This, however, is where fact and fiction diverge. According to available concert records and Sarasate’s known touring schedule, there is no evidence that he was performing in London in October 1890. While Sarasate made frequent visits to London, these typically occurred during the spring or early summer months, when the city’s concert season was in full swing. The great London musical season was largely structured around social calendars, and the major artists, especially foreign virtuosi like Sarasate, usually performed in April through July, occasionally extending into early August. By October, many artists had already departed London, heading for engagements on the Continent, often in Germany, Austria, or Russia, where autumn and winter seasons were already underway.
Sarasate’s tours were well-documented, and music journals of the time, including The Musical Times and various European newspapers, provide a fairly comprehensive map of his whereabouts. In 1890, Sarasate was performing throughout Europe but not in London in the autumn. He is known to have appeared in cities like Berlin and Vienna in October and November of that year. Thus, while it is entirely plausible that Sarasate would have played at St. James’s Hall, it is historically inaccurate to place him there on a specific October afternoon in 1890.
It is here that we see Conan Doyle’s likely intention. He was not attempting to record literal history. Instead, he was weaving the trappings of the real world into his fiction to lend it authenticity. For the reader of the Strand Magazine, the reference to Sarasate would have functioned as a mark of realism and a reflection of Holmes’s cultural depth, even if the precise details were fictitious. Indeed, Doyle frequently employed such real-world references. Holmes is known to quote Goethe, refer to works by Winwood Reade, and even comment on contemporary scientific discoveries. These details were not pedantic flourishes, but instead formed part of the carefully constructed illusion that Holmes’s world was our world — only slightly more brilliant and more dangerous.
The decision to include Sarasate at that moment in the story serves multiple purposes. Narratively, it provides a quiet interlude before the action resumes. Holmes and Watson, taking in a violin performance, mirrors the calm before the storm. Thematically, it also highlights Holmes’s dual nature — man of science and man of art, cold reasoner and emotional aesthete. There is a deeper irony as well. Holmes, a capable violinist himself, is about to pit his intellect against the cunning of John Clay, a criminal who has dug a tunnel into a bank vault beneath the city streets. The contrast between the sublime music of Sarasate in a concert hall and the muddy, manual labor of criminal enterprise beneath the city is rich in metaphor. Above ground, art and civilization; below, greed and savagery.
This narrative juxtaposition may have been intentional, or it may simply reflect Doyle’s own cultural references and preferences. We know that Doyle himself was musically inclined and appreciated the arts. In Holmes, he created a character who mirrored the ideal Victorian intellectual — one who could appreciate German philosophy and French violin technique in equal measure, even as he investigated murders and unraveled cryptographic codes. But Doyle was not above adjusting facts to suit the needs of a story. That Sarasate was not in London that week likely never troubled him, and it certainly troubled no readers at the time. The story is not about Sarasate, after all. The violinist’s name is only mentioned once and plays no role in the plot. Yet it is precisely such details that make the Holmes stories feel lived in, as though they are occurring in the real streets of London, in real time.
To those with modern scholarly interests, this discrepancy becomes more than a footnote. It is part of the broader endeavor of Holmesian scholarship — that curious mixture of literary criticism, historical research, and imaginative extrapolation that defines the field. Chronologists have long attempted to pin down the exact dates of the various Holmes adventures, creating elaborate timetables and maps of his movements. The inclusion of Sarasate provides a test case in how Doyle’s fiction can be both richly grounded in its time and casually unmoored from it.
Some scholars have attempted to reconcile this inconsistency by proposing alternate chronologies. Perhaps, they argue, the story takes place in another year when Sarasate was in London in October — maybe 1889 or 1891. But this often runs afoul of other internal clues, such as references to the Jabez Wilson advertisement or the police’s awareness of John Clay. Others suggest that Holmes may have been mistaken — or even joking. But this is out of character for Holmes, who rarely makes errors of fact in the canon. More likely, the solution is simpler: Doyle was invoking a name that would lend glamour and resonance, regardless of historical exactitude.