I love this meta! It’s wonderfully informative, and it offers a very believable background for Holmes. We’re so lucky to have such wonderful fics that adopt this backstory for him.
Since Doyle did leave us wiggle room, though, I sometimes wander down another path. I think it’s also possible to read canon in a way that places Mycroft and Sherlock’s generation of Holmeses within the urban middle class. In my own head, I waffle on whether I imagine Sherlock and Mycroft as being raised on a still-functioning squire estate in the country. In one of the only lines in the canon in which Sherlock Holmes discusses his family history, he says: “My ancestors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class.”
For one sentence, that seems surprisingly full of ambiguities. He refers to his “ancestors” rather than his “parents,” which suggests to me that this history might be attached to a part of his family tree further in the past. Do they still have this landed estate, or was it lost years ago, perhaps broken up or sold away or simply abandoned as it became too difficult to farm it successfully or to manage the tenants? Holmes says his ancestors “appear to have led” a certain lifestyle, as if he knows this by report or research rather than through his own lived observations and experiences. And finally, he unthinkingly refers to “their class” rather than “our class,” as if he does not consider himself as a member of the same group.
When revealing Mycroft’s true role as being so central to the British government that he practically IS the British government, Sherlock clarifies that there is no wealth or honorary privilege attached to Mycroft’s position. Specifically, Sherlock says: “Mycroft draws four hundred and fifty pounds a year, remains a subordinate, has no ambitions of any kind, will receive neither honour nor title, but remains the most indispensable man in the country.“ Four hundred fifty pounds a year in Victorian London would constitute, I believe, quite a comfortable middle class salary (especially for a man with no family to support), but it wouldn’t be considered anywhere near the top echelon of middle class urban lifestyles (this article says that a man earning more than twice that amount, one thousand pounds a year, could still be considered middle class). Although, of course, class identity was by no means entirely dictated by how much money one earned. The type of work one did, one’s education and family, and other factors were also important and I’m sure others know a good deal more about it than I do. Mycroft lives in Pall Mall, and is so entirely a creature of his particular neighborhood that Sherlock is flabbergasted when he deviates from his routine even so far as to visit Baker Street. “It is as if you met a tram-car coming down a country lane. Mycroft has his rails and he runs on them. His Pall Mall lodgings, the Diogenes Club, Whitehall–that is his cycle… But that Mycroft should break out in this erratic fashion! A planet might as well leave its orbit.” Based on that description, It seems probable that Mycroft never goes to the country.
There are a lot of squires who show up in the pages of the Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories, but surely the most memorable and richly described were Victor Trevor and his father. There are plenty of different ways to read Sherlock’s description of the Trevors’ country lifestyle - in some ways he seems quite comfortable and familiar with it, in other ways he seems a bit wide-eyed at the wealth on display and charmed by the rustic displays of local justice and learning. Is this a lifestyle that he himself grew up in? Is he charmed by the Trevors’ country estate out of nostalgia and because he can easily make himself at home there? Or is it still fairly novel to him as a way of passing a vacation, and is he impressed by things that would be taken for granted by someone more used to them?:
“Finally, he invited me down to his father’s place at Donnithorpe, in Norfolk, and I accepted his hospitality for a month of the long vacation. Old Trevor was evidently a man of some wealth and consideration, a J.P., and a landed proprietor. Donnithorpe is a little hamlet just to the north of Langmere, in the country of the Broads. The house was an old-fashioned, wide-spread, oak-beamed brick building, with a fine lime-lined avenue leading up to it. There was excellent wild-duck shooting in the fens, remarkably good fishing, a small but select library, taken over, as I understood, from a former occupant, and a tolerable cook, so that he would be a fastidious man who could not put in a pleasant month there….The father interested me extremely. He was a man of little culture, but with a considerable amount of rude strength, both physically and mentally. He knew hardly any books, but he had traveled far, had seen much of the world. And had remembered all that he had learned. In person he was a thick-set, burly man with a shock of grizzled hair, a brown, weather-beaten face, and blue eyes which were keen to the verge of fierceness. Yet he had a reputation for kindness and charity on the country-side, and was noted for the leniency of his sentences from the bench.”
One thing is clear, though, which is that after Sherlock leaves the Trevors’ estate, he does not go back to any Holmes country estate to pass the remaining two months of his summer holidays. “All this occurred during the first month of the long vacation. I went up to my London rooms, where I spent seven weeks working out a few experiments in organic chemistry.” By his university years, at least, he is living at school for part of the year and in London for the rest.
So, I’d say it’s plausible to think that Sherlock and Mycroft are considered - by themselves and others - to be urban middle class.
W.S. Baring-Gould, a fan who invented a lot of influential meta theories about Sherlock Holmes in the mid-twentieth century, was also interested in this ‘country squires’ backstory. He came up with the headcanon that Sherlock and Mycroft must have had an older brother who took charge of the family’s country estate, thereby freeing up both Sherlock and Mycroft to be life-long city dwellers and bachelors. Baring-Gould named this invented sibling Sherrinford, a name he took from some of Doyle’s earliest notes before he’d settled on ‘Sherlock’ as the name for his hero. And that’s why there’s been a third Holmes sibling popping up in Holmesian fanon now and then ever since! :)
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