As a young man, I read the two-volume
Annotated Sherlock Holmes cover to cover, and like others here I wanted to be Sherlock Holmes. It's a funny thing, but I have to admit I'd completely forgotten the sudden switch to Utah. It has been 35-40 years since I'd read the story, but I still don't recall having the kind of shock I had as I was reading it in Harry's omnibus. Like others here, I thought for some time into the section that somehow another novel got somehow inserted into this one. I'm pretty sure none of the other Holmes stories do anything like that, but then again, I don't remember
A Study in Scarlet doing it.
What I do remember, perhaps because other sources so frequently reference it, are such things as the list of Holmes strengths and weaknesses that Dr. Watson drew up shortly after their acquaintance, and things like Holmes insistence that he was ignorant of Copernican astronomy. But as for the latter, Maria Konnikova's
Mastermind: How to think like Sherlock Holmes, the book I mentioned earlier, has this to say:
One of the most widely held notions about Sherlock Holmes has to do with his supposed ignorance of Copernican theory. “What the deuce is [the solar system] to me?” he exclaims to Watson in A Study in Scarlet. “You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.” And now that he knows that fact? “I shall do my best to forget it,” he promises.
.....It’s fun to home in on that incongruity between the superhuman-seeming detective and a failure to grasp a fact so rudimentary that even a child would know it. And ignorance of the solar system is quite an omission for someone who we might hold up as the model of the scientific method, is it not? Even the BBC series Sherlock can’t help but use it as a focal point of one of its episodes.
.....But two things about that perception bear further mention. First, it isn’t, strictly speaking, true. Witness Holmes’s repeated references to astronomy in future stories—in “The Musgrave Ritual,” he talks about “allowances for personal equation, as the astronomers would have it”; in “The Greek Interpreter,” about the “obliquity of the ecliptic”; in “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” about “a planet leaving its orbit.” Indeed, eventually Holmes does use almost all of the knowledge that he denies having at the earliest stages of his friendship with Dr. Watson. (And in true-to-canon form, Sherlock the BBC series does end on a note of scientific triumph: Holmes does know astronomy after all, and that knowledge saves the day—and the life of a little boy.)
.....In fact, I would argue that he exaggerates his ignorance precisely to draw our attention to a second—and, I think, much more important—point. His supposed refusal to commit the solar system to memory serves to illustrate an analogy for the human mind that will prove to be central to Holmes’s thinking and to our ability to emulate his methodology. As Holmes tells Watson, moments after the Copernican incident, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”
