Elementary, My Dear Olivia: It's Sherlock Holmes!

The Sherlock Holmes Museum, located, naturally, at 221b Baker Street focuses on the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional hero. We visited this morning on our way to the Royal Academy of Music, it being just around the corner. A five-story flat, it is stuffed with an odd combination of Victorian furnishings and manequins depicting various tableaux of Sherlock Homes tales. The girls, although they had never heard of Sherlock Holmes, thought it was fun to be able to handle all the artifacts, see the grisly scenes and learn a little about life in the Victorian period. They were especially grossed out to discover that Victorians were in a transition phase from chamber pots to bathrooms such as we know them. Chamber pots they found revolting, the idea of servants having to empty them more so and the concept of throwing the contents into the street put them over the top! Olivia was appalled to learn that even children could enter service at very young ages and that universal education wasn't a high priority in the early part of the queen's reign. She did, however, find the concept of bell pulls to summon servants would be quite an acceptable way to live. What none of us ever figured out was why anyone would want to build a museum depicting the home of someone who never really existed.