John Watson (Sherlock Holmes)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Dr. John H. Watson is a fictional character, the friend, confidant and biographer of Sherlock Holmes, the fictional 19th-century detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Various (extra-canonical) sources give Watson's birth date as August 25, 1852 and his full name as Dr. John Hamish Watson. In the stories, Watson shared lodgings with Holmes in large parts of the last two decades of the 1800s and soon emerged as the assistant and biographer of the great detective. In all of his appearances, he is a major protagonist.
Watson's is the voice of all four novels and fifty-two of the fifty-six original short-stories in the series; of the remaining four, two are narrated by Holmes, and two are in the third person. Only in those narrated by Holmes does Watson fail to appear, though he is mentioned in both.
The original stories provide no details about Watson's life after 1914 (when he assisted Holmes one last time in the story "His Last Bow"). Holmes' untiring biographer was apparently still alive in 1927, when the last story ("The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place") appeared. In Nicholas Meyer's revisionist novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Watson was portrayed as still around in 1939, but apparently died that year or shortly afterwards.
