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What would Dr. Watson think?

Posted on 15.08.2025 by admin

Dr. John H. Watson, late of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, knew hunger.

Not in the genteel way of a missed luncheon, but in the pit-of-the-stomach, battlefield-hospital sense. In Afghanistan he would have seen soldiers weakened by poor rations, and in London, patients in the East End whose ailments were really just the visible scars of poverty.

In Victorian Britain, hunger wasn’t hidden. It stared from the faces of barefoot children selling matches, from the queues outside the soup kitchens, from the grey stone walls of the workhouse. Feeding the poor was an act of charity, but also of judgment: you were expected to be the “deserving” sort before you were given bread. The process was slow, tangled in rules, and rarely anonymous.

Now imagine Watson confronted with this:

Buy a book, and a child somewhere in the world gets a meal. Immediately. No forms, no committees, no soup ladles clanging in a church basement. Just a direct link between your choice and someone else’s full stomach.

That’s what happens when you buy a book from MX Publishing. For every book sold, they donate 50p to the World Food Programme’s ShareTheMeal initiative, enough to feed one person. The simplicity of it would have astonished Watson; a battlefield doctor used to improvising with whatever he had would recognise the elegance of cutting straight to the cure.

Holmes might raise an eyebrow at the sentiment, but even he could not argue with efficiency. And Watson? He would nod, perhaps a little gruffly, and say: “Quite right, sir. A sound use of resources. Now, shall we see if the Evening Standard has reported any more stolen state papers?”

Andrew Peel is the author of Footsteps on the Moor a thoughtful reimagining of Sherlock Holmes time on Dartmoor via a private journal discovered by his brother Mycroft.

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