“Take a pinch of snuff, Doctor” is Victorian for “take a fucking sip, babe”
I’m not even kidding here. Look at this: Holmes tells Watson truth is stranger than fiction, Watson calls bullshit, picks a random newspaper article and says he can tell you the facts without even reading it, and Holmes completely destroys his argument:
“Indeed, your example is an unfortunate one for your argument,” said Holmes, taking the paper and glancing his eye down it. “This is the Dundas separation case, and, as it happens, I was engaged in clearing up some small points in connection with it. The husband was a teetotaler, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife, which, you will allow, is not an action likely to
occur to the imagination of the average story-teller.Take a pinch of snuff, Doctor, and acknowledge that I have scored over you in your example.”
I just imagined the sherlock holmes canon written in the style of pg wodehouse and im on the floor dying. “His chin had a certain thinginess to it and he shimmered about the place with a dash good amount of whotsit.”
*sherlock swooning on a chaise* fish me out of the soup, doctor
[standing above a dead body at a crime scene]
john: rummy circs this. i mean to say this cove’s sleeping with hades tonight for cert, what
sherlock: you’ve got the ticket again, old thing, and yours are usually first class. never lower than second. i advise we dine out to further pursue that thread.
lestrade: dr watson, mr holmes, can you please talk in an english the rest of us can understand
john: Oh You Old So and So! always so froggy with the old map, what! we’re right on top of it
sherlock: toodle pip, you darling lamb
lestrade: omg pls
TOODLE PIP
One can’t give the raspberry to a client. I mean, you didn’t find Sherlock Holmes refusing to see clients just because he had been out late the night before at Doctor Watson’s birthday party.
hey folks, I’m gonna introduce you to two very important fandom terms and they are watsonian and doylist
they come (obviously) from the sherlock holmes fandom, and they are two different ways of explaining something in a story. say I’m a fan and I notice that, in the original books, watson’s war wound is sometimes in his leg and sometimes in his shoulder. the watsonian explanation is how watson (that is, a person within the story) might explain it; the doylist explanation is how sir arthur conan doyle (a person in real life) would have explained it.
sherlock explains the migrating war wound by making the shoulder wound real and the limp psychosomatic. the guy ritchie films explain it by having the leg wound sustained in battle before the events of the film and the shoulder wound happen onscreen. the doylist explanation, of course, is that acd forgot where the wound was.
this is very important when we’re discussing stuff like headcanons and word-of-god. I see this when people offer watsonian explanations for something, and then a doylist will say something like “it’s just because the author wrote it that way,” and I see it when a person is criticizing bad writing/storytelling (for example, the fact that quiet in metal gear solid v is running around the whole game in a bikini and ripped tights) and someone comes back with “but there’s an in-story reason why that happens!” (that reason being she breathes through her skin).
there’s nothing wrong with either explanation, and really I think you need both to understand and analyze a text. a person coming up with a watsonian explanation has likely not forgotten that the author had real-life reasons for writing something that way, and a person with a doylist interpretation is likely not ignoring the in-universe justification for that thing.
but it’s very difficult (and imo often useless, though there are exceptions) to try to argue one kind of explanation with the other kind. wetblanketing someone’s headcanon with “or it could just be bad writing” is obnoxious; dismissing someone’s criticism with “but have you considered this in-universe explanation” is ignoring the point of the criticism. understanding where someone is coming from is important when making an argument; acting like your argument is better because you’re being doylist when they’re being watsonian or vice versa is not.
Making Watsonian interpretations is also part of playing “The Game” (AKA “The Great Game”, or “The Sherlockian Game”)–analyzing the stories under the premise that Holmes and Watson are actual people, and Doyle was merely Watson’s literary agent, if he was involved at all. This game often (but not always) involves researching things from the time period and using outside sources to tie up loose ends in the stories, clarify details, and make sense of Watson’s broken timeline.
Playing The Game is a long-established pastime among Holmes fans, so I think when reading analyses of Holmes stories people probably encounter Watsonian-style interpretations much more often than they would with other literary works. I can see how someone who is used to interpreting literary works based off of the author rather than the narrator might see it as strange for people to be so fixated on Watson’s voice and intentions if they didn’t realize that making in-universe explanations for questions about Holmes stories was a game that Holmes fans have been playing for decades.
john works at a local record store to support himself after coming back from afghanistan, and he hates the monotony of it and the loneliness of it–because who goes to a record store when you can buy whatever you want online–and he feels like he’s wasting away here, like he’s already dead, until one night sherlock comes up just as he’s locking up for the evening, and even though john’s tired and just wants to go home after 8 hours of dusting off racks and racks of albums that no one wants to buy, their eyes meet through the door and he thinks what color even are those and he doesn’t know except that they’re beautiful and john can’t resist beautiful, not when there’s so little beauty in his life these days, so he lets sherlock in and locks the door behind them and flips just one of the lights back on, and sherlock asks if they have any samuel barber, and john can feel those strange eyes on him as he searches and manages to find one worn old record in their bins of used vinyls, and when he’s ringing up the sale he admits he has no idea who samuel barber is, and sherlock scoffs and mutters typical and john’s ears go pink at the tips and he thinks maybe he shouldn’t have let sherlock in after all if he’s going to be an ass, but then sherlock stutters out would you, um, want to, you know, give it a listen, and john smiles, beams really, and it feels awkward on his face because it’s been so long since he even tried, and then there’s a cab ride to a flat on baker street and the awkward arrangement of limbs on an unfamiliar sofa and the telltale clicks and pops of imperfections in the vinyl before the strings begin, and sherlock closes his eyes when the music starts and john’s too busy watching him for a while to really listen, looking instead at the way the notes can be seen in fluttering lashes and twitching fingers and the crinkling across the bridge of his nose, and sherlock tells him close your eyes without even opening his own, and john coughs out a dusty laugh but he presses his eyes closed and listens, and there’s tension and there’s sorrow–heavy and deep–but there’s beauty too and he’s never heard anything like it, felt anything like it, the way the music seems to fill him up like swirling sand scraping every nerve raw, and it’s almost unbearable, a single tear slipping free to be swiped away by the soft brush of unfamiliar fingers along his cheek, and then sherlock is shifting, moving closer, and
over the rising crescendo of the strings
john can hear the question in the shake of his breath, and he nods his answer, and sherlock’s weight settles across his lap, their bodies taut and buzzing with possibility as hands come up to cradle his jaw, and he feels electric, like lightning made flesh, and when soft lips press against his, john crackles back to life
willowfoot 