alt Hacker NewsI feel like this article is revisionism. The author is making a wild assumption that no male, no matter the circumstances was presented with having issues or trauma in victorian literature. Being nice and sympathetic is also not a concept which was only discovered recently. The article just throws in key words like mental health to make it sound relevant for today.
Maybe the only interesting part is that drug use was considered (barely) socially acceptable and holmes was still respectable. Note that he wasn't an alcoholic.
Shout out to the bbc adaptation which does a fantastic and hilarious job of portraying holmes as an erratic drug addict.
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Britain was a very repressed culture at the time and for a long time after this.
An Englishman’s proverbial “stiff upper lip” came to be a cliche for a reason.
“Boarding school syndrome” would be the term coined for the emotional damage that was an educational ideal for a long while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_school#Psychological_...
Subtle, but the very last line of 1939's "Hounds of the Baskervilles" is "Oh, Watson - the needle!".
> a fantastic and hilarious job of portraying holmes as an erratic drug addict.
Except in Conan Doyle's books, Holmes was a user of cocaine, not an addict.
This desire to portray Holmes as a drug addict says far more about our own times.