Integrated Listening and Reading — 2

Sherlock Holmes, a fictional private detective created by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was partially modelled on Doyle's former university teacher Joseph Bell. In 1892, in a letter to Bell, Doyle wrote, "It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes" and, in his 1924 autobiography, he remarked, "I used and amplified his [Bell's] methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal." Robert Louis Stevenson was able, even in faraway Samoa, to recognise the strong similarity between Joseph Bell and Sherlock Holmes: "My compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Can this be my old friend Joe Bell?" Other authors sometimes suggest additional influences — for instance, the famous Edgar Allan Poe character C. Auguste Dupin.

The popular image of Sherlock Holmes was created by Sidney Paget, a British illustrator. He was inadvertently hired to illustrate The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a series of twelve short stories that ran from July 1891 through December 1892, when the publishers accidentally sent him the letter of commission rather than his younger brother, Walter Paget. Altogether, Sidney Paget did some 356 published drawings for the Sherlock Holmes series and is credited with giving the first deerstalker cap and Inverness cape to Holmes, details that were never mentioned in Arthur Conan Doyle's writing.