Dr. Watson

Character creation

In Doyle's early rough plot outlines, Holmes's associate was named "Ormond Sacker" before Doyle finally settled on "John Watson". He was probably inspired by one of his colleagues, Dr James Watson.

Watson shares some similarities with the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's stories about fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin, created in 1841, but unlike Watson, Poe's narrator remains unnamed.

Fictional character biography

Watson's first name is mentioned on only four occasions. Part one of the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, is subtitled Being a reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., Late of the Army Medical Department. The preface of the collection His Last Bow is signed "John H. Watson, M.D.", and in "The Problem of Thor Bridge", Watson says that his dispatch box is labelled "John H. Watson, M.D." His wife Mary Watson appears to refer to him as "James" in "The Man with the Twisted Lip"; Dorothy L. Sayers speculated that Mary may be using his middle name Hamish (an Anglicisation of Sheumais, the vocative form of Seumas, the Scottish Gaelic for James), though Doyle himself never addresses this beyond including the initial. David W. Merrell, on the other hand, concludes that Mary is not referring to her husband at all but rather to (the surname of) their servant.

The year of Watson's birth is not stated in the stories. William S. Baring-Gould and Leslie S. Klinger estimate that Watson was born in 1852. June Thomson concludes that Watson was probably born either in 1852 or 1853. According to Thomson, most commentators accept 1852 as the year of Watson's birth.

In A Study in Scarlet, Watson is the narrator. He states that he had studied at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, receiving his medical degree from the University of London in 1878 with further training at Netley as an assistant surgeon in the British Army. (In Doyle's short pastiche "The Field Bazaar", Watson is described as having received his Bachelor of Medicine from Doyle's alma mater, Edinburgh University; this would probably have been in 1874.) He was sent to India with the 5th (Northumberland Fusiliers) Regiment of Foot before being attached to the 66th (Berkshire) Regiment of Foot. Watson saw service in the Second Anglo-Afghan War and was wounded at the Battle of Maiwand by a jezail bullet, suffered enteric fever and was sent back to England on the troopship HMS Orontes following his recovery. With his health ruined, Watson was then awarded a daily pension of 11 shillings and 6 pence for nine months.

In 1881, Watson is introduced by his friend Stamford to Holmes, who is looking for someone to share rent in rooms in 221B Baker Street. Concluding that they are compatible, they subsequently move in. When Watson notices multiple eccentric guests frequenting the rooms, Holmes reveals that he is a "consulting detective" and that the guests are his clients.

Watson as Holmes's biographer

Throughout Doyle's novels, Watson is presented as Holmes's biographer. At the end of the first published Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, Watson is so incensed by Scotland Yard claiming full credit for its solution that he exclaims: "Your merits should be publicly recognised. You should publish an account of the case. If you won't, I will for you". Holmes calmly responds, "You may do what you like, Doctor". Thus, the story is presented as "a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson", and most other stories of the series share this by implication.

In the first chapter of The Sign of the Four, Holmes comments on Watson's first effort as a biographer: "I glanced over it. Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism... The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes, by which I succeeded in unravelling it", whereupon Watson admits, "I was annoyed at this criticism of a work which had been specially designed to please him. I confess, too, that I was irritated by the egotism which seemed to demand that every line of my pamphlet should be devoted to his own special doings".

In "The Adventure of Silver Blaze", Holmes confesses that "I made a blunder, my dear Watson—which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through your memoirs." In The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapters 5–6, Holmes says: "Watson, Watson, if you are an honest man you will record this also and set it against my successes!" Nonetheless, in his prologue to "The Adventure of the Yellow Face", Watson himself remarks, "In publishing these short sketches [of Holmes's cases] ... it is only natural that I should dwell rather upon his successes than upon his failures."

Sometimes Watson seems determined to stop publishing stories about Holmes. For example, in "The Adventure of the Second Stain", Watson declares that he had intended the previous story ("The Adventure of the Abbey Grange") "to be the last of those exploits of my friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes, which I should ever communicate to the public." However, Watson later decides that "this long series of episodes should culminate in the most important international case which he has ever been called upon to handle" ("The Second Stain" being that case). Despite this, Watson subsequently presents twenty further cases in his stories. The public knows from the stories that Watson is Holmes's partner; the Prime Minister appeals to both Holmes and Watson's patriotism when revealing the details of the secret letter in "The Second Stain".

Personal characteristics

Physical appearance

In A Study in Scarlet, having just returned from Afghanistan, Watson is described "as thin as a lath and as brown as a nut." In subsequent texts, he is variously described as strongly built, of a stature either average or slightly above average, with a thick, strong neck and a small moustache.

Watson used to be an athlete: Watson mentions in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" (1924) that he used to play rugby union for Blackheath, but he fears his physical condition has declined since that point. In "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" (1899), Watson is described as "a middle-sized, strongly built man—square jaw, thick neck, moustache..." In "His Last Bow", set in August 1914, Watson is described as "...a heavily built, elderly man with a grey moustache...".

Skills and personality

Watson is intelligent, if lacking in Holmes's insight, and serves as a perfect foil for Holmes: the archetypal late Victorian/Edwardian gentleman against the brilliant, emotionally detached analytical machine. Furthermore, he is considered an excellent doctor and surgeon, especially by Holmes. For instance, in "The Adventure of the Dying Detective", Holmes creates a ruse that he is deathly ill to lure a suspect to his presence, which must fool Watson as well during its enactment. To that effect, in addition to elaborate makeup and starving himself for a few days for the necessary appearance, Holmes firmly claims to Watson that he is highly contagious to the touch, knowing full well that the doctor would immediately deduce his true medical condition upon examination.

Watson is well aware of both the limits of his abilities and Holmes's reliance on him:

Holmes was a man of habits... and I had become one of them... a comrade... upon whose nerve he could place some reliance... a whetstone for his mind. I stimulated him... If I irritated him by a certain methodical slowness in my mentality, that irritation served only to make his own flame-like intuitions and impressions flash up the more vividly and swiftly. Such was my humble role in our alliance.

Watson sometimes attempts to solve crimes on his own, using Holmes's methods. For example, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Watson efficiently clears up several of the many mysteries confronting the pair, including Barrymore's strange candle movements turning out to be signals to his brother-in-law Seldan, and Holmes praises him for his zeal and intelligence. However, because he is not endowed with Holmes's almost-superhuman ability to focus on the essential details of the case and Holmes's extraordinary range of recondite, specialised knowledge, Watson meets with limited success in other cases. Holmes summed up the problem that Watson confronted in one memorable rebuke from "A Scandal in Bohemia": "Quite so... you see, but you do not observe." In "The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist," Watson's attempts to assist Holmes's investigation prove unsuccessful because of his unimaginative approach, for example, asking a London estate agent who lives in a particular country residence. (According to Holmes, what he should have done was "gone to the nearest public house" and listened to the gossip.) Watson is too guileless to be a proper detective. And yet, as Holmes acknowledges, Watson has unexpected depths about him; for example, he has a definite strain of "pawky humour", as Holmes observes in The Valley of Fear.

Influence

As the first-person narrator of Doyle's Holmes stories, Watson has inspired the creation of many similar narrator characters. After the appearance of Watson, the use of a "Watsonian narrator", a character like Watson who has a reason to be close to the detective but cannot follow or understand the detective's line of investigation, became "a standard feature of the classical detective story". This type of character has been called "the Watson".

The Holmes-Watson partnership, consisting of a "brilliant yet flawed detective" and a "humbler but dependable and sympathetic sidekick", influenced the creation of similar teams in British detective fiction throughout the twentieth century, from detective Hercule Poirot and Poirot's companion Captain Hastings (created by author Agatha Christie in 1920), to Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis, introduced in 1975. Watson also influenced the creation of other fictional narrators, such as Bunny Manders (the sidekick of gentleman thief A. J. Raffles, created by E. W. Hornung in 1898) and the American character Archie Goodwin (the assistant of detective Nero Wolfe, created by Rex Stout in 1934). Author Kodō Nomura modeled his characters Heiji Zenigata and his sidekick Hachigoro on Holmes and Watson.

Microsoft named the debugger in Microsoft Windows "Dr. Watson".

Adaptations

Theatre

Bruce McRae originated the role of Watson in the 1899 Broadway production of Sherlock Holmes, a play by William Gillette and Doyle.

Claude King played Watson in the 1910 premiere of The Speckled Band. In the 1923 play The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Watson was played by H. G. Stoker. In the 1965 musical Baker Street, he was played by Peter Sallis.

Derek Waring played Watson in the 1989 London premiere of Sherlock Holmes: The Musical. Lucas Hall portrayed Watson in the 2015 premiere of Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery.

Film

Actors to play Watson in early film adaptations of Sherlock Holmes include Edward Fielding (1916), Roland Young (1922), Ian Fleming (1931), Athole Stewart (The Speckled Band, 1931), Ian Hunter (The Sign of Four, 1932), Reginald Owen (1932) and Warburton Gamble (A Study in Scarlet, 1933). The series of Holmes films with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson portrayed the doctor as a lovable but incompetent assistant. Some later treatments have presented a more competent Watson.

Watson was played by actor André Morell in the 1959 film version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, wherein Morell preferred that his version of Watson should be closer to that originally depicted in Doyle's stories, not Nigel Bruce's interpretation. Other depictions include Robert Duvall opposite Nicol Williamson's Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1978); Donald Houston, who played Watson to John Neville's Holmes in A Study in Terror (1965); a rather belligerent, acerbic Watson portrayed by Colin Blakely in Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), in which Holmes was played by Robert Stephens (who starts the rumour that they are homosexual lovers to discourage female interest); and James Mason's portrayal in Murder by Decree (1978), with Christopher Plummer as Holmes. Alan Cox played a teenage Watson in the 1985 film Young Sherlock Holmes, narrated by Michael Hordern as an older Watson.

In the 1988 parody film Without a Clue, the roles of a witless Watson and an extremely intelligent Holmes are reversed. In the film, Holmes (Michael Caine) is an invention of Watson (Ben Kingsley) played by an alcoholic actor; when Watson initially offered suggestions on how to solve a case to some visiting policemen, he was at the time applying for a post in an exclusive but private medical practice and so invented the fictional Holmes to avoid attracting attention to himself. He continues the "lie" of Holmes's existence after he fails to get the post, hiring the actor as people wanted to meet the "real" Holmes. At the same time, Watson becomes increasingly frustrated that his own talents are unrecognised, and unavailingly attempts to win celebrity for himself as "the Crime Doctor" while the actor attempts to quit, only for both men to gain a new appreciation for each other during the latest confrontation with Professor Moriarty (one of the few men who knows the truth of their dynamic).

In the Guy Ritchie-directed Sherlock Holmes movies, Watson is portrayed by Jude Law. Law portrays Watson as knowledgeable, brave, strong-willed, and thoroughly professional, as well as a competent detective in his own right. Apart from being armed with his trademark sidearm, his film incarnation is also a capable swordsman. The film portrays Watson as having a gambling problem, which William S. Baring-Gould had inferred from a reference in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" to Holmes keeping Watson's cheque book locked in a drawer in his desk. Law also portrayed Watson in the 2011 sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

Television

William Podmore played Watson in The Three Garridebs (1937).

The first actor to play Watson on a TV series (as opposed to a one-off adaptation) was Raymond Francis who appeared in the 1951 British series, We Present Alan Wheatley as Mr. Sherlock Holmes in....

The 1950s Sherlock Holmes American TV series featured Howard Marion-Crawford as a stable Watson with a knockout punch.

Nigel Stock played Watson in two BBC series in 1965 and 1968.

In the Soviet Union television series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, directed by Igor Maslennikov, Watson was played by Vitaly Solomin. The Telegraph included Solomin in their list of the 10 top actors to play Dr Watson.

Watson was portrayed by David Burke and later by Edward Hardwicke in the 1980s and 1990s television series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, all starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes.

In the animated TV series Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (1999–2001), Holmes acquires a 'new' Watson in the form of a robot. The robot, having absorbed all lore of the original, believes itself to be Watson, and Holmes treats it as such, concluding that the "spirit" is Watson's though the "body" is not.

Ian Hart portrayed a young, capable, and fit Watson twice for BBC Television, once opposite Richard Roxburgh as Holmes (in a 2002 adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles) and for a second time opposite Rupert Everett as the Great Detective in the new story Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004).

In the 2004–2012 medical drama House, the character of James Wilson, portrayed by Robert Sean Leonard, is partially based on John Watson. Beyond the similarity of their names, aspects of the relationship between Wilson and Gregory House mirror the relationship between Watson and Sherlock Holmes.

Radio

For most of the run of the 1930–1936 radio series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Leigh Lovell played Watson with Richard Gordon as Holmes.

Nigel Bruce reprised his film role of Watson on the radio opposite first Basil Rathbone, then Tom Conway as Holmes for most of the 1940s radio series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Different actors played Watson in later seasons.

Carleton Hobbs portrayed Holmes in a series of BBC radio broadcasts that ran from 1952 to 1969, with Norman Shelley playing Watson. Many of these were broadcast on Children's Hour. Of the many actors who have portrayed Holmes and Watson for the BBC, the Hobbs and Shelley duo is the longest running.

In 1954, Sir Ralph Richardson played Watson (named James rather than John) in a short radio series on NBC opposite Sir John Gielgud as Holmes.

Watson was also portrayed by English-born actor Michael Williams for the BBC Radio adaptation of the complete run of the Holmes canon from November 1989 to July 1998. Williams, together with Clive Merrison, who played Holmes, were the first actors to portray the Doyle characters in all the short stories and novels of the canon. After Williams' death, the BBC continued the shows with The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Four series were produced, all written by Bert Coules who had been the head writer on the complete canon project, with Andrew Sachs starring opposite Merrison.

In 1998, Imagination Theatre received the rights from the estate of Dame Jean Conan Doyle to produce new radio stories of Holmes and Watson. Lawrence Albert plays Watson to the Holmes of first John Gilbert and later John Patrick Lowrie in the radio series The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Lowrie and Albert also played Holmes and Watson respectively in The Classic Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which adapted all of Doyle's short stories and novels.

Video games

Watson appears alongside Holmes in multiple Sherlock Holmes video games, such as Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (1991) and its two sequels, and The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes (1992) and its sequel. Watson also appears with Holmes in the Sherlock Holmes series of video games developed by Frogwares.

Watson appears at the start of The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures (2015), where he is murdered while teaching in Japan. His role as an assistant to Sherlock Holmes is instead filled by another character named Iris Watson, who claims to be his daughter and uses "Dr. John H. Watson" as a pen name. Both Watsons had their names changed to Wilson due to copyright concerns in international releases.

G5 Entertainment published a free-to-play hidden object game called Sherlock (2020), featuring Watson and Holmes.

Print

Stephen King, the American novelist, wrote a short story called "The Doctor's Case" in the 1993 collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes, where Watson actually solves the case instead of Holmes. Watson appears as a supporting character in several of American author Laurie R. King's Mary Russell detective novels.

American author Michael Mallory began a series of stories in the mid-1990s featuring Watson's mysterious second wife, whom he called Amelia Watson. In Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds, Watson's second wife is Violet Hunter, from "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches".

Robert Ryan wrote a series of thriller novels featuring Watson as an army Major in World War I.