Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle

Multi-Media Afterlives

S. Vanacker, C. Wynne, S. Vanacker, C. Wynne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137291561
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Sherlock Holmes is an iconic figure within cultural narratives. More recently, Conan Doyle has also appeared as a fictional figure in contemporary novels and films, confusing the boundaries between fiction and reality. This collection investigates how Holmes and Doyle have gripped the public imagination to become central figures of modernity.

1

The Case of the Multiplying Millions: Sherlock Holmes in Advertising

Amanda J. Field

... in the case of The Multiplying Millions, Sherlock Holmes investigates saving schemes. ... This investigation, chronicled by his great friend Doctor Watson, is now dramatically revealed to the people of Nottingham by the famous sleuth in person

National Savings advertisement (ACD1/F/15/102)

Somerset Maugham believed Sherlock Holmes’s longevity as a character was attributable to the way Arthur Conan Doyle hammered the detective’s idiosyncrasies into readers’ minds with ‘the same pertinacity as the great advertisers use to proclaim the merits of their soap, beer or cigarettes’ (1967: 160). Likening Holmes to consumer products in this way raises two interesting issues, firstly because it implies that the detective was becoming a ‘brand’ or ‘product’ in his own right with his own distinct set of widely recognised values, and secondly because Holmes was indeed appropriated by manufacturers of those very products – and many more – as a lucrative aid to their sales campaigns.

This essay examines how business and industry have used Holmes in their advertising, which elements of his visual iconography and characteristics they have exploited, and how they have attempted to make the link between Holmes and their products in consumers’ minds. It also considers why they might have chosen him in the first place – and whether his fictionality makes a difference to the way he is used or the way consumers might respond. It draws on primary source material from the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, Richard Lancelyn Green Bequest, at Portsmouth City Museum.¹ Among the documents in the collection is an archive of 340 advertisements from over 170 different companies and organisations, all featuring Holmes, and spanning the period 1900 to 2000.² None of these advertisements are direct promotions for Holmes books, pastiches, films, or memorabilia, nor are they promoting places related to Holmes. Instead, they draw upon the Holmes ‘brand’ to promote products or services that appear to have no pre-existing connection with him. Whereas Peggy Perdue, in her survey of Holmes in advertising, offers a global perspective, this study looks specifically at the British market. Holmes is the quintessential Englishman, though his every utterance, and as C. A. Lejeune notes, is ‘a household word in ... Tamil, Talugu, Urdu and Pitman’s Shorthand’. Examining how he is promoted in his own country highlights the place he occupies in British popular consciousness (Lejeune, 1991 : 155).

David Ogilvy, founder of the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency, defines a brand as being:

a complex symbol. It is the intangible sum of a product’s attributes, its name, packaging, and price, its history, reputation and the way it is advertised. A brand is also defined by consumers’ impressions of the people who use it, as well as their own experience. (Roman, 2004)

If Holmes can be said to be a brand, then – just like a product – it is made up of a combination of all these elements. Brands are much more than logos, and although Holmes’s ‘logo’ might consist of his deerstalker, pipe, and magnifying glass, these are not empty symbols: the deerstalker implies someone who will patiently ‘hunt down’ their quarry; the pipe indicates a man given to thoughtful contemplation; the magnifying glass represents someone for whom close observation is a key skill. Together, they also suggest a nineteenth-century man. Holmes’s ‘attributes’, ‘history’, and ‘reputation’ might include his rooms at 221b Baker Street, his friendship with Dr Watson, his violin, reputation for ‘cracking the case’, use of deduction, rationality, imperviousness to women, ability to move with ease through social strata, talent for disguise, and cocaine use when bored. Thus there is a link between what is denoted by the image of Holmes and what is connoted, a connection which Roland Barthes calls a ‘code’. This is, as Sut Jhally explains, ‘the store of experience upon which both the advertiser and audience draw in their participation in the construction of commodity meaning’ ( 1990 : 3). In Holmes’s case, this ‘store of experience’ may come from multiple sources, given the character’s transmedia presence: the consumer may know him through Doyle’s stories, radio, TV, cinema or stage productions, pastiche novels, comic-strips, or through any of the other media which have appropriated the detective since his first appearance. In a sense, therefore, everyone brings their own notion of Holmes to bear when they see each new representation, weighing it against the Holmes of their imagination.

Due to the commercial value of consumer brands they are tightly controlled by their owners, and although today similar rigour is often applied to fictional characters in terms of licensing and copyright, Doyle arguably ceased to have complete control over Holmes from the moment the manuscripts left his desk en route to The Strand Magazine. His detective changed; indeed, a number of what are now thought to be Holmes’s most essential characteristics – his curved-stem pipe and deerstalker, and his tendency to say ‘elementary, my dear Watson’ – are examples of this evolution. Doyle seemed unconcerned, telling William Gillette that he may ‘marry or murder or do what you like with him’ in his play Sherlock Holmes, first performed in 1899 (Starrett, 1974: x), yet he protested at the depiction of Holmes as looking ‘about five feet high, badly dressed, and with no brains or character’ in an unnamed proposed advertisement at around the same time.³

Doyle seemed fairly relaxed about the appropriation and exploitation of Holmes – it was not until 1920 that he authorised the Stoll company to make a series of Holmes films starring Eille Norwood, after a number of unauthorised films, including Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1900) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1905), had been released. After Doyle’s death, his sons Denis and Adrian Conan Doyle, realising Holmes’s financial potential, exercised assiduous control of every aspect of the brand. Their focus, however, was more about extracting the maximum possible revenue rather than protecting the use of Holmes; the 1942 agreement with Universal studios for a series of films permitted ‘the fullest latitude’ in changing, modernising and adapting Holmes and Watson, as long as they were ‘characterised in the same general way’ as in Doyle’s stories. The only restriction imposed was that the film company must not ‘kill off’ the characters, presumably with an eye to future revenue streams.⁴ In terms of advertising, the Doyle Estate did not seize the initiative quickly enough and was often surprised by seeing Holmes feature in unauthorised promotions. In 1941, Denis was incensed to see a billboard on which Holmes was endorsing New Golden Glow Beer, which he deemed to be a ‘monstrous misuse of our property’; in 1942 he had much the same reaction to a campaign by the International Shoe Company, and in that same year he forced Angostura Bitters to pay $1,350 retrospectively for their use of a cartoon Holmes figure in nine advertisements.⁵ Fitelson and Mayers, the Estate’s lawyers, threatened legal action in every case, often on shaky grounds. The owners of New Golden Glow Beer said, with some justification, that they ‘had noticed many uses of Sherlock Holmes for advertising purposes and ... were certain that they were not licensed or paid for’. Even as late as 1949, Fitelson and Mayers were advising Denis that ‘the mere use of the hat and magnifying glass’ were not enough to constitute an infringement of Doyle’s rights: an advertisement would need also to ‘employ ... the dialogue or names of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson’.⁶ Denis wrote to licensing specialists Abbot Kimbell in New York in order to seek help in exploiting the Holmes name and symbol, and suggested that ‘his violin, pipe, deerstalker hat etc as well as the world-famous phrase “elementary my dear Watson” could be used’ in advertisements for pipes, tobacco, musical instruments – and even honey.⁷ There is no evidence to show whether this was successful. After Adrian, the remaining brother, died in 1970 the rights to the Holmes and Watson characters were bought by Denis’s widow, Nina Mdivani, who set up a company, Baskervilles Investments, in order to administer them. Chaotic finances meant that the company quickly went into receivership – which probably partially explains the surge of ‘unregulated’ advertising featuring Holmes in the 1970s.⁸

Holmes advertised a wide range of goods in Britain, and whereas it might be expected that he would be used to promote products that had some connection with his character, such as pipes and tobacco, he has also been employed to sell biscuits, liqueurs, tea, tyres, toffee, jam, car manuals, finance, shirts, mouthwash, bread, computers, pharmaceuticals, moth-proofing, packaging, double glazing, and many more consumer and industrial products. Rather than discussing the advertisements by product-group, however, the aim here is to explore advertisements that convey the same brand message: in other words, to examine which qualities in their product or service the advertiser is seeking to align with Holmes.

Advertisers frequently use celebrity endorsement: such a technique is, according to Matthew Healey, ‘the quickest way to attach a personality to a brand’ (Healey, 2008: 82). Thus Judith Williamson, in her analysis of how this transfer of personality from celebrity to product is achieved, says that the mere juxtaposition of the two enables an exchange of meaning to take place: she uses an advertisement which features Catherine Deneuve’s face alongside a bottle of Chanel No 5 perfume. The advertiser seeks to appropriate the link between what Deneuve signifies (glamour, beauty) ‘so that the perfume can be substituted for Catherine Deneuve’s face and can also be made to signify glamour and beauty’ (Williamson, 2000: 25). In using Holmes for endorsement, however, such an exchange of meaning is more complex, firstly because Holmes is a fictional character with accrued layers of meaning, and secondly because he has not been aligned with one particular product or service, but with hundreds of disparate ones. Usually, celebrity endorsement comes from actors, sportsmen, or TV personalities: indeed, Hamish Pringle, in his book Celebrity Sells, does not even acknowledge that a fictional celebrity, with a life outside the brand, might be used to sell it (passim).

The advertisements analysed here share one common denominator: all use elements of Holmes’s visual iconography to create an instant identification for the consumer. The most common visual symbols used are the deerstalker, Inverness cape, pipe, and magnifying glass. In terms of indicating that the person illustrated is indeed Holmes, often the deerstalker and magnifying glass suffice. Out of all of the advertisements examined, only five portray him without a deerstalker, and these show him in his rooms at 221b Baker Street where he is identified by his dressing gown and violin. So well-known are all these elements that Holmes does not even need to be portrayed as a man, or even as a human. In one advertisement (Tootal fabrics ACD1/F/15/20) he is shown as a woman, in one he is a moth (BMK ACD1/F/15/126), in another a child (Sharps Toffee ACD1/F/15/2), a bottle (Teachers’ whisky ACD1/F/15/300), and a phone directory (Yellow Pages ACD/1/F/15/193). Any portrayal seems possible as long as the iconography links the consumer’s mind to Holmes. In many advertisements he is not even named.

In terms of illustration style, most advertisements use drawings to portray Holmes, ranging from simple schematic outlines, silhouettes, or cartoons, through to sophisticated colour illustrations. Where photography is used it tends to avoid showing too ‘distinct’ an image of Holmes, instead using one element – such as a single eye enlarged by a magnifying glass – to signify the whole; showing just enough of the figure to identify it as Holmes without revealing the face, or positioning the deerstalker and pipe on an inanimate object which substitutes for Holmes’s head. In this way, Holmes is ‘suggested’ rather than depicted too literally, allowing the advertisement’s viewer to project their own idea of Holmes. Ogilvy notes that this mediation by the consumer can be an important part of brand formation (Roman, 2004). Only four advertisements show a clear photograph (that is, one showing the face) of a model dressed as Holmes, and only one uses the image of an actor well-known for playing Holmes on the contemporary stage and/or screen: Eille Norwood endorsing Phosferine in a Girls’ Cinema advertisement of 1923 (Perdue, 2009: cover). Despite the large number of British actors who have played Holmes in the last eighty years, including Clive Brook, Arthur Wontner, Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing, Douglas Wilmer, Jeremy Brett and many more, they have not been used to endorse products in Britain, probably due to the introduction of more complex and more expensive licensing regimes.⁹ Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce have occasionally been used retrospectively to depict Holmes and Watson in advertisements, such as the promotion for Alphaderm’s eczema treatment (undated but c. 1980 s), which indicates that their definitive portrayal of Holmes and Watson could be used to reach a new consumer generation (ACD1/F/15/153).

Because of the deerstalker and Inverness cape, Holmes is tied visually to the nineteenth century and never appears in contemporary clothing, even though he clearly moves through time to endorse products that did not exist in his ‘true’ period. In advertisements for Weaver to Wearer suits, for example (ACD1/F/15/259), he is observing the fashions in a 1950s street scene; in a promotion for Honeyrose Nicotine-Free Tobacco (ACD1/F/15/ 98) he is taking part in a 1960s ‘ban the bomb’ type protest march; and in an advertisement for Canon (ACD1/F/15/296) he carries an electronic typewriter tucked under his arm.

Dr Watson appears in only fifteen per cent of the advertisements, never without Holmes, and has a less structured iconography, usually being portrayed as elderly, portly, and with Victorian-style whiskers, wearing a bowler hat and carrying a walking stick. Occasionally he is illustrated with his medical bag. Watson, therefore, is recognisable only when he is teamed with Holmes. Surprisingly, a sense of place is absent from the advertising. Whereas on screen Holmes is often introduced by an ‘establishing shot’ of London’s Houses of Parliament, such as in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), thus suggesting Holmes to be a symbol of, or a metonym for, London, in advertisements he is usually shown in a non-specific location. The Houses of Parliament do not appear, and other key identifiers of Victorian London such as hansom cabs, cobbled streets, gaslights, and fog are rare. Holmes’s rooms are depicted in a small number of instances, usually with great attention to Victorian detail, and Baker Street is referenced in cases where either the advertiser has a connection with the street (Power Gas and Abbey National had Baker Street addresses), or because a pun is being made on the word ‘baker’ (such as in the 1986 Sherlock Holmes and ‘Mr Baker’ advertisements for Rank Hovis granary loaves; ACD1/F/15/188). If it were only the British advertisements which do not site Holmes visually in London, this might be understandable on the grounds that the British audience takes for granted that Holmes and London are synonymous, but this is also the case with US advertising too. Perhaps Holmes needs to be ‘stripped’ from his surroundings if the consumer is to focus on the brand message that the company is trying to communicate?¹⁰

Analysis of all of the advertisements reveals a number of selling propositions which Holmes is being used to convey: principal among these are expertise, observation, common sense, the clever consumer (a way of flattering the audience that they are as brilliant as Holmes), and elegance and distinction. The use of Holmes establishes a link between these qualities and the product. Judith Williamson argues that all advertising uses this technique of correlating ‘feelings, moods or attributes to tangible objects, linking possible unattainable things with those that are attainable, and thus reassuring us that the former are within reach’ (Williamson, 2000: 31). A third of the advertisements use Holmesian iconography but make no clear connection between the detective and their product or service, other than using his image to signify ‘looking’ or ‘examining’. In these advertisements, the vital link between signifier and signified is broken and the transfer of meaning is therefore only partial. As Healey observes, ‘the brand has enormous power to enhance the thing it represents, so long as it never loses its connection with the reality of that thing’ (Healey, 2008: 11). Adding a Holmes image arbitrarily to an advertisement may draw the reader’s eye (and perhaps that is the only intention) but offers no consumer ‘promise’ in terms creating an analogy between Holmes’s attributes and the product.

Advertisements that emphasise expertise draw a par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: From Baker Street to Undershaw and Beyond
• 1  The Case of the Multiplying Millions: Sherlock Holmes in Advertising
• 2  Sherlock Holmes and a Politics of Adaptation
• 3  Open the Window, Then!: Filmic Interpretation of Gothic Conventions in Brian Millss The Hound of the Baskervilles
• 4  The Curious Case of the Kingdom of Shadows: The Transmogrification of Sherlock Holmes in the Cinematic Imagination
• 5  Sherlock Holmes, Italian Anarchists and Torpedoes: The Case of a Manuscript Recovered in Italy
• 6  Sherlocks Progress through History: Feminist Revisions of Holmes
• 7  Sherlock Holmes Reloaded: Holmes, Videogames and Multiplicity
• 8  Sherlock Holmes Version 2.0: Adapting Doyle in the Twenty-First Century
• 9  The Strange Case of the Scientist Who Believed in Fairies
• 10  Channelling the Past: Arthur George and the Neo-Victorian Uncanny
• 11  Arthur Conan Doyles Appearances as a Detective in Historical Crime Fiction
• 12  Sherlock Holmes in Fairyland: The Afterlife of Arthur Conan Doyle
• Bibliography
• Index