Doctor Watson having one very famous friend has really unbalanced his being in the eyes of the rest of humanity. I mean, think of any one friend in your life, your best friend, even . . . now think of your life if everyone saw it in only terms of that one other person, and cast you as someone who practically wouldn't exist without that one person. Even if you don't consider John Watson to be Sherlock Holmes's one true love, he still winds up being Holmes's One True Friend, despite all evidence of problems in the relationship -- and there is plenty.
One of the most intriguing lines we have from John Watson about his life outside of Holmes comes from "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box," as Watson, still living at Baker Street, writes, "Everybody was out of town, and I yearned for the glades of the New Forest or the shingle of Southsea."
So just who was "everybody?"
It really speaks to Watson having a regular group of friends he'd hang out with. He follows that with "a depleted bank account had caused me to postpone my holiday, and as to my companion, neither the country nor the sea presented the slightest attraction to him." So if Watson had a well-stuffed bank account, he'd have plainly gone to the planned trip to New Forest or Southsea. And he wouldn't have gone with Sherlock Holmes. Watson is actually kind of depressed that he has to stay in London with Holmes.
Who would he have hung out with on vacation? How many of his friends went to the same location in New Forest or Southsea to do that hanging out? And if Watson was yearning for those places, it would seem to indicate he had either been there before or just heard so much about them from his friends who did vacation there.
Colonel Hayter, Thurston, Lomax . . . the list of non-Sherlock friends who might have been in that "everybody" is very short. And if you search up Watson's well over two hundred uses of the words "my friend" in his writings, they all tend to be about the guy he lives with. Even the hundreds of instances of the words "your friend" seem to focus on the guy Watson was forced to live with for financial reasons.
Was "everybody" a real social group, or something Watson just yearned for in his hot August blues as he yearned for those vacation spots outside of London?
It remains yet another of those Watson mysteries we shall be forever wondering about, like his wound, his bull pup, and his wives.
Despite the fact Arthur Conan Doyle was himself a medical man, trained at Edinburgh, he never seems to me to be especially interested in Watson. Although Hollywood movies really did take it too far in making something of a buffoon of Holmes's biographer, I can see why they went that way. Nothing in the canon was to overshadow Holmes's brilliance, of course, and largely readers didn't buy magazines and books containing their adventures to read about Watson. In my seven or eight novels and my short stories I deliberately compensate for this lack of attention - even of fairness - towards Holmes's faithful friend, giving him far better parts than those assigned by Doyle, for example in one of my short stories titled 'The Case of the Straw Boater' (involving burglars and spies) just about to appear in the next MX Anthology Holmes is largely absent.
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