It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime. —A Scandal in Bohemia
Sherlock Holmes was more than just a shrewd detective—among other distinctions, he remains one of history’s foremost masters of disguise. His profession demanded it: Concealing his identity allowed Holmes to trail suspects without their knowledge, slip his enemies’ traps time after time, and in “His Last Bow” to break a German spy ring that might have cost England dearly if not for Holmes’s undercover intervention. That Dr. Watson himself failed to recognize his old friend in disguise on at least five occasions is further proof of Holmes’s genius; and considering that Watson was a sharp if underrated mind in his own right, it goes without saying that Holmes’s efforts went much further than simply donning a costume. To master the art of personal camouflage, every aspect of your person, from your clothes and hair to the manner in which you speak and carry yourself, must be altered beyond recognition.
*Select a new identity. You will fool no one by simply donning exotic clothes willy-nilly; a disguise lacking in coherence appears to be just what it is—a disguise. Instead, think like an actor: Imagine a character most unlike yourself and let that guide your selection of clothing, the manner in which you speak, the cover story you concoct, and so on. Consider the sex, age, profession, economic status, and personality of this character, as Holmes did when he disguised himself as an aged seaman in The Sign of the Four : “Altogether he gave me the impression of a respectable master mariner who had fallen into years and poverty,” reports a briefly duped Watson.
• Change your clothes. In his career, Holmes wore a black robe and hat to become an talian priest in “The Final Problem,” a “blue blouse” to portray a rough-edged French plumber in “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax,” and a tweed suit and cloth hat to appear like “any other tourist” in The Hound of the Baskervilles, among many other costumes. But Holmes does more than simply take these clothes from the rack and drape them on his person; he adapts them to the subtleties of his roles. For instance, his aged sailor costume in The Sign of the Four consisted mainly of a pea-coat, but it wasn’t just any pea-coat:Watson describes it as “old” and “buttoned up to his throat,” touches that reinforce both the poverty and infirmity of the character Holmes is playing.
*Change your hair. Holmes’s sailor disguise employed not only a wig but fake whiskers and eyebrows as well, creating the impression of an unkempt man rarely acquainted with scissors or a razor. But false hair can be dangerous; nothing will ruin your cover more quickly than an ill-fitting wig.
• Change your face. This can be achieved by artificial means—with makeup to create wrinkles or flesh-colored putty to reshape the nose—as well as naturally, through facial expressions. For maximum effect, employ both techniques simultaneously, as Holmes does in “The Final Problem”: “The aged ecclesiastic had turned his face towards me,” Watson writes. “For an instant the wrinkles were smoothed away, the nose drew away from the chin, the lower lip ceased to protrude and the mouth to mumble . . . and the next the whole frame collapsed again, and Holmes had gone as quickly ly as he had come.” He takes a different approach in “The Dying Detective,” affecting the look of a man on his deathbed by applying petroleum jelly to his forehead, daubing his eyes with irritating nightshade to turn them angry red, and encrusting beeswax around his lips.
• Change your body. Desperate fools might submit to a surgeon’s knife in order to change their bodies, but for a master of disguise, such measures are superfluous. Your natural stride should be lengthened or shortened, or a limp adopted. Holmes often altered his height by stooping while in disguise, a wonderful trick but no easy thing to maintain over a long period, as he pointed out after portraying a hunched bookseller in “The Empty House”—”I am glad to stretch myself, Watson,” said Holmes. “It is no joke when a tall man has to take a foot off his stature for several hours on end.”
*Alter your speech. An accent is easy enough to fake, but a new manner of speech is considerably more difficult. The most elaborate role of Holmes’s career was that of an Irish American traitor named Altamont in “His Last Bow,” whose voice alone was enough to convince the Germans on whom he was spying of his authenticity. “If you heard him talk you would not doubt [that he is Irish American],” Von Bork assures a German comrade. “Sometimes I assure you I can hardly understand him. He seems to have declared war on the King’s English as well as on the English king.”
Victorian Fashion
lthough the extreme formality of the early Victorian period had begun to slacken somewhat in Holmes’s day, making way for slightly more comfortable styles of dress, the streets of London remained a sea bobbing with tall hats balanced atop sober dark-coated gentlemen and ladies whose breathing was so restricted by strangulating corsets that they dared not exert themselves for fear of fainting. Although Sir Arthur doesn’t exert much authorial energy describing fashion—his and Holmes’s preoccupations lie elsewhere we know that the detective dressed as an urbane gentleman of London would have been expected to: He often wore a tall felt hat, though sometimes it was traded for a cloth traveling cap or a bowler, which had become an acceptable alternative to the otherwise ubiquitous top hat by the turn of the century. He was rarely without a tie, a waistcoat, and a knee-length frock coat and frequently carried an umbrella, which doubled as a weapon on at least one occasion.
So style conscious were the Victorians that even the poorest Londoners wore bonnets or hats, often salvaged used from middle-class owners and worn until they fell to pieces. Carpenters wore tailcoats, and omnibus conductors, policemen, postmen, and other working people wore tall black hats. Only the lowliest of laborers went about bare headed. As a result, there was a thriving market for second-hand clothes, many of which had been worn for years and rarely washed. (Bathing, tooth-brushing, and clothes washing were rare luxuries for the Victorians, who instead took a mighty interest in colognes and perfumes.) The miasmatic stench of second-hand clothes markets was said to be overpowering.
In addition to a tall hat, the middle-class Victorian male habitually wore dark trousers, a coat, a waistcoat, and, in especially cold weather, an overcoat. Shirts were made either at home or by one’s tailor and featured removable cuffs and collars that could easily be replaced if they became soiled or sweat stained. (The shirt itself, however—invisible beneath one’s frock coat—could be worn for days or weeks on end.)
Women’s fashion, then as ever, was considerably more elaborate and uncomfortable. In striving to achieve a perfect “hourglass” figure, Victorian women endured long, tightly laced corsets, cage-shaped crinolines that could support dresses up to six feet in diameter but made everyday activities like sitting or maneuvering through doorways humorously difficult (and that even Queen Victoria decried as “indelicate, expensive, dangerous and hideous”), heavy bustles that effectively created a two-foot shelf extending out from a lady’s hindquarters, high heels, and vertigo inducting hairstyles. For much of the Victorian era, a dress that dared to reveal the ankles of its wearer was considered the garb of prostitutes, and trousers for women were downright unthinkable. Despite protests from clothing-reform advocates such as the Rational Dress Society (which in 1888 made the outrageous demand that the maximum weight of a woman’s undergarments should “not exceed seven pounds”), it was the bicycle craze of the 1890s that did the most to liberalize women’s fashion.
Because riding a bicycle was impossible (not to say dangerous) in a full-length skirt, the scandalous advent of cycling amongst strong-willed women eventually led to shorter skirts and even bifurcated garments called bloomers. Suddenly, women were able to pedal significant distances on their own, all while wearing less than seven pounds of underwear. Little wonder that Susan B. Anthony remarked that bicycling “had done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”
Though they may not have washed their clothes very often, the Victorians did change them frequently—often several times per day. Women wore a morning dress in the daytime and for dinner donned lavish evening dresses that revealed their shoulders. A man might have worn one coat to breakfast and another to work, and yet another when smoking or walking in the park, and both men and women owned separate outfits for activities like riding, playing tennis, or going to the country. The class system was a strictly adhered-to facet of Victorian society, and the manner in which one dressed was an instant identifier of social position.
