YESTERDAY, WE CLARIFIED SOME MATTERS ABOUT Sherlock Holmes’ stuff: a non-Canonical crooked-stem meerschaum and his authentic country-attire deerstalkers. We continue today in Part 2 with other head wear, his magnifying lens, and even variously colored dressing-gowns.
A Proper Bowler. Occasionally, whether in town or country, Holmes was known to wear a proper English bowler.
In “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty,” Holmes and others don bowlers. Illustration by Sidney Paget; this and others from The Original Illustrated ‘Strand’ Sherlock Holmes.
Mr. Joseph Harrison appears to be wearing a tam o’shanter.
Holmes’ Boater. In “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” Watson notes, “It was a blazing hot day in August, Baker Street was like an oven, and the glare of the sunlight upon the yellow brickwork of the houses across the road was painful to the eye.” Perhaps this is what encouraged Holmes to wear his straw boater.
Another Sidney Paget illustration.
London Wear. Though The Hound of the Baskervilles is a novel concerning a family’s country history, the tale begins in London—where Holmes and Watson dress appropriately: top hats and morning suits.
Yet another Sidney Paget illustration.
Holmes’ Magnifying Lens. My first perusal through the Strand Magazine’s more than 1000 pages revealed no magnifying glasses. Later, double-checking another image I came upon Holmes wielding what Watson termed his “lens.”
Illustration by Frank Wiles from The Valley of Fear.
Holmes’ Dressing-Gowns. Holmes’ dressing-gowns recur throughout the Canon. In “The Man With the Twisted Lip,” it’s a “large blue dressing-gown.” In “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” it’s “a purple dressing-gown.” Is the garment fading?
Above, the purple dressing-gown. Below one of indeterminate colour from The Hound of the Baskervilles. Both illustrations by Sidney Paget.
In “The Adventure of the Bruce=Partington Plans,” it’s a “mouse-colored dressing-gown.” Later, in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes foils an assassination attempt by setting a mannequin draped in this dressing-gown visible through the window. By adventure end, Watson notes “He had thrown off the seedy frock-coat, and now he was the Holmes of old in the mouse-coloured dressing-down which he took from his effigy.”
A Disguised Holmes, Occasionally Overworked. Holmes is a master of disguise. In undercover investigations, he even tricks Watson with vicar/workman/old man guises. Indeed, he deceives the entire world during his three-year hiatus as the Norwegian explorer Sigerson.
In “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” Watson observes, “It was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes’s iron constitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of constant hard work of the most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps, by occasional indiscretions of his own…. Thus, it was that in the early spring of that year we found ourselves together in a small cottage near Poldhu Bay, at the farther extremity of the Cornish peninsula.”
For reasons I cannot describe, this illustration by Gilbert Holiday of a rambling Sherlock Holmes reminds me of Bing Crosby. Why ever? ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025