What About the Gown?
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In my essay, The Definitive Holmes, I explored how our image of Sherlock Holmes has evolved from Doyle’s actual stories to the magnificent portrayal by Jeremy Brett. I will now endeavor to show that what Holmes wears and often has about him was largely determined by the drawings of Sidney Paget and Frederic Dorr Steele, and by the stage performances of William Gillette.
It is the image conveyed by these three men upon which Eille Norwood, Arthur Wontner, Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett and others based their portrayals. Of course, since Rathbone’s Universal films were set in the 1940’s, his wardrobe was contemporary to the times. But his two films for Twentieth-Century Fox fit the classic image.
Let’s take a look at five “props” that were commonly associated with Holmes in the early 1900’s. We will first look at the three that have lasted into our times. Then we’ll discuss the two that did not.
One could argue that the most common image of Sherlock Holmes is of the detective puffing contentedly on his curved pipe (more on that next). But certainly the picture of him peering through a magnifying glass is at least equally enduring. Most of the spoofs we see involve Holmes using an oversized one.
D.H. Friston provided four drawings for the famous 1887 Beeton’s Christmas Annual, which contained A Study in Scarlet. Ignoring the cover of the Annual, we can view the frontispiece of this story as the first depiction of Sherlock Holmes. He is using a reasonably large magnifying glass. At the opposite end of the size spectrum is G. Patrick Nelson’s drawing from The Problem of Thor Bridge. As the next sentence indicates, Friston was in the right.
I quote Doyle: “As he spoke, he whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass from his pocket.” With these words, the author introduced a key characteristic of Sherlock Holmes that is burned into our minds over 110 years later. To Doyle goes the credit for this depiction of the great detective.
Here, things get a bit more interesting. None of Friston’s four drawings for A Study In Scarlet had Holmes smoking a pipe. The next year, in 1888, it was reissued with forty illustrations by George Hutchinson, eleven of which featured Holmes. He is not smoking a pipe in the six I have seen (although Watson does).
In 1891, The Strand treats us to both Holmes short stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle, and to accompanying drawings by Sidney Paget. In A Scandal in Bohemia, we see Holmes with a pipe, but it doesn’t really count. He is in disguise, trying to gather information on Irene Adler. However, we do see him in Baker Street, pondering the three pipe problem of Jabez Wilson in The Red Headed League. As Watson tells us, “He curled himself up in his chair, with his thin knees drawn up to his hawk-like nose, and there he was with his eyes closed and his black clay pipe thrusting out like the bill of some strange bird.”
Holmes smokes a pipe in only one Paget drawing from the entire Return, though he is shown with a cigar or cigarette more than once. We see a profile in The Abbey Grange, and it is possible that the pipe has a slight curve to it, though minimal at best. It is a straight pipe that Paget draws throughout his 357 illustrations. Watson never mentions a curved pipe. So where did it come from? For the answer to that, we turn to William Gillette.
Gillette rewrote a Doyle play and performed Sherlock Holmes – A Drama in Four Acts all over America and England. It was a huge success, and he was the embodiment of Sherlock Holmes (read more about his impact in The Definitive Holmes). He found he could not speak his lines, move his hands about and keep a straight pipe clenched between his teeth. So, he switched to a curved meerschaum, or a calabash, pipe, which allowed him to do so. He performed as Holmes over 1,200 times, and firmly established the curved pipe for Holmes. American illustrator Frederic Dorr Steele based his drawings on Gillette and further spread the pipe’s image, as shown in this drawing.
Even in a great picture like this one by Frank Wiles, a straight pipe just doesn’t look right for Holmes. See several pictures and photos of Holmes with both types of pipes and decide for yourself. But there’s no disputing the popularity of the image of the master sleuth with his calabash.
Friston and Doyle have Holmes wearing a derby-like hat. Paget gives the disguised groom a derby in A Scandal in Bohemia, a formal top hat in The Red Headed League, and no hat in A Case of Identity. Then, in The Boscombe Valley Mystery, Paget gives us a drawing with two important features.
The least important, is that it takes place in a railway car. The image of Holmes and Watson, traveling across the English country-side on a rattling train, off to solve some rural murder or the like, is a favorite one among fans, and it was reproduced by several different illustrators.
Ah, but he’s wearing a deerstalker cap for the first time. Gillette wore a similar hat, and he decided to draw Holmes wearing one. Another part of the legend was established. Paget usually drew Holmes without a hat at all, and often with a soft cap, or a top hat (indeed, I think Jeremy Brett looks best in a top hat). In fact, Paget last drew the deerstalker in 1903. Holmes would not wear such a cap in the pages of The Strand for eighteen years, when Frank Wiles drew three such pictures for the final story, Shoscombe Old Place. But ask what hat Sherlock Holmes should wear, and the answer is “a deerstalker.” We owe that to Sidney Paget.
So, we’ve seen how the magnifying glass, curved pipe and deerstalker cap have become standard accoutrement for Sherlock Holmes. Now let’s look at two more things that were standard fare in the earlier part of the 1900’s but died out over time.
Pillows
by the Fire
We’ve seen how William Gillette introduced the curved pipe to Sherlock Holmes fans. In his play, Sherlock Holmes, he would scatter soft pillows on the floor, usually in front of a fireplace, and sit on the floor, cross-legged, smoking his pipe and thinking deeply. Here is a good example of the scene.
Gillette first performed his play in 1899, and I do not know when he first incorporated this scene into it. However, I will now quote from The Man With the Twisted Lip, which first appeared in The Strand in 1891:
“It was soon evident to me that he was now preparing for an all-night sitting. He took off his coat and waistcoat, put on a large blue dressing-gown, and then wandered about the room collecting pillows from his bed, and cushions from the sofa and armchairs. With these he constructed a sort of Eastern divan, upon which he perched himself cross-legged, with an ounce of shag tobacco and a box of matches laid out in front of him. In the dim light of the lamp I saw him sitting there, an old brier pipe between his lips, his eyes fixed vacantly upon the corner of the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him, silent, motionless, with the light shining upon his strong-set aquiline features.”
All future scenes similar to this one take place with Holmes sitting on furniture, either laid out on the sofa or slumped in his chair. Doyle included the “floor pillows” in one of his earliest stories, and Gillette used it in his massively popular play. But it did not catch on, and today few know that it was a common image during the heyday of Gillette’s stage performances. It is my guess that seeing the great detective sitting on the floor, surrounded by pillows, wasn’t dignified enough and was simply replaced with the image of Holmes curled up in his chair, pipe smoke wafting upwards to the ceiling.
The Dressing-Gown
As you might guess from the title, it was Holmes’ dressing-gown that first inspired me to write this essay.
Fourteen stories reference Holmes wearing a dressing gown a total of eighteen times (see the appendix for them). Fourteen times, no other description of the gown is mentioned. Twice it is referred to as mouse-colored, once it is blue, and once it is purple.
In June of 1887, he had a blue one. He is wearing a purple one that December. In April of 1994,Watson tells us it is a mouse colored gown. He apparently has the same in November of the following year. To this seeming discrepancy, I say: “Who cares?” I own three robes myself. Surely Holmes had several dressing-gowns over the twenty-three years that Watson chronicles a case. He changed them occasionally.
Just having a little fun there. What we know from Watson is that Holmes’ gown was rarely worth commenting on, and when he did, it was a simple description of the color. He never uses words like “outrageous,” “outré,” “ghastly,” or the like. From this we can infer that Holmes wore rather plain dressing-gowns. But into the 1930’s, it was not uncommon to see Sherlock Holmes wearing a brightly colored, or even ugly, gown.
As you can see from these pictures, most of these certainly would have deserved a minor mention, unless Watson was so appalled by them he felt it best to totally ignore the subject.
1900 – 1910
Pictures of William Gillette performing his play often show him in a distinctive robe. H. A. Saintsbury and Julian Royce were successful Holmes’ and toured England in Gillette’s play in the early 1900’s. The gowns they wore aren’t exactly conservative. Herbert Bradford wore such a robe when he was on stage in Doyle’s The Speckled Band.
1920 - 1929
Eille Norwood was well known for his patterned robe, both in his silent films and performing his own play, The Return of Sherlock Holmes. I think he deserves special mention, as it was quite a dressing-gown.
1930’s
It’s hard to miss Raymond Massey's gown in his movie, The Speckled Band. And there is an early 1930’s cigarette card of Clive Brook in a colorful robe very much like Eille Norwood’s.
But then, the distinctive robe seems to die out. Arthur Wontner doesn’t wear one in his five films, and Basil Rathbone dresses in normal attire for his thirteen Twentieth-Century Fox movies. I can’t even envision Jeremy Brett wearing Norwood’s robe.
Clive Brook’s second and final film as Holmes was made in 1932. That is also the last year that William Gillette toured in his play. Arthur Wontner’s films were shot between 1931 and 1937, and Basil Rathbone is seen wearing a subdued gown in his 1939 Hound of the Baskervilles. It appears that the colorful robe, introduced by William Gillette, left with him. It was frequently worn on-stage and in films for thirty years, but it would literally vanish in less than a decade.
There’s no denying that the curved pipe and magnifying glass are all but required for the classic picture of Holmes. I assert that the deerstalker is an ugly hat, but it works for him. Still, the great Jeremy Brett looks a little silly wearing his. Nonetheless, it is a part of Sherlock Holmes.
Perhaps taking his lead from Doyle himself, William Gillette was often seen in his play sitting on the floor, cushions piled around, in front of the fire, smoking his pipe. This never caught on as an enduring image of Holmes and is forgotten by nearly all today.
We have a great deal of photographic proof that it was common for thirty years to see Holmes wearing a notable robe, sometimes with a distinctive pattern, sometimes in a notable color, and even both at once. However, this characteristic, in evidence for thirty years, died out in the early thirties and there doesn’t seem to be any indication it will be making a comeback in the near future. I assert that the image of Holmes sitting on a bunch of cushions on the floor, or of wearing a robe similar to that of Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, is just too undignified for the greatest character in the history of mystery fiction. Because of this, two standard images of Sherlock Holmes faded out over time, and are now only remembered because of old pictures.
Sidney Paget often pictured Holmes wearing a top hat, and Jeremy Brett is often in one for his Grenada Series. Is it possible that the next incarnation of Holmes will build on that and we’ll see such an image become another Holmes staple? We shall see.
My first impression as I opened the door was that a fire had broken out, for the room was so filled with smoke that the light of the lamp upon the table was blurred by it. As I entered, however, my fears were set at rest, for it was the acrid fumes of strong, coarse tobacco which took me by the throat and set me coughing. Through the haze I had a vague vision of Holmes in his DRESSING-GOWN coiled up in an armchair with his black clay pipe between his lips. Several rolls of paper lay around him.
Our breakfast-table was cleared early, and Holmes waited in his DRESSSING-GOWN for the promised interview. Our clients were punctual to their appointment, for the clock had just struck ten when Dr. Mortimer was shown up, followed by the young baronet.
"Your hat and boots, Watson, quick! Not a moment to lose!" He rushed into his room in his DRESSING-GOWN, and was back again in a few seconds in a frock-coat. We hurried together down the stairs and into the street. Dr. Mortimer and Baskerville were still visible about two hundred yards ahead of us in the direction of Oxford Street.
"And ample for us both," said Holmes, as he sprang up and hastened to change from his DRESSING-GOWN to his coat. "While we are on our way, Mr. Mac, I will ask you to be good enough to tell me all about it."
It was soon evident to me that he was now preparing for an all-night sitting. He took off his coat and waistcoat, put on a large BLUE DRESSING-GOWN, and then wandered about the room collecting pillows from his bed, and cushions from the sofa and armchairs. With these he constructed a sort of Eastern divan, upon which he perched himself cross-legged, with an ounce of shag tobacco and a box of matches laid out in front of him. In the dim light of the lamp I saw him sitting there, an old brier pipe between his lips, his eyes fixed vacantly upon the corner of the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him, silent, motionless, with the light shining upon his strong-set aquiline features.
I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a PURPLE DRESSING GOWN, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand.
Sherlock Holmes was, as I expected, lounging about his sitting-room in his DRESSING GOWN, reading the agony column of The Times, and smoking his before-breakfast pipe, which was composed of all the plugs and dottles left from his smokes of the day before, all carefully dried and collected on the corner of the mantelpiece.
"Holmes," said I, as I stood one morning in our bow-window looking down the street, "here is a madman coming along. It seems rather sad that his relatives should allow him to come out alone. My friend rose lazily from his armchair, and stood with his hands in the pockets of his DRESSING-GOWN, looking over my shoulder
“You shall have it, then. Ring for our boots, and tell them to order a cab. I'll be back in a moment, when I have changed my DRESSING-GOWN and filled my cigar-case."
Sherlock Holmes's prophecy was soon fulfilled, and in a dramatic fashion. At half-past seven next morning, in the first dim glimmer of daylight, I found him standing by my bedside in his DRESSING-GOWN. "There's a brougham waiting for us, Watson," said he.
Holmes was seated at his side-table clad in his DRESSING-GOWN and working hard over a chemical investigation.
`You have less frontal development than I should have expected,' said he at last. `It is a dangerous habit to finger loaded firearms in the pocket of one's DRESSING-GOWN.'
It stood on a small pedestal table with an old DRESSING-GOWN of Holmes's so draped round it that the illusion from the street was absolutely perfect.
All right, Mrs. Hudson, I am much obliged for your assistance. And now, Watson, let me see you in your old seat once more, for there are several points which I should like to discuss with you." He had thrown off the seedy frock-coat, and now he was the Holmes of old in the MOUSE-COLORED DRESSING GOWN which he took from his effigy.
He was a different man to the limp and lounging figure in the MOUSE-COLORED DRESSING GOWN who had prowled so restlessly only a few hours before round the fog-girt room.
Finally, just after I had been called in the morning, he rushed into my room. He was in his DRESSING-GOWN, but his pale, hollow-eyed face told me that his night had been a sleepless one.
Dr. Watson could not restrain a cry of amazement. There was a facsimile of his old friend, DRESSING-GOWN and all, the face turned three-quarters towards the window and downwards, as though reading an invisible book, while the body was sunk deep in an armchair.
