall that Arthur Conan Doyle himself wrote a book of medical short stories titled Round the Red Lamp.) About the only colour you apparently can't get from Sherlock Holmes, so far as I can tell from my computerized text, is a blue light. That, you can only get from Labatt's.

One of the most curious statements about light in the whole Canon is a remark made by Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Watson has been doing his feeble best to explain the inscription on Dr. Mortimer's walking-stick, including the mysterious initials CCH, and after he finishes his disquisition, Holmes tells him, "Really, Watson, you excel yourself. I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light."

Dr. Watson is not himself luminous. What a surprise! One would think that an ex-Army doctor who glowed in the dark would have attracted some attention in Victorian London, and such an attribute would have been something of a drawback to Watson in those late-night ambushes on which he accompanied Holmes. They waited in the pitch dark for something to happen at Stoke Moran in the case of "The Speckled Band", for example, and at the Capital and Counties Bank in "The Red-Headed League". If Watson had been luminous, shining like a good deed in a naughty world and so warning Dr. Roylott and Jonathan Clay, Holmes would probably have asked him to stay at home by the Baker Street fireside, and the stories of the Canon would read very differently.

So far as I can recall, there are no luminous characters in the Sherlock Holmes tales at all, unless of course you count the Hound of the Baskervilles, of whom we are told that "Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame." Otherwise, about the closest thing the stories give us to a person outlined in light is Mrs. Neville St. Clair in "The Man with the Twisted Lip" -- one of the most fascinating characters in the Canon, and infuriating because we know so little about her, not even her first name. Listen to Watson when he first sees her: "As we approached, the door flew open, and a little blonde woman stood in the opening, clad in some sort of light mousseline de soie, with a touch of fluffy pink chiffon at her neck and wrists. She stood with her figure outlined against the flood of light, one hand upon the door, one half-raised in her eagerness, her body slightly bent, her head and face protruded, with eager eyes and parted lips." This is pretty ripe stuff: no wonder Sherlock Holmes refers to her as "this dear little woman"! But that's how it is with blondes: they have a curious effect on men, perhaps even on Sherlock Holmes. I told you I find it difficult to say no to Dayna.

Dayna McCausland (not exactly as pictured)

Ah yes, it's time to talk about our new president again for a moment. Some of us will recall that Dayna instantly achieved prominence among the Bootmakers on May 24, 1986, at the Hungarian Village Restaurant, where we held a dinner meeting. Dayna was the after-dinner speaker, and brought down the house with her remarks under the title, "What's So Great About Irene Adler, and What's She Got That I Haven't Got?" She was a decently married woman, and at that time a brand-new mother, but she scandalized us all with her brazen dismissal of Miss Adler. "So what," Dayna asked, "if she has beauty, brains, charm, talent and a superb figure? Big deal!" Over the intervening years, we have had many opportunities to observe that Dayna also has beauty, brains, charm, talent, and a superb -- well, a superb head of blonde hair, something that she has in common with Mrs. Neville St. Clair and, so far as we can tell, three other women in the Canon.

All four blondes are described with loving Watsonian detail. To be fair, so are some of the men in the Canon -- the King of Bohemia with "the chest and limbs of a Hercules", for example, who turns up in the very same story as the chest and limbs of Irene Adler. So who are the four blondes? I have already mentioned Mrs. St. Clair in "The Man with the Twisted Lip". The second is Lady Mary Brackenstall in "The Abbey Grange" -- blonde, and with a perfect complexion, a graceful figure (notice a pattern here?), and a womanly presence, whatever that is. Another blonde in the stories is Ettie Shafter of The Valley of Fear, who is first seen, like so many other women, "framed in the bright light" of an open doorway. This time there is no particular reference to her figure, but we are told that Jack McMurdo "gazed at her in open admiration until her eyes dropped in confusion", so we can perhaps draw our own conclusions. Finally, Mary Morstan of The Sign of the Four is a blonde. When she is first introduced, Watson manages not to mention her figure; after all, we are speaking here of the woman he intends to marry, and he is more circumspect, only mentioning that "her expression was sweet and amiable, and her large blue eyes were singularly spiritual and sympathetic". However, he does manage to work in the word "figure" in reference to Miss Morstan twice before the story is over. As I say, notice a pattern?

As for Irene Adler herself, she is only is described as "the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet", with no mention of her hair colour. Remember that once when Watson actually sees her, she is disguised as "a slim youth in an ulster" and, if we can rely on the Sidney Paget illustration that accompanies the story, a bowler hat. Similarly, she was surely wearing a hat when she stepped out of her carriage in front of Briony Lodge; Watson does not mention the bonnet, but he doesn't mention the hair either. Perhaps she was having such bad hair daythat removing the bonnet would have instantly ruined her reputation for beauty. Watson, in any case, is too busy looking at something else -- he refers again to "her superb figure outlined against the lights of the hall". Presumably he doesn't care, and perhaps he doesn't know, whether she is blonde. And so neither do we.

When I was writing In Bed with Sherlock Holmes, I took the trouble to survey several groups of Sherlockians, asking them what they imagined Irene Adler to look like. The answers varied widely, including heights anywhere from 5 feet even to a full 6 feet tall, and there was a consensus that she was either brunette, blonde or redhead.

Gentlemen prefer blondes, so it's said, and unquestionably Dr. Watson was a gentleman. It is also said that blondes have more fun. Do you know why blondes have more fun? Because they're so easy to keep amused. Yes, this is the point at which I launch into a series of blonde jokes -- except that I don't need to; you've heard them all already, and you have laughed at them, or been outraged by them, as the case may be. Besides, telling blonde jokes now would be very unkind to any blondes in the audience, other than Dayna of course. You do know, I presume, how to make a blonde laugh out loud on a Monday morning? Tell her a joke on Saturday night.

It's important to realize that blonde jokes are essentially a way of putting down women by putting down one group of women, with whom men have a love-hate relationship, or perhaps I should say a love-fear relationship. Making jokes about women is a traditional male activity, designed to keep women in their place. There was a particularly unkind joke a few weeks ago: somebody suggested that maybe it would turn out that women aren't Y2K compliant, and they'd all turn back to 1900 and stay home and keep house. That zinger hits home for Sherlockians like us, whose heart's desire is to have the world turn back to the gaslamps and hansom cabs of 1895. For us it would become a Sherlock-centred society, and as we read the Canon carefully we see that to a great degree it would be a male-centred one too. Admittedly there are liberated women, from Irene Adler to Violet Hunter, but for women the world has come a long way, baby, since the days of Mrs. Hudson and Julia Stoner and poor Beryl Stapleton. Watson was a ladies' man, as I have already reminded you, but that very expression might make it clear that women were a hobby for him rather than equals whom he could respect. The cozy sitting-room at Baker Street was a very male environment, and The Complete Sherlock Holmes is a male environment too, for the most part.

Looking at it in those terms immediately makes it clearer why so many readers, especially female readers, have embraced Laurie King's novels about Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell. The principle is that any feminist is better than no feminist, and Irene Adler can't be expected to do all the work single-handed. (And yet Carole Nelson Douglas did a wonderful job of expanding the character and life of that lady of dubious and questionable memory, in her four novels that started with Good Night, Mr. Holmes. It's just her bad luck that Laurie King came along when she did; otherwise Carole Nelson Douglas would be the focus of all the female fans of the past decade.)

Anyway, about blonde jokes: Max Beerbohm said long ago -- in Holmes's time, in fact -- that there were three divisions of humour: jokes about bodily humiliation, jokes about things alien, such as foreigners, and jokes about bad cheese. He should have added a fourth: jokes about the opposite sex, unless, indeed, those are included in the category of "things alien". Somebody else -- I am afraid I wasn't able to track this quotation to its source even on the Internet -- somebody else has said that "a Scotsman is funnier than a Frenchman, just as a monkey is funnier than a dog, because it is nearer to the real thing." The real thing of course is a man, and particularly an Englishman, preferably an Englishman as much like our beloved Dr. Watson as possible. (I am not sure how this principle applies to blondes being funnier than brunettes.)

Now there is no doubt that a big part of our affection for Dr. Watson is based on his reputation for being as dumb as a turnip. You might remember the episode in "Monty Python's Flying Circus" in which the intelligence of various primates is ranked, with all of them coming in well ahead of BBC programme planners. That's about where we like to put Watson -- even Arthur Conan Doyle once described him as "rather foolish". In 1932 Edmund L. Pearson coined the phrase "boobus Britannicus" for Watson; to be fair, Pearson was describing not the Watson of the actual stories, but the stolid figure portrayed by some illustrators. Dr. Watson, we repeat, is not himself luminous. A decade later, along came Nigel Bruce, bumbling beside Basil Rathbone, and the stereotype was established. I won't say "permanently established", because it is just possible that the reputation may change nowthat we have a generation that's familiar with the more admirable Watson of Edward Hardwicke -- courageous, sensible, solid and perceptive. But that's asking a lot: it's like expecting Gwyneth Paltrow to reverse what Marilyn Monroe did for the reputation of blondes.

I'd like to draw your attention to a few examples of Dr. Watson's lack of luminosity. "I am still in the dark," he says in "A Scandal in Bohemia" (and he uses very similar phrases in two other stories). "I am out of my depths," he says in "The Stock-broker's Clerk", and in the same story "I am afraid I miss the point." Look up Watson in Bill Goodrich's wonderful reference book Good Old Index, and you'll find page citations listing some of Watson's states of mind: amazed, astonished, bewildered, puzzled, startled, surprised and thunderstruck. I have mentioned his wildly wrong deductions about Dr. Mortimer's stick in The Hound of the Baskervilles, and we know his incompetent work on Holmes's behalf in "Lady Frances Carfax" and "The Solitary Cyclist". Best of all, perhaps is this little incident in the story of "The Five Orange Pips": Sherlock Holmes had not come back yet.

It was nearly ten o'clock before he entered, looking pale and worn. He walked up to the sideboard, and tearing a piece from the loaf he devoured it voraciously, washing it down with a long draught of water.

"You are hungry," I remarked.

Perhaps it would be kindest to classify Dr. Watson as an honorary blonde, to whom all the old jokes can be applied -- or updated. How do you put a gleam in the eyes of a blonde ex-army doctor? Shine a lantern in his ear, and bring in Mary Morstan. What do you get when you offer Dr. Watson a penny for his thoughts? Three farthings in change. You get the idea. But we love him all the more for his imperfections, just as we love our friends who happen to be blonde -- and we would never, never tell jokes about them. And I thank you very much for your attention.

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Copyright © Chris Redmond 2000