Watson's Journal

The ink-stained companion that turned a detective's logic into legend.

Dr. Watson is the first-person narrator of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and is presented throughout the novels as Holmes's biographer. When Holmes refuses to record and publish his own account of their first adventure, Watson undertakes to do it himself.

Lore & Background

In 1881 Watson is introduced by his friend Stamford to Holmes, who is looking for someone to share the rent of rooms at 221B Baker Street. At the end of A Study in Scarlet he is so incensed that Scotland Yard claims full credit for the solution that he urges Holmes to publish an account of the case. Holmes is a hard critic of the result: in The Sign of the Four he says Watson has tried to tinge it with romanticism, and in "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier", one of only two stories Holmes narrates himself, he accuses Watson of pandering to popular taste instead of keeping rigidly to facts and figures. Even so, Holmes regularly calls him his "faithful friend and biographer" and once exclaims, "I am lost without my Boswell".

Reader's Guide

Watson admits in his prologue to "The Adventure of the Yellow Face" that in publishing these sketches he naturally dwells on Holmes's successes more than on his failures. At the beginning of "The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger" he stresses the discretion and high sense of professional honour that govern his work as biographer.