I received a few email asking me the origin of the somewhat familiar phrase “where it is always 1895″ in my welcome post. The line actually comes from a classic and oft-reprinted poem by one of the first –and most eminent– Sherlockians, Vincent Starrett, who wrote (among other things) The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933) and 221 B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes (1940). This poem was first published in 1942 by Edwin B. Hill in a now very rare pamphlet called Two Sonnets. I’ve found some three dozen copies of this poem on the web already, and so I hope I’m not being too remiss in offering yet another.


221B

Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears–
Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

– Vincent Starrett

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