A Case Of Identity

When Miss Sutherland visits Holmes’s Baker Street apartment, she is desperate. Her stepfather disapproves of her seeking help from the police, but when Miss Sutherland ventures out from under her stepfather’s authority, she goes to Holmes, not Scotland Yard. In this regard, Holmes is presented as the go-to for imperiled or confused people, and his Baker Street apartment, always open to visitors, becomes elevated as the haven for all victims of injustice. It acts as a beacon of light to truth-seeking individuals because it is where Holmes lives, and Holmes means logic, intelligence, and answers.

For Watson, Baker Street is a place of intrigue. When he is away for a day because of work, Watson rushes back to the apartment, afraid of what he might have missed. The process of solving problems through careful analysis—especially with such an eccentric devotee to the principles of induction and deduction as Holmes—is never boring, and both the reader and Watson find that the most interesting conversations and events take place in Baker Street.

Holmes’s apartment is also a place of reckoning. Windibank is temporarily locked in, guilty and anxious, until he is loosed and sprints away. Conan Doyle depicts it as a place greatly feared by criminals and hallowed by those seeking justice and truth.