Sherlock Holmes: A Secret History

Sound Bite

Broad in range and scope, this book delves into the mind and milieu of Arthur Conan Doyle, exploring the context in which he developed the beloved character Sherlock Holmes and the stories, the world, in which he comes to life.The author notes and deciphers a wealth of symbols and references from philosophy, religion, literature, history and contemporary events that enrich the plots and the morals of Doyle's clever tales, showing them to be more than merely entertaining.

About the Book

Many readers have been fascinated by the complex and cunning mind of Arthur Conan Doyle, inventor of the personality of Sherlock Holmes. Hennessy offers readers a deeper understanding of how one great mind goes about creating another great mind.Of all the books exploring the subject of Sherlock Holmes, this is the only one that reaches into the philosophical and psychological depths of the work and uses these findings to present a new understanding of the writer's motives and aesthetic goals.

Introduction

In hitting a few of the highlights in this summation of Doyle's creativity, I realize I am omitting areas of thought equally important (if such a thing can be measured), but I had to draw the line somewhere. Taken purely on the level of associative writing, as put forth by the Symbolist Manifesto, the products of Doyle's mind are the most thoughtful and thought provoking of their kind that I know of, so any assessing of such convoluted introspections would of necessity be abbreviated, arbitrary, and incomplete. Space and time force me to leave gaps, some of which I hope to fill in at a future date. I have dealt solely with sources such as philosophers, fictional writers, and so forth, that I am familiar with. Like a fisherman who cannot see his lure in such deep water, I have no idea of what may have come up to the bait, but failed to bite.With the exception of religious authority, the achievements in nonfiction that cultivated the most profound and deep-seated control on Doyle's choice of source material are unquestionably the philosophical concepts, which foster and motivate artistic creation by advocating an external prerogative, forcing purpose on the evolution of abstract thoughts serving as an armature of concrete material dress, and in turn becoming the preeminent factor in the esthetic. They gave the work energy and direction. Arthur Doyle owned one of the largest philosophical libraries in private hands. Any work of art, be it a painting, sculpture, or a piece of writing, is an external display of the quality, maturity, and intentions of the mind that created it; the work itself showing what the creator was thinking at the time, his level of mental development, morals, and so forth. Doyle was no exception to this rule. The philosophical reflections expressed in these stories designate the rich mental texture of the artist, who lifted them boldly from their original context, and adding to them the needs of his individual personality, stamped them as uniquely his own. Arthur Conan Doyle and his creation Sherlock Holmes are two of the most unique people that ever lived. Doyle utilized considerations from just about every field of philosophy, but definitely there developed a stronger sphere of influence expressed by speculations and personalities generated within the period known as the Enlightenment, and the conceptions that came about either by what had sponsored its founding, such as Descartes;¢ thoughts, or by what had resulted from its expansion, such as empiricism, pragmatism, and science; yet these stories do not deal with a solitary dominant point of view emphasizing a system contingent on a philosophical attitude, such as we find in the existential concoctions of Jean-Paul Sartre, or the desperate liberalism of Voltaire. Rather they take as their foundation large, heterogeneous chunks from the world of thought that has preceded them or is contemporary with them, and with these considerations weave a new web: flexible, personal, and highly entertaining, whose abstract energy assimilates into the dynamic personalities found in the Holmes Canon...