Dr. Watson
John H. Watson, known as Dr. Watson, is a fictional character in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Along with Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson first appeared in the novel A Study in Scarlet (1887). "The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place" (1927) is the last work of Doyle featuring Watson and Holmes, although their last appearance in the canonical timeline is in "His Last Bow" (1917).
This article is about the Sherlock Holmes character. For other uses, see Dr. Watson (disambiguation).Dr. Watson
A Study in Scarlet (1887)
"The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place" (1927, canon)
John H. Watson
H. Watson Sr. (father; deceased)
Mary Morstan (late 1880s – between 1891 and 1894)
Second unnamed wife (c. 1903–??)
British
As Holmes's friend and confidant, Watson has appeared in various films, television series, video games, comics and radio programmes.
Personal characteristics[edit]
Physical appearance[edit]
In A Study in Scarlet, having just returned from Afghanistan, Watson is described "as thin as a lath and as brown as a nut."[16] 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.[17]
Watson used to be an athlete: it is mentioned 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...".
Influence[edit]
As the first-person narrator of Doyle's Holmes stories, Watson has inspired the creation of many similar narrator characters.[19] 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".[20] This type of character has been called "the Watson".[21]
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).[22] Author Kodō Nomura modeled his characters Heiji Zenigata and his sidekick Hachigoro on Holmes and Watson.[23]
Microsoft named the debugger in Microsoft Windows "Dr. Watson".