Did Sherlock Holmes Really Wear a Deerstalker Hat?

Quick, who is the guy on the right in the illustration below?

Here he is again:

We’d know him anywhere, thanks to that deerstalker cap. This was a practical hat used by hunters and other outdoorsmen in England at the time. It was popular with women as well as men. The front and back brims warded off rain and sun. The ear flaps tied under the chin for cold weather or wind. The flaps were tied at the top when they were not down. Holmes’s hat was apparently in a hounds-tooth tweed pattern of water-shedding wool.

How often did Arthur Conan Doyle feature his detective character wearing this headgear? Actually, he didn’t at all. The stories never once mention Holmes in a deerstalker cap (or an Inverness cape, another Sherlock Holmes trope), although such a hat is not implausible.

When the first sets of Sherlock Holmes stories appeared serialized in the Strand magazine in the early 1890’s, they were illustrated by artist Sidney Paget. Paget is responsible for the deerstalker cap image. Here is the detective and his sidekick on the way to investigate the Boscombe Valley mystery:

Image: Wikipedia The Boscombe Valley Mystery

It would seem that Sherlock Holmes lived and died by his deerstalker, as evidenced by Paget’s illustration on the detective’s struggle to the death with the arch-villain Professor Moriarity above Reichenbach Falls, in The Final Problem:

Image: Wikipedia

( Doyle wrote The Final Problem to kill off his detective character, so the author could move on to more dignified pursuits than writing Sherlock Holmes stories. He did not anticipate the public outcry at the demise of the popular character. Men in London wore black armbands, and subscriptions to the Strand magazine were cancelled in protest. Eventually Doyle brought Holmes back in a further series of stories, with the literary device that Holmes had faked his own death in order to hide out from a criminal syndicate. )

Even Paget did not keep Holmes in this hat all the time. When the great detective was not sleuthing in the outdoors, he was properly dressed for English society. It was unthinkable for a gentleman to appear in public without some kind of hat. For instance, here are two illustrations from The Adventure of Silver Blaze. Holmes is depicted below in his deerstalker when confronting a bad guy at the gate of a neighboring farm, after tracking a horse across the moor: