Fairbank

Type

house

Style

Victorian

First appears

Book 2 · Ch. 12

Books

1

Fairbank, the stately Victorian residence in Streatham, first appears in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as the opulent home of the banker Alexander Holder, its iron gates and carriage drive symbolizing the wealth and respectability that the case will soon shatter. Across the series, the house remains a fixed point of upper-middle-class security, yet its symbolic weight deepens: each subsequent reference underscores how easily the trappings of Victorian propriety can conceal financial desperation and moral compromise. By the later stories, Fairbank has become less a specific address than a shorthand for the precarious façade of Edwardian prosperity that Holmes so often peels away.