Literary Journeys

Exploring the paths that literature opens

Tag: London

The Birth Date of Sherlock Holmes: Fact, Tradition, and Interpretation

Why January 6 became a literary tradition

The Epiphany, celebrated a few days ago, is, for me, a day naturally linked to James Joyce’s short story The Dead, as its action takes place on 6 January. The same date, however, also appears in a very different part of literary culture: as the traditional birthday of Sherlock Holmes, one of the most famous characters in world literature.

Baker Street Tube Station, London

Did Arthur Conan Doyle ever state Holmes’s birth date?

The date of the detective’s birth was never clearly given by Arthur Conan Doyle. Even so, for many years, readers around the world have celebrated it on 6 January, treating this date almost as if it were part of the official canon. This shows not only the strength of the character but also the lasting power of literature and the involvement of its readers.

Canonical clues about Sherlock Holmes’s age

Any attempt to work out Holmes’s age must begin with the hints scattered through the canon. The only place where his age is stated directly in the short story His Last Bow. The War Service of Sherlock Holmes. In the scene where James Altamont visits Baron von Bork – before the true identity of the American agent working for Germany is revealed – the narrator describes him as

a tall, gaunt man of sixty, with clear-cut features.

Only at the end of the story does it become clear that this description refers to Sherlock Holmes. This makes it possible to fix his age in 1914 and, as a result, to place his year of birth around 1854.

The Sherlock Holmes Museum, London

Other works do not give Holmes’s age directly. Instead, they present him as a fully mature man with a strong reputation and long professional experience, which supports this calculation.

Why 6 January is celebrated as Holmes’s birthday

Doyle never gave the day or month of Holmes’s birth. This gap was filled by readers and scholars known as Sherlockians. They suggested 6 January as a symbolic date, based not on a direct statement in the text but on interpretation. This date falls on Epiphany, the feast of revelation, when hidden truths are made known.

The idea of Epiphany fits Holmes particularly well. The detective repeatedly brings hidden facts into the open, finds meaning in confusing details, and allows reason to win over illusion. In this sense, 6 January is not a historical fact but a meaningful symbol – the ‘birth’ of a mind devoted to discovering the truth.

Over time, this interpretation became widely accepted and turned into a tradition. 6 January 1854 is now treated as an unofficial but widely recognised ‘fan canon’. It is a good example of how readers interact with a text: when the author leaves a gap, readers create a clear and meaningful explanation.

From fiction to cultural tradition

As a result, Sherlock Holmes, a fictional character, has gained an almost real biography, complete with a specific birth date that is still celebrated today. This shows that great literature does not end on the final page, but continues to live in reading, discussion and imagination.

The Sherlock Holmes Museum, London

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08/01/2026
A Christmas Carol: Dickens’s London and the Making of a Classic

A ghostly journey toward redemption

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is among the most influential Christmas stories in English literature, combining social criticism with a tale of moral transformation. The novella tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly old man visited on Christmas Eve by the ghost of his former partner and three spirits – Past, Present, and Yet to Come – who guide him toward compassion and generosity.

Bah, said Scrooge, Humbug.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens Museum in London

One of the most important places on London’s literary map is the Charles Dickens Museum, located at 48 Doughty Street. This was the home of Charles Dickens from 1837 to 1839, at the very beginning of his extraordinary literary career. While living here, Dickens worked on novels such as ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘Nicholas Nickleby’.

Today, the museum allows visitors to step into Dickens’s private world. Its preserved rooms reveal his study, personal possessions, and the atmosphere of the Victorian era, offering a vivid sense of how the writer lived and worked.

A Christmas Eve that changes everything

However, when Dickens wrote his most famous Christmas story, ‘A Christmas Carol’, he no longer lived at Doughty Street. In 1843, his home was 1 Devonshire Terrace, near Regent’s Park. It was here that ‘A Christmas Carol’ was written – astonishingly, in just a few weeks and with intense emotional energy.

Dickens was deeply affected by the social problems of London at the time: the poverty of children, sharp class divisions, and the lack of compassion shown by the wealthy toward the poor. He believed that a powerful story could move people’s hearts more quickly and more deeply than political articles or essays. This belief gave rise to the unforgettable tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and his moral transformation.

‘A Christmas Carol’ was first published on 19 December 1843, and its impact was immediate: the initial 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve, an extraordinary success. Dickens’s publishers, Chapman and Hall, rushed to produce second and third printings before the New Year. The story quickly became a Christmas classic and has remained an essential part of the season ever since.

In 1864, the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray praised the book, calling it:

a national benefit to every man or woman who reads it, a personal kindness.

The illustrations associated with the original 1843 edition, created by John Leech, depict how Victorian readers first encountered the story, helping to shape the visual imagination of ‘A Christmas Carol’ that still influences how we picture it today.

I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

To fully appreciate the story behind A Christmas Carol, visit the Charles Dickens Museum and uncover the origins of Dickens’s timeless Christmas tale – and much more.

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23/12/2025
1914 Christmas Truce: A Moment of Humanity in the Heart of War

The war that consumed a generation

The first thing that came to my mind while visiting the exhibition about the First World War at the Imperial War Museum in London was the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. The book shows the cruelty and absurdity of war through the experiences of a young German soldier, Paul Bäumer. Eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys are sent to the front almost immediately after finishing school, encouraged by their teachers to serve their country. They soon realise, however, that they are shooting at boys their own age who, like them, miss home and long for peace. They begin to question the point of the war. The brutality of war takes away their sense of humanity and, in the end, their lives, turning them into a ‘lost generation’. The powerful way the author presents the characters’ emotions, the violence of the attacks and the constant presence of death mean that All Quiet on the Western Front still shocks readers today.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial – I believe we are lost.

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

The first Christmas of World War I

However, one object at the exhibition held my attention for longer. It was a button – a symbol of a brief ceasefire, of brotherhood and of humanity in the middle of the cruelty of World War. It is a reminder of the events of late 1914, known as the Christmas Truce.

The exhibit label reads: ‘German soldier Werner Keil scribbled his name and gave this uniform button to 19-year-old Corporal Eric Rowden of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles on Christmas Day 1914. In his diary, Rowden wrote, “I went out and found a German who spoke English a little, and we exchanged buttons and cigarettes, and I had 2 or 3 cigars given me, and we laughed and joked together, having forgotten war altogether”.’

Moments of peace – carols, gifts and fraternisation

On Christmas Eve, December 24, 1914, British, German, and French soldiers on the Western Front chose to disregard explicit orders from their superiors, as well as the threat of consequences such as court-martial and even execution. They bravely emerged from their trenches, laid down their weapons, and celebrated the holiday together. Diaries and other accounts from that time describe football games, the singing of Christmas carols, the exchange of gifts, Bible readings, and even shared meals with the enemy.

Behind the trenches — reactions and aftermath

High Command Was Furious. The Truce deeply alarmed military leaders on both sides. Officers issued strict orders afterwards forbidding any fraternisation, and in many sectors the truce was never repeated. By Christmas 1915, the tone of the war had hardened dramatically – gas attacks, heavy artillery, and massive casualties made a similar ceasefire impossible.

A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends. At some table a document is signed by some persons whom none of us knows, and then for years together that very crime on which formerly the world’s condemnation and severest penalty fall, becomes our highest aim.

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Remembrance and cultural legacy

Many books have been published about the 1914 Christmas Truce. Among the most notable are Truce: The Day the Soldiers Stopped Fighting by Jim Murphy and Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce by Stanley Weintraub.

One of the most popular poems capturing the spirit of that night is Carol Ann Duffy’s The Christmas Truce.

[…]

All night, along the Western Front, they sang, the enemies –

carols, hymns, folk songs, anthems, in German, English, French;

each battalion choired in its grim trench.

So Christmas dawned, wrapped in mist, to open itself

and offer the day like a gift

for Harry, Hugo, Hermann, Henry, Heinz … with whistles, waves, cheers, shouts, laughs.

[…]

Carol Ann Duffy, The Christmas Truce

The events of that remarkable evening have inspired not only historians, writers, and poets but also artists in popular culture. The Christmas Truce of 1914 is referenced in songs such as Pipes of Peace by Paul McCartney, All Together Now by The Farm, Christmas Truce by Sabaton, and Christmas in the Trenches, a beautiful and moving ballad by John McCutcheon.

In 2014, Sainsbury’s released a Christmas advertisement recalling events from 100 years earlier.

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15/12/2025
Virginia Woolf’s London – A Literary Guide to the City (Part 1)

22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington (1882–1904)

While visiting London recently, I couldn’t resist returning to this place. I sat on the steps across the street and gazed at the stately townhouse where Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882, as Adeline Virginia Stephen, the youngest daughter of the successful author and critic Sir Leslie Stephen. With a sense of emotion, I recalled the memories Woolf shares in her autobiographical essays, Moments of Being.

The house was dark because the street was so narrow that one could see Mrs Redgrave washing her neck in her bedroom across the way; also because my mother who had been brought up in the Watts-Venedan-Little Holland House tradition had covered the furniture in red velvet and painted the woodwork black with thin gold lines upon it. The house was also completely quiet. Save for an occasional hansom or butcher’s cart nothing ever passed the door. One heard footsteps tapping down the street before we saw a top hat or a bonnet; one almost always knew who it was that passed; it might be Sir Arthur Clay; the Muir Mackenzies or the white-nosed Miss or the red-nosed Mrs Redgrave. Here then seventeen or eighteen people lived in small bedrooms with one bathroom and three water-closets between them.

Here the four of us were born; here my grandmother died; here my mother died; here my father died; here Stella became engaged to Jack Hills and two doors further down the street after three months of marriage she died too. When I look back upon that house it seems to me so crowded with scenes of family life, grotesque, comic and tragic; with the violent emotions of youth, revolt, despair, intoxicating happiness, immense boredom, with parties of the famous and the dull; with rages again, George and Gerald; with love scenes with Jack Hills; with passionate affection for my father alternating with passionate hatred of him, all tingling and vibrating in an atmosphere of youthful bewilderment and curiosity that I feel suffocated by the recollection. The place seemed tangled and matted with emotion. I could write the history of every mark and scratch in my room, I wrote later. The walls and the rooms had in sober truth been built to our shape. We had permeated the whole vast fabric it has since been made into an hotel with our family history. It seemed as if the house and the family which had lived in it, thrown together as they were by so many deaths, so many emotions, so many traditions, must endure for ever. And then suddenly in one night both vanished.

Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being – Autobiographical Essays

13 Kensington Square

In the second half of the nineteenth century, London saw the first academic institutions open their doors to women. One of the most important was the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London, which was established in 1885 at 13 Kensington Square. It provided women the opportunity to study subjects that had long been reserved almost entirely for men.

Inside this townhouse, students attended lectures in history, literature, classical and modern languages, philosophy, and the sciences. The Department had academic standing while retaining an intimate character, with many lessons conducted in small groups. From the 1890s, Lilian Faithfull, a teacher and social reformer, played a leading role in advancing women’s education. Among the tutors were outstanding classicists such as Clara Pater and Janet Case, both of whom strongly influenced the intellectual growth of future writers and artists.

It was here, between 1897 and 1902, that Virginia Stephen – later known as Virginia Woolf – studied history, Greek, Latin and German. She also took private Greek lessons with Janet Case. Her elder sister, the painter Vanessa Stephen (later Vanessa Bell), also studied at the Department. For both sisters, Kensington Square offered their first taste of academic life. Though limited by the restrictions placed on women at the time, the experience encouraged their later self-education and creativity.

Today, the building at 13 Kensington Square is called St James’ House and serves as office space. It remains an important landmark in the history of women’s education in Britain. Virginia Woolf is remembered at King’s College London, where she is named among its distinguished former students, and one of the university buildings now carries her name (22 Kingsway, London).

All photographs by the author.

If you’d like to continue this literary walk, the second part of the guide explores further London locations connected to Virginia Woolf’s life and writing.

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21/11/2025
The Five – The True Stories of Jack the Ripper’s Victims

Inspired by a winter read, I decided to spend the summer walking through the streets of London’s East End, which in the late 19th century became the stage for one of the darkest stories of modern times.

In the summer and autumn of 1888, five women lost their lives in the alleys of Whitechapel: Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. They all struggled with poverty, homelessness and the lack of support in a world that left no room for weakness. Their deaths were violent and cruel, but the memory of them was quickly overshadowed by the story of the man who killed them.

The Victorian press had no doubts: their fates were explained by what was seen as an ‘immoral lifestyle’. Selling sex on the streets became an easy label that required neither nuance nor empathy. In truth, only two of the women may have turned to sex work at times. The others were simply trying to survive in a world where hunger and homelessness were far greater threats than any personal weakness. The false image created by newspapers meant that, for decades, the women’s identities were reduced to a stereotype, their lives hidden beneath the myth of their killer.

Hallie Rubenhold challenges this myth in her book The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. Instead of chasing the murderer, as countless writers have done for over a century, she focuses on the victims themselves – their childhoods, relationships, struggles and daily fight to stay alive in poverty. Rubenhold brings them out of the shadows, restoring the dignity denied to them by their contemporaries and by history. It is both an act of remembrance and a gesture of justice – giving back voices to women who were, for so long, treated only as the backdrop to the legend of a ‘dark genius of evil’.

It was the sensational newspapers of the 19th century – the so-called ‘penny press’ – that built the legend of Jack the Ripper. Their pages were filled with loud headlines, supposed letters from the killer, rumours and gossip. Fear and curiosity sold far better than the quiet truth about the lives of poor women in the East End. As a result, it was he, not his victims, who became the focus of public imagination.

Over the years, the Ripper moved beyond criminal history and entered popular culture. His shadow hangs not only over books and films but also, sometimes in grotesque ways, over everyday life. London pubs and restaurants have used his name – for example, the fish-and-chip shop Jack the Chipper, the historic pub The Ten Bells (once renamed Jack the Ripper), or the cocktail bar Ripper & Co in Portsmouth. Tourist marketing and morbid curiosity blend with a dark legacy, transforming tragedy into a decorative spectacle. A story that should serve as a warning has become an ornament.

From time to time, attempts are made to solve the mystery. Modern DNA analysis has suggested that the killer may have been Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew and barber from the East End, already suspected during the original investigation. Yet the lack of clear proof and doubts about the methods used mean that his name remains only a theory. Perhaps it is exactly this uncertainty that keeps the legend alive. Today, the Ripper is more of a symbol than a real person of flesh and blood – and his name, turned into a pop culture icon, has sadly drawn attention away from the women whose lives ended in the dark streets of Whitechapel.

All photographs by the author.

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07/10/2025