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Mrs. Hudson is the landlady of the fictional house 221B Baker Street, in which Sherlock Holmes lives, in the Sherlock Holmes detective stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

[edit] History

She is a woman who wants the home to be clean and tidy and often fights with Sherlock Holmes for this. Watson describes her as a very good cook, and Holmes once referred to her as a Scotswoman. Other than one mention of her "queenly tread," she is given no physical description or first name, although she has been identified with the "Martha" in "His Last Bow". In film and television adaptations of the stories, she is usually portrayed as an older woman, although on rare occasion she is presented as a young woman, such as in Meitantei Holmes, where she was also given the first named "Marie" and used as a potential love interest for Holmes.

Watson described the relationship between Holmes and Hudson in the opening of "The Adventure of the Dying Detective":

Mrs. Hudson, the landlady of Sherlock Holmes, was a long-suffering woman. Not only was her first-floor flat invaded at all hours by throngs of singular and often undesirable characters but her remarkable lodger showed an eccentricity and irregularity in his life which must have sorely tried her patience. His incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him made him the very worst tenant in London. On the other hand, his payments were princely. I have no doubt that the house might have been purchased at the price which Holmes paid for his rooms during the years that I was with him. The landlady stood in the deepest awe of him and never dared to interfere with him, however outrageous his proceedings might seem. She was fond of him, too, for he had a remarkable gentleness and courtesy in his dealings with women.

[edit] Mrs. Turner

At one point in "A Scandal in Bohemia" Holmes says "When Mrs. Turner has brought in the tray I will make it clear to you", just before he and Watson are described as eating food prepared by their landlady; it is unclear whether "Turner" is here a publisher's/author's error for "Hudson", some sort of servant of Mrs. Hudson's, or an example of Holmes being thoughtless and forgetting his own landlady's name.

There have since been several explanations for this name which have varied from the sensible to the absurd. It was reported in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes that the name Mrs Turner once again featured in the original manuscript for "The Empty House" but had been crossed out and replaced with Mrs Hudson. This lends weight to the idea that the name was a mistake by Doyle.

Another theory was that Mrs Turner could have been a stand-in while Mrs Hudson was on holiday. The most absurd suggestion was that Holmes and Mrs Hudson were secret lovers and that Turner was the name that they used when checking into hotels for trysts. In Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds, Holmes and Mrs Hudson are lovers, although Watson is too oblivious to notice.

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