the gilded bee

:: March 20 :: Selection for Week 12 of 2025 :: 🐝"a scandal in bohemia" (1891) from sherlock holmes: a year of quotes* 🖊️

Standing alone in the dark of night, it so happens that John Watson finds himself at 221B Baker Street, perhaps in the shadow of a lamppost, gazing up from the pavement below toward an upper floor window which frames a partially visible, partially obscured figure in motion. The sitting room across which Sherlock Holmes is pacing had previously belonged to Watson as well, before he had exited the premises, perhaps six months to a year before; as he observes, "my marriage had drifted us away from each other." In his wording he's not yet ceded the space that served as his former home as belonging solely to its current occupant, stating that Holmes "had remained in our lodgings in Baker Street." Watson has brought himself to the physical border at which he is placed either outside or inside the brilliantly lit space.

New fidget ring

SEASON 1, EPISODE 1 | A STUDY IN PINK

[part 1] [part 2] [part 3] [part 4] [part 5]

I've just noticed how Mycroft's use of his umbrella is a rather aggressive provocation when compared to John's cane -- since Mycroft famously carries his umbrella everywhere it tends to fade in the background, but here, while his stance is somewhat dandyish with the umbrella propping him up, it is also broadcasting that it's pretend support. He lifts it up with ease and remains perfectly still and upright with one leg even angled across the other and swings it all the way up to chest level to point it at John -- he's steady on his feet, unlike John. Just one of the many factors that went into his intimidation theatrics, perhaps.

paintings from the honeydew phase lol

A little blink and you'll miss it moment in The Master Blackmailer, Watson dancing and Holmes smiling as he watches him

SHERLOCK HOLMES (1984 - 1994) ↳ 5x04 | Boscombe Valley

Jeremy’s hair in the beginning of FINA

I LOVE HIS HAIR LIKE THIS! 😍😍😍😍😍😍

I’m always so fascinated by how Watson accidentally became an interesting character. He was supposed to be a blank slate! Narratively he’s just there to follow Holmes around and ask questions

and then stuff just. Kept being added and we slowly start getting the outlines of an interesting character seemingly by accident. His army time ptsd, his war wound, his relationship with his brother, his want to follow Holmes around and solve crimes with him + his insistence that he’s not that interesting and he’s sooo normal, him canonically telling us he’s an unreliable narrator in the sense of changing names and then all of ACD’s story inconsistencies accidentally creating ‘the game’, “three continents Watson” + how the hell many times has this been man been married, him canonically being a hunk, his gambling problem, the fact that the fanon of his middle name being ‘Hamish’ is so well accepted because ACD forgot his first name, the list goes on

The London Sherlock Guidebook has been updated! Find it here.

It’s not revised - @sincerely-chaos and I haven’t been around London checking to see what’s been knocked down/rebuilt - but it now contains the two shooting locations in Cheltenham, i.e. the restaurant and cafe from The Empty Hearse. Also the Aldwych tube station page has been updated.

Reblogs of this post are appreciated as I (pennypaperbrain) originally published the guidebook over two years ago, so some newer fans might not be aware of it. It’s a 90-page complete guide to every known Sherlock location in London, with screencaps, maps, directions and contemporary photos showing shooting angles.

If anyone has any stories of their experience using the guidebook, we’d love to hear them.

The BEST vacation plan ever! Seriously, every time we go to London I pull this beauty out and we figure out what we’re gonna see next. This forced me to figure out how to take the bus (spider maps FTW), and we’ve never looked back. Looking forward to our next outside of London adventures as well. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!!

Excellent! I’m curious - how many of the locations have you managed to cover? Are you aiming to do them all?

As I’m going to be in London in a couple of weeks…

I don't see people talking about this so today is the 110th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in where the factory owners locked working women and girls inside to "eliminate the risk of theft" (in reality it was too keep them from taking breaks), which resulted in the gruesome deaths of 123 mostly immigrant women and girls and 23 men, many of whom jumped to their deaths from the ninth floor either in a panicked attempt to escape or in order to die quickly. There were reports that some of the workers were on fire already as they jumped.

The eighth floor of the building was able to telephone the tenth floor to warn them about the fire, but the factory on the ninth floor where these women and girls labored had no such communication and such warning.

The factory owners were criminally charged with manslaughter for actions that contributed to the mass deaths but acquitted. However, this tragedy led to mass sympathy to the labor movement, and unions spurred on safety regulations that passed in New York state and eventually the entire country, and activists were able to reduce child labor in the process.

This tragedy is a reminder that has been forgotten in the 110 years since: every safety regulation-- every scrap of paperwork contributing to the hundreds of pages of red tape people like to complain about--every word of it was written in the blood of a laborer.

111th anniversary

They were discouraged from breaks because they were actively trying to unionize, and bosses felt that keeping them from unsupervised contact would prevent them from joining the garment workers' union.

This is why unions are important. This is why today, right now, the biggest companies in America are trying to squash unionization of their laborers and why those workers are fighting so hard to unionize.

@tikkunolamorgtfo did a great write-up a few years ago about the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and I highly recommend reading it (and anything else you can about the fire). It is painfully relevant still and it's incredibly important women's, Jewish, immigrants', and workers' history.

#most of the girls working there were either jewish immmigrants or southern italian immigrants #two of the more exploited immigrant groups at the turn of the century particularly in nyc but elsewhere too #the labor history element of it can't be overemphasized tbh (x)

I've been thinking about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire ever since the outcome of the last presidential election; the world of 1911, the world in which the horror of the fire happened, was one with many cruelties and abominations and corruption and rapacious wealth acquisition, and in some ways I despair at the fact that in our own times these same deeply rooted evils have found fresh purchase and are rising up again. But I also remember that Frances Perkins, who was a witness to the fire, helped to pass safety legislation in the aftermath. Earlier, the settlement house movement in Chicago had been critical in her developing picture of the world, and in 1910 in NY she became executive secretary of the NYC Consumers League, an organization that fought for workers’ rights and protections. When FDR was governor she eventually became chair of the State Industrial Commission, and then, when he became president, was appointed Secretary of Labor. Amidst the horrors of Gilded Age America, in those very same decades and afterwards, there were also seeds of hope and spirited resistance and an upswelling of ideas and plans and projects . . . we wouldn't see how powerful these potential changes were right away, but they did come. It is an idea that I hold on to today when I despair.

just truly bonkers how much i love lying down……….like being horizontal? unparalleled

every time i see someone call kirk and spock the oldest ship, i'm filled with the urge to go "hmm actually the holmes and watson girlies have been here for a hundred years now", and i refrain because i know the natural conclusion of this game is gilgamesh and enkidu

sherlock sitting (sulking) around in john’s sweater

prompt 3/5

One, if not THE best decision Granada Holmes made was to not have Watson married (except to Holmes) or a widower (except for the three years he thinks Holmes is dead). And to have them canonically living together for the whole series with brief logistical gaps if Watson is working late/early at his surgery, is attending a medical conference, or going on solo vacations to protect his peace (which Holmes inevitably crashes) was brilliant as well.

I recall an interview where Jeremy Brett said that without Watson to come home to Holmes would be dead in a matter of weeks, and Watson could never love another the way he loved Holmes, and I'm so glad they decided to play it that way.