The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes Read Free Page B

contacts or friends who would have any lasting importance in my later career. I entered life self-contained and I shall leave it in the same manner. Only three people have penetrated my detachment to be regarded with what may pass for affection but which was, in fact, admiration: Mycroft, Watson and ‘The Woman.’
    During the years at Oxford, my time was divided between studies in chemistry at Exeter College and an informal course of eclectic studies in numerous of the other colleges of Oxford. There existed in my mind the idea that I would learn chemistry and other sciences along with abnormal history and human criminology and, by so doing, bring science to bear on criminal activity, a worthy use for a superior intellect in my estimation. And so, I took knowledge from wherever it was to be found; all colleges and all disciplines were fair game for my self-directed education. A morning would find me in the laboratory; an afternoon in the dissecting rooms; evenings in various college libraries reading the history of crime and criminals. An experiment with human blood or enzymes often led me to specialty laboratories at various colleges equipped for specialty analyses and thence to another college’s library with a collection of historical treatises on mass murders, serial deaths or military executions. I viewed all of the colleges of Oxford as being my personal resource for knowledge, a concept that shattered the linear conventions of an institution nearing nine-hundred years of unchanging, insular existence.
    It was in my third year at Oxford that the raw elements of deduction were linked for the first time in my brain. The physical observation of wet grass, linked with the chemical knowledge of ash, linked to a unique boot print, linked with the psychological reaction to fear, linked with the analyses of time and distance, linked with geographic certainty of a surrounding neighborhood, all came precisely together to produce a flawless, serial, analytic deduction taking me to a specific room in a specific house where a specific crime was about to take place by a specific criminal with murder aforethought about to occur; and the instantaneous linkage of all those elements into a cohesive and accurate deduction coursed through my brain like lightning, and I emerged another person, forever to be more machine than corporeal.
    At that moment, my studies were complete. I possessed the essential knowledge, deductive tools and connective synapses to inhabit the center of the organ of crime and defeat its purposes. My brain was on fire and would burn with a white-hot intensity for decades to follow.

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    There is only one city in the whole of the world that can nourish white-hot intensity: London.
    After coming down from Oxford and spending a week at Church Court, I departed on Sunday, 31 May 1874 on the second full moon of the month, for London. My father made over a generous allowance to me for expenses, but I accepted only a small annual stipend of one-hundred guineas from him until I could make my own way.
    I chose the British Museum as the centre of my web in order to have access to its vast library and reading room for historical research. Close by also, were the great stations, Covent Garden, and a number of the hospital laboratories wherein my researches were to continue. After only three nights in a boarding house in Holborn, on 4 June I located satisfactory rooms at 47 Montague Street, Bloomsbury, next the Museum to its east, between Russell Square and Great Russell Street. The owner, an antiquarian specializing in Byzantine studies, lived quietly in rooms on the second floor and fitted the ground floor as his extensive library and museum housing his arcania. Mr Arbuthnot let the entire third and fourth floors, furnished, for a quite low rate likely owing to his complete lack of knowledge of the prevailing economics of 1874 due to his oyster-like existence lived almost exclusively in the Byzantine Era, and, having lost the