(no subject)
I was recently rereading "A Scandal in Bohemia," and was struck by an interesting detail. Holmes is planning a ruse where he'll be injured by a kind of mob assault outside Irene Adler's house (so she'll take him inside without his arousing suspicion). And Holmes being Holmes, of course, can't just appear as a nondescript man about town:
He disappeared into his bedroom, and returned in a few minutes in the character of an amiable and simple-minded Nonconformist clergyman. His broad black hat, his baggy trousers, his white tie, his sympathetic smile, and general look of peering and benevolent curiosity were such as Mr. John Hare alone could have equalled.
But why a Nonconformist clergyman in particular? As I understand it (Brits/history buffs, correct me if I'm wrong), there was usually an official church whose clergy enjoyed the right to perform sacraments and preah in public and establish officially recognized churches. Like the Church of England in England, the Roman Catholic church in Ireland, and I believe a presbyterian church in certian parts of Scotland. But there were all sorts of minority Christian sects - the Methodists of my own background, Baptists, unitarians, evangelicals, even the Quakers - that operated outside the bounds of the official church. Sometimes they had limited authority to perform (some) religious rites; sometimes they weren't so well tolerated.
But it's not so simple as saying Nonconformists were just from minority Protestant sects seeing to their own flocks. They were often seen as rabblerousers. George Fox, a Quaker minister, was arrested multiple times for causing a public disturbance and for heresy. John Wesley, the father of Methodism, was an ordained Anglican minister so had some protections, but he was still pilloried in the press for things like public preaching in districts. Still, there seems to be a difference in how they were perceived from disgraced clergy, like the defrocked priest employed to perform the marriage of Violet Smith in "The Solitary Cyclist."
Here's what I find fascinating: Holmes had the chance to disguise himself as virtually anything, and he chose someone visibly on the outskirts of respectable society. A proper, virtuous English lady like Holmes (via Watson) characterizes her as might be a little more wary of someone in that guise; but someone --well-- more bohemian, like the American performer and seductress the king presents her as, might see him as a decent man kept unfairly on the margins of polite society, and so be more likely to let down her guard around a nonconformist than she would most other type.
I mean, he's assaulted in front of her house, it's not a huge jump to think she'd have cared for him regardless, and I don't want to make more of this than it deserves. But it's a fascinating bit of characterization that Holmes thinks this particular identity would make her more ready to let down her guard around him and not less.