"Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age."
With these words, Sherlock Holmes praised his long-time roommate, biographer, friend, and associate, Dr. John H. Watson, in the 1917 short story "." And certainly, Holmes’s appraisal rings true for countless readers and listeners, as Watson remains a steadfast favorite of detective literature.
Though it is no exaggeration to say that Holmes and Watson are a legendary, that "fixed point" remark is not quite as accurate as it once was. While Watson has remained Holmes's faithful companion and "helpmate" since his debut in more than 130 years ago, he, like Holmes, has undergone many revisions and alterations in that time. He's been played straight and played for laughs, he's sometimes been revealed as the true brains behind his partnership with Holmes, and his character has been reinvented time and again, imagined as different genders, races, and even species.
Take, for example, one of his latest reincarnations in the Audible Original . Here, he is brilliantly played by award-winning actor Adam Godley, who portrays Watson in an alternate telling where Professor James Moriarty isn’t quite the evil mastermind he’s purported to be. In this iteration, Dr. Watson must contend with and work alongside not one but two obsessive geniuses—Holmes and Moriarty, the latter of whom was unjustly accused of killing his beloved.
No matter how he’s been characterized or what shape he’s taken on over the years, Watson remains a fascinating character, both for the dynamism he brings to Holmes’s investigations and for a personality and set of skills all his own. Here, we do our best to distill all of that analysis into the most important points that fans need to know about literature's most famous sidekick.
Who is Doctor John Watson?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first created the character of Watson to narrate his mystery stories and to serve as a relatable everyman beside his legendary detective’s otherworldly insight and abilities. Yet the give us little information about Watson's origins. We know that his father is dead and his deceased brother struggled with a drinking problem. A Study in Scarlet begins by informing us that he served as an army doctor in Afghanistan, where he was wounded badly enough to be sent back to England. With few prospects and less money, he ran into an old friend, who introduced him to Sherlock Holmes, a consulting detective—"the only one in the world," claims Holmes—in need of a roommate to help cover rent. Fascinated by Holmes's eccentricities, Watson started writing down their adventures for publication. And so, the legend of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson was born.
In The Sign of the Four, Watson married one of Holmes's clients, Mary Morstan, who eventually died and left Watson a widower. Their relationship is mired in mystery, as Arthur Conan Doyle infamously grew to loathe Holmes and increasingly neglected his continuity. If you try to figure out how long Watson remained married versus how long he was single, you'll likely find that the dates indicate he must have been married several times rather than just the once—but more on Watson's woman chasing later!Despite such mysteries, there are a couple of other things we know about this character for sure—one, that Doyle originally wanted to name him Ormond Sacker, and two, that we are all very grateful he settled on the name "John Watson" instead.
