“It is an illusion that transmogrifies recognizable matter into an imagining; reality into a representation, life into a shadow.” (Vanacker 65)
Sherlock Holmes was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s imagining of a detective that manifested in the Victorian era and became the epitome of the Victorian man. The illustrators’ lens of Sidney Paget drew that imagining into a reality. Later as Gillette, Rathbone, Brett, Cumberbatch and Miller represented Sherlock Holmes on television and in cinema, Sherlock became a shadow of his creator’s vision. Holmes was transformed from a hawkish lean Victorian man to Paget’s handsome deerstalker wearing detective with Gillette’s addition of the calabash pipe and phrase, “Elementary, my dear Watson”. Rathbone transformed him into a “thinking machine” and Brett into “manic-depressive” between adventures. Cumberbatch transformed Sherlock into the sexy “high-functioning sociopath” and Miller has given Holmes an American edge. As Vanacker argues, “Holmes is evoked only in the title of the film and in the fact that the unknown actor portraying him is tall and wears a three-quarter length smoking jacket. Yet we are invited to recognize ‘Sherlock Holmes’ as an icon of late nineteenth-century popular culture: a symbol of empiricism and rationality, and a fictive detective who had been able to unravel every forensic detail of the world of his time” (Vanacker 64). The visual signatures or shadows of Holmes continue to play the great Game that Doyle created with the Sherlock Holmes stories.
