Sherlock Holmes Research Paper

The ideal Victorian Gentleman was never arrogant or weak. He acted with the impulse of a kind heart, he was too wise to despise trifles and too noble to be mastered by them; he was respectful to superiors without servility; courteous to equals; and kind to inferiors. In truth, however, according to Victorianweb.org, a gentleman rarely exhibited the qualities he emphasized. For example, the quality that separated men from gentlemen was technically right of birth, despite the fact that Victorian ideals stressed that birth alone could not make a gentleman. This contradiction made the Victorian gentleman a paradox. Victorians in general, not just gentlemen, took a strong interest in foreign countries and cultures, such as India, Africa, and China.
He deviated from both the norm and the image of a Gentleman in many ways. Holmes indulged in several strange hobbies, such as indoor target-practice, and malodorous experiments that would sometimes explode. The rooms of 221b Baker Street were also painstakingly organized in increasingly odd ways. The unanswered correspondences of Sherlock Holmes were fixed to the center of his desk with a jackknife. Holmes, was an expert on, and, like most gentlemen, an avid smoker of tobacco. The specific places that he set aside for all of his smoking apparatus, however, were rather unusual. Pipes were kept on the mantelpiece, cigars in the coalscuttle, and the tobacco was kept in the toe of a Persian slipper. There was another rather less amusing habit that separated Sherlock Holmes from the ideal Gentleman he was made out to be. Holmes was a frequent user of cocaine, “three times a day for many months” (Doyle 99). During the Victorian era, cocaine was a legal substance, and was in fact used by doctors as a mild anesthetic for many procedures such as dentistry and eye-surgery. The substance was also used to recover from illness, cure lethargy and depression, and was also an active ingredient in the popular drink Coca-Cola (Tracy 41). Using it and being addicted, however, were two very different things. Cocaine addiction was looked down upon in a manner similar to how alcoholics are viewed in today’s society, and gentlemen typically did not partake of this substance for leisure, or with much frequency. Therefore, Sherlock’s apparent addiction to the “seven per-cent solution” (Doyle 99) went against the image of Gentleman that he