The Real Reason Holmes Had To Retire? Sheer Throughput!

 Sherlock Holmes, as we all know, had a mighty, mighty brain.

And we all know he retired from consulting detection in the early 1900s after only a couple decades at the job. By modern standards, that seems pretty young, but in the Victorian era one has to wonder if it was younger still. We have glimpses of why it was that Holmes retired, but not his full explanation. Rheumatism, boredom, Watson's "desertion" . . . surely there was something more to his choice to leave London and investigation.

While I am not going to compare my brain to Holmes's, the effects of my own age and our modern age combining are definitely giving me one theory as to why he gave it up: The sheer throughput.

I find myself becoming more and more forgetful these days, missing things in my e-mails, losing track of projects, but there is an obvious source aside from the subtle effects of age, and that's the sheer amount of data that has been rushing at me, both on the job and off. Sherlock Holmes, we know, was all about grabbing up as much data applicable to his profession as possible. He read all of the newspapers, he studied all of the topics that might be useful to him, and the ever-flowing parade of London criminals that he tried to keep aware of in a growing city? The city added two million residents between 1881 and 1901, not counting suburban growth!

Sherlock Holmes (like many a Sherlockian of the Ron DeWaal sort) set himself impossible goals in his youth and a never-ending path of information gathering. The amount of material that passed through that racing engine of a mind of his had to be astounding . . . and, eventually, unmaintainable.

Sherlock Holmes eventually had to retire just so he could quit being the Sherlock Holmes he had decided he was to be, early in life.

When looking at Holmes's retirement, it's interesting that he chose first to go for a quiet country life, and then next chose to become someone else entirely -- an Irish-American anarchist named Altamont from Chicago. Sure, he says "Strong pressure was put upon me to look into the matter" regarding his choice to turn spy, but there was also surely something attractive about just being someone other than Sherlock Holmes for a couple of years. Hanging out in America, making the social connections that would lead him back to England and Von Bork . . . yes, he was working, but he also wasn't taking case after case, called upon by Scotland Yard every time they got lazy . . . you know they had to bug him in Sussex now and again.

The amount of data flowing through the brain of an Irish-American in Chicago was probably quite a deal less than that through the mind of the London professional consulting detective. And, for a while, he got to quit being all that was Sherlock Holmes, a man of whom magic came to be expected.

I really can understand that these days.