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Reviewing Peter Martin's biography of James Boswell a dozen years ago, Adam Gopnik asserted that "Boswell lives on in the modem detective story. Not only the basic situation but the tone of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, and all their successors, comes right out of Boswell."1 Certainly Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had Johnson and Boswell in mind as models for Holmes and Watson, as my title quotation from "A Scandal in Bohemia" plainly informs us. For his tales of the great consulting detective, Doyle adapted concrete aspects of Johnson and Boswell's two relationships, that of friends and that of subject and biographer.
Doyle was intimately familiar with Boswell's Life of Johnson. In a sentimental review of his own library, Through the Magic Door, Doyle remarks enthusiastically that "it is not by chance that a man writes the best biography in the language."2 Boswell, Doyle reports, is his second favorite writer (Macaulay is first, and Gibbon third). He devotes a chapter of Through the Magic Door to the Life of Johnson, analyzing what the biography reveals of Johnson's personality, strengths and weaknesses. "Where [Boswell] excels as a biographer is in telling you just those little things you want to know," Doyle writes. "How often you read the life of a man and are left without the remotest idea of his personality. Not so here. The man lives again" (Door, pp. 50-51). In perhaps a veiled reference to Dr. Watson, his own "Boswell," Doyle characterizes Johnson's biographer as a medical man: "If Boswell had not lived, I wonder how much we should hear now of his huge friend? With Scotch persistence he has succeeded in inoculating the whole world with his hero worship" (pp. 48-49). This image presents Boswell's biographical project as a therapeutic intervention, a safely diluted dose of Johnson. Certainly Doyle is intrigued by the power of Boswell's creative imagination, by the way his admiring narrative of Johnson's life reshapes the implicitly threatening "huge friend" into a benign "hero." Part of what attracted Doyle to Boswell's work, I believe, was Johnson's transformation from friend to hero, his presence as both biographical subject and fictional creation, and the way his awareness of this dual role is articulated in the Life. Specifically, Doyle's fiction re-creates elements of...