Holmes's Birthplace: The (Pride and) Joy of Sussex

By Brad Keefauver

Whenever a Sherlockian turns to the origins of Sherlock Holmes, an inevitable first stop is his well-known line, “My ancestors were country squires.” While seeming at first to be a revelation about his beginnings, the words also put a certain distance between the urban Holmes and his rustic roots, implying an unsaid “but I’m from somewhere else entirely.” Yet Holmes never actually says, “I’m from somewhere else entirely,” and in that, I think we can find a “dog in the night-time” clue as to just what he was really telling us in not telling us where he was from. (Confused? Just wait.)

When you stop to consider it, hiding a rural origin was something Holmes had to find highly desirable in his chosen career. Saying anything as harmless as “My parents owned farmland” would mark him as a converted country boy, an image that wouldn’t have helped his early dealings with Scotland Yard in the least. Instead of jibes like “Mr. Theorist,” he would get the inevitable “That’s not how we do things in the big city, farm-boy.” London clients wanted a smart London detective, not some sage bumpkin who was going to win them over with homespun charm. And, as we’ve seen on several occasions, Sherlock Holmes knew how to play a part, whether it was an old Italian priest or a hard-drinking groom. Playing the part of a city-bred detective would not have been a great challenge to him. So how does one find the truth with a chameleon like Holmes?

Wait until you’re sure he’s not playing a part any more. The only way to truly know what Holmes was before he began playing “the world’s first and foremost consulting detective” is to simply look at what he was after he left that role. And that trail leads directly to Sussex.

Urbanites, especially those who’ve spent their entire lives in one of the world’s largest cities, don’t suddenly move to the country to start bee-farming when they retire. Raising bees is a fairly specialized branch of agriculture, and even a city dweller who decided to go rustic wouldn’t think of such a thing off the top of his head . . . unless he possessed some past experience of it. Age inevitably brings a return to pleasures remembered from childhood, and since Sherlock Holmes’s sudden interest in apiaries did not spring into his head from nowhere, it would be a fairly safe bet to say he was going back to something he enjoyed as a child. And where better to return to the thing you enjoyed as a child than that place you enjoyed it as a child. And, for Holmes, that would mean Sussex.

Hints of a Sussex origin for Holmes appear in the Watsonian chronicles for those willing to look. Take this description, for example, that Holmes gives in LION: “a big, ginger-moustached man of the slow, solid Sussex breed — a breed which covers much good sense under a heavy, silent exterior.” Sound like anyone we know that wasn’t from Sussex? Watson perhaps? In choosing a close friend, a long-term room-mate, most people would lean toward the sort of person that felt like family to them, that made them feel like they were at home. Watson’s similarity to the men of Sussex, perhaps even to one of Holmes’s boyhood companions of that breed, could help produce the sort of friendship we see forming between Holmes and Watson from early on.

But it wasn’t just good things that showed the detective’s ties to the southern coast. Holmes demonstrated just how important Sussex was to him more than once, when evil conspired to reached a dark hand out toward his favored retirement spot. Whether he went against the Ku Klux Klan (FIVE) or Moriarty (VALL), Holmes reacts very much like they’ve encroached on his home turf and deals very personal justice in both cases. One can almost imagine Holmes, as he slipped out of Moriarty’s grasp at Reichenbach Falls, uttering one last line to the professor along the lines of: “You shouldn’t have gone into Sussex.”

From the first real case Holmes tells of (MUSG) to the last case he relates (LION), Sherlock Holmes seems bound to Sussex more than any other place. His phrase in the latter of those tales “my little Sussex home” points not just to the latter days, but to earlier ones as well. Childhood home, birthplace, origin point . . . call it what you will. The circle of Sherlock Holmes’s life may have London at one end, but Sussex . . . Sussex will always be at the other.