Jeremy Brett has my ♡

just leaving this here

@delphi-star You do recall correctly!! She does not give a shit about that man! She's happily married! She tipped him for being a witness at her wedding!

Apparently Arthur Conan Doyle just made a mistake while writing the story and nobody bothered to proofread so they just published it like that.

In The Last Vampyre there's that couple whose daughter has flu, and it's like:

Mother: She's not going to die is she, doctor?

Watson: No *vexation inexplicably activated* But she will pass through a crisis and needs the greatest care *vexation increasing* She should sleep now *accusatory glare*

Father: This village is plagued.

Watson: Like many another at this time of the year with INFLUENZA!! *flounces out of room, vexation overflowing*

I mean, what kind of a bedside manner is that?!

He did make up for it by gently stroking the patient's forehead with those lovely, lovely hands later on, but I digress . . .

The Problem of Thor Bridge

“Somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox & Co., at Charing Cross, there is a travel-worn and battered tin dispatch-box with my name, John H. Watson, M.D., Late Indian Army, painted upon the lid. It is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases to illustrate the curious problems which Mr. Sherlock Holmes had at various times to examine.”

If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outrè results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”

So it's like as a young man he goes "Boy I wish there was a tiny society made of individuals with a shorter lifespan than my own which I could life the roof off of and observe." And then he just sits on that for a few decades before going "WAIT! BEES!!!!"

(Gosh sorry this doodle is so cursed haha)

Sure, the connotations of two men holding hands has definitely shifted over the past century and is now more likely to be seen as having romantic implications (sadly, I think) than when this was written. What is a normal thing to do in a homosocial friendship has shifted.

...But I think that it does suggest that if Holmes is fantasising about whizzing around omnipotently and making brilliant deductions on a social scale, he wants Watson specifically there with him to be impressed?

Sherlock Holmes & John Watson