Since I seem to be tumbling head over heels into Holmes fandom,

[lotesse]

I've got to ask: who's got the info on his name? Google/various sociological database searches tell me that Sherlock means either "fair-haired" or "short-haired," and that it's a common surname. So what possessed Conan Doyle to give it to his protagonist as a prenomen? Did he ever discuss the name, or what it meant to him?

It's one of those things I'd never noticed, and then I started reading fic and the lovely strangeness of it really leaped out at me. I find it inexplicably - and intensely - sexy.

Comments

[celandineb]

It's not a common noun so the Oxford English Dictionary, my usual standby, is of no help as to its meaning/etymology.

The British are wont to use surnames as forenames, though. I believe traditionally this was often done as a way of honoring the maternal family by using the mother's maiden name as one of a son's forenames.

[laughingrat]

There's a couple editions of annotated Holmes out there--I think Norton published/publishes both of them. I mean, huge complete annotated sets, massive things. If you have access to one, that might answer, if you don't get a response from someone soon. Which you probably will, this being the internet. :) Heck, for that matter I have our library's former copies of the Baring-Gould (I think) edition at home.

[bossymarmalade]

All I seem to remember is Watson thinking that Holmes' parents messed up a Shakespeare reference, which is so hilarious that I want it to be canon even if it isn't. *g*

[mayhap]

Oooooh, yes, I've always loved the sound of Sherlock.

Here are the relevant bits from my copy of Baring-Gould, although it's not as enlightening as one might wish:

Now, the name "Sherlock Holmes" did not come to Conan Doyle's mind in a flash of inspiration; he had to labor over it. In Memories and Adventures he wrote: "What should I call the fellow? . . . One rebelled against the elementary art which gives some inkling of character in the name, and creates Mr. Sharps or Mr. Ferrets. First it was Sherringford Holmes [our italics] . . ."

But Mr. Vincent Starrett first published in this country--in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes--a page from an old notebook of Conan Doyle's on which the name Sherrinford Holmes--no g--is clearly to be seen.

Let us delve a little more deeply into the ultimate name--Sherlock Holmes.

The Holmes: As a student, Conan Doyle had gone without lunches to buy Oliver Wendell Holmes' Autocrat, Poet and Professor at the Breakfast Table (as well as many other books). And Holmes (Oliver Wendell, Senior) was much in the news in that May of 1886--he was making a famous and much-publicized visit to England. "Never have I so known and loved a man whom I had never seen," Conan Doyle wrote later. "It was one of the ambitions of my lifetime to look into his face, but by the irony of Fate I arrived in his native city just in time to lay a wreath on his newly-turned grave."

The Sherlock: Mr. John Dickson Carr in his brilliant Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tells us that the author hit on the Irish name of Sherlock¹⁷ "entirely at random." But the Sherlocks were landowners in the very part of Ireland where the Doyle family had once held its estates--County Wicklow--and Conan Doyle, a student of heraldry, may well have seen the name in family papers. Again, Conan Doyle in a newspaper interview unearthed by Mr. Vincent Starrett was once quoted as saying that "years ago I made thirty runs [at cricket] against a bowler by the name of Sherlock, and I always had a kindly feeling for the name." We may take this quip for the little it is worth.

¹⁷The name Sherlock, as Mr. Duncan MacDougald, Jr., has reported in "Some Onomatological Notes on 'Sherlock Holmes' and Other Names in the Sacred Writings," comes from the Irish scorlóz--Shearlock or Sherloch, which is derived from searlóz--Scurloch, Shirlock, or Sherloch, which is in turn the Gaelic version of the Anglo-Saxon scortlog, literally "short-lock," that is, one with shorn locks. Mr. MacDougald also notes that, according to Patrick Woulfe, Irish Names and Surnames, Dublin, 1923, the Sherlock family, "which, to judge from the name, is of Anglo-Saxon origin, had settled in Ireland before the beginning of the thirteenth century, and soon became very widespread, being found in Dublin, Meath, Louth, Wexford, Waterford, Tipperary, etc."

Sherlockian scholars, on the other hand, have speculated that Holmes was perhaps named for the famous Bishop Thomas Sherlock, 1678-1761, or his father, William Sherlock, 1641-1707, who became dean of St. Paul's and the author of A Practical Discourse Concerning Death. "There can be little doubt," Christopher Morley once wrote, "that the detective's full name was either Thomas Sherlock Holmes or William Sherlock Holmes."

But was even this the detective's full name? We know that Holmes took "Escott"--S (for Sherlock) Scott?--as his aias in "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton," and this has led to the suggestion that the detective's full name was Thomas (or William) Sherlock Scott Holmes. [pp. 9-10]